The current budget crisis offers almost unlimited opportunity.  I have said repeatedly over the past several months that I seldom agree with Rahm Emanuel, but I do agree with his observation that “we shouldn’t allow a good crisis to go to waste”.  The other recent memorable quote was from Speaker John Boehner:  “We can’t kick the can up the road anymore, because we have come to the end of the road.  Like Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey, we have arrived at Hotel California.”  In a certain perverse way, this is actually encouraging.

Why?  Because there is no way out except to fundamentally change the way we do business and because our system of federalism encourages the states to lead the way.  And Texas is uniquely positioned for this leadership.  I offer one example, public education, with which I am reasonably familiar and on which Texas spends about $50 billion annually.  We are besieged with woe over the prospect of what appear to be the draconian education spending reductions necessary to balance the state’s budget and, while major reductions will no doubt be in the cards, the most important approach is to change the way we do business in the schools.

The Texas Education Code is chock full of opportunities for strategic transformation in the area of human resources management alone.  After all, approximately 80% of education expense is personnel, and the Code and the rules driven by it have embedded large areas of prescriptive regulation by the state into the business of delivering education in over 1,200 school districts, all of which a collection of activist adults, a few “stakeholders”, and some policymakers (often abetted by their vested interests) at one time became convinced were absolutely necessary.  These include such items as the single salary scale, the student/teacher ratio, the tenure rules, the teacher assignment rules,  the educator certification rules, the teacher dismissal process, school scheduling rules, the prohibition of salary reductions and furloughs in certain jobs, and on and on.

After serving on the State Board for Educator Certification, I know how antiquated our approach to education human resources policy has become.  Our organization, the Texas Institute for Education Reform (TIER), is promoting policy recommendations that will move us away from the top-down, compliance and input driven policy approach to one that is not only performance-based, but much more flexible and enabling of innovation in the schools.  We have an accountability system; let’s enforce it and allow it to work.

Several of TIER’s board and policy advisory board members participated in the recent kickoff conference for the new Center for Financial Accountability and Productivity, which will offer leadership for moving Texas into transforming the way business is done in our schools.  TIER’s soon to be released recommendations for enhanced human resources management segue into the transformational objectives of this initiative and in many ways help lay the groundwork for a complete overhaul in the role of the state in human resources.

These approaches differ drastically from the ham-handed across the board cuts that are feared and, in fact, there are a number of strategic expenditures that represent meaningful interventions to help schools advance student success that we believe should be preserved.  But business as usual is out of business, and Texas must use this opportunity to change the paradigm.  We have been reform leaders before in the move to academic standards and accountability, and we can do it again.

A review of the new book, Between War and Peace, a collection of essays edited by Matthew Moten, resonated with a great book I am now completing–The Shield of Achilles, by Philip Bobbitt.  This is a sweeping, 800+ page history of war and peace over five centuries, highlighting the impact of war, its preparation, and its aftermath on the structure and strategy of the state.  Both the review and Bobbitt’s book emphasize the fact that, in essence, there is no substitute for victory.  Bobbitt says that strategic success in war certifies the constitutional form adopted by the winning state and spreads to the constitution of the society of states as a whole, thus while violence and war initiate change in the constitutional order, peace and law ratify the results.  In other words, without victory there is no peace, and the world moves on to the next phase of the war.  I have long maintained that real victory in this context is possible only with unconditional surrender.  Think about it:  Every conflict in which America has been engaged that had an unconditional victor resulted in the resolution of the underlying issues; those that didn’t left the issues unresolved, many of them to this day.

I read recently that the Harvard Business School is making major changes to its curriculum and that the changes, according to its marketing release, are aimed to “create leaders of competence and character, rather than just connections and credentials”.  Evidently, there is a certain concern and maybe a little guilt that 58% of its graduates go into financial services and consulting and, as its Dean noted, that it helped create a culture that had something to do with the financial sector meltdown and the decline in public trust of business.  So a big objective now is to create more “ethical leaders”.  I wish them well, but I am reminded of John Wooden’s admonishment that “sports do not build character; they reveal it”.  The same goes for business and ethics.  And where do we secure a solid foundation in ethics for students beyond its principle sources in the family and religion?  In the study of the humanities and liberal arts, primarily the Western intellectual tradition and the foundations of Western civilization and American ideals.  So while we strive to correct the deficiencies of our professional schools, let’s also correct the damage that has been done to the core curriculum in the liberal arts in our leading universities over the past century.

If you are like me, there are certain “buzzwords” or phrases that enter the lexicon periodically that begin to get on my nerves after awhile.  “Best practices” in education is one of these.  And now the word “sustainability” is near the top of my list.  Where did this term originate in its current social context?  I recently read an article by Glenn Ricketts of the National Association of Scholars, “The Roots of Sustainability”, which enlightened me on this irritable term.

It turns out that the word has roots in the romantic period and in the American transcendental movement (no surprise there), but more directly in the turbulent 1960′s and 1970′s, and its core text, according to Ricketts, appeared in a document titled “Our Common Future” published by the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development in 1987.  This paper promoted “sustainable development” as the essential remedy for the interlocking crises confronting humanity and defines it as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs……….it involves a progressive transformation of economy and society”.  That last part is the kicker, for, as Ricketts further notes, while this concept smacks of radical environmentalism, it is actually much more comprehensive because it requires that we connect with other matters of concern to social activists and submit to new structures of authority in which those who possess this new wisdom of interconnectedness  will make the right decisions for us.  In fact, it is this notion of “interconnectedness” as it relates to sustainability which has replaced radical environmentalism as the new religion of social justice.  Just words, of course, but as we know, ideas have consequences, so beware of those who peddle “sustainability” without a very good explanation.

First, it was German Chancellor Angela Merkel, then French President Nicolas Sarkozy who denounced the philosophy of  multiculturalism as a failure, and finally the most ringing critique of all from British Prime Minister David Cameron who, in a recent speech to the Munich Security Conference, not only denounced it, but put the issue squarely on the table as a primary element of the security agenda of the West.  But he did even more by suggesting antidotes, including what he called “muscular liberalism”, by which he means that a genuinely liberal country, as opposed to one that is “passively tolerant”,  believes in certain values and actively promotes them and “it says to its citizens, this is what defines us as a society; to belong here means to believe in these things”.  This kind of talk in the European public square is long overdue.  Maybe it represents the first stirrings of a wake up call for the European malaise of the past several decades.  Let’s pray that it does.  But also let’s hope that we can see and hear this sentiment expressed loudly and publicly by our own leaders, beginning in the White House, and it would help if we could have more pressure applied by trustees and alumni to those last bastions of multicultural mythology, the upper reaches of our leading colleges and universities.

We are the product of a long trail of classical liberal values dating from the Reformation and the  Enlightenment that help us distinguish between our version of reason and those not only of radical Islam, but of the core beliefs of Islam itself.  This heritage has been corrupted by the postmodern notion of multiculturalism to the point of confusion about who we are.  Our intellectuals have failed us in this regard and they should repent and repair the damage, the sooner the better, before we develop a terminal case of the European disease.

Two issues in the news lately have once again highlighted our propensity to judicial activism.  One, the Obama administration announced that it will no longer defend the Defense of Marriage Act; the other involves the Supreme Court decision in favor of Westboro Baptist Church in its public desecration of military funerals.  I won’t spend much time on the underlying merits of each, except to say that, in the former, it seems that an oath to execute the laws implies the defense of them in court and, in the latter, it seems that the First Amendment is primarily about political speech, properly understood, and not about grandstanding for publicity.

The primary issue for me in both of these instances is that they should be settled by political and democratic processes, not by the judiciary.  This  is a mature country of fairly well-settled values, with a republican form of government in each of 50 state jurisdictions with a total of over 7,000 legislators, and with vast numbers of citizen associations that form the voluntary mediating powers and institutions highlighted by Tocqueville that make America exceptional.  This is the “civic republic” well-described by Michael Sandel in Democracy’s Discontent, but it has been corrupted by what he calls the “procedural republic”, which essentially demands that we move cultural and moral considerations off the table in our deliberation on public policy.  And where has this taken us?  To Roe v. Wade, elimination of prayer in the schools, etc., and deep divisions in the body politic because it was denied a political resolution of the issues nearest and dearest to our core.  It is time for the procedural republic to step aside and let the civic republic take over.  We can handle it.

As we watch the scene in the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison,  we are exposed to the raw truth of where liberalism has led us–to the fraud of the “social contract” as it has evolved in the age of entitlement.  The wraps are off, the facade is down, Paul Krugman for once is right–it is all about power.  This budget crisis is not a math problem except at the most superficial level.  It is a long overdue overhaul of the social contract, and the left did it to themselves with the final indignity of the overreach of Obamacare.  The Republicans may blow it, they have many times before, but the curtain has been raised on the great Oz of government, from Greece to Ireland to Madison–there are providers and there are takers.  Every public policy has a moral basis.  The Tea Party initiative and its moral basis and the crowd in the streets of Greece and the protesters in the capitol in Madison are polar opposites–the Tea Party is protesting what the crowds in Greece and Madison are demanding.  The Tea Party  speaks for the providers; who speaks for the takers?

For the first time in 1,000 years Arabs are taking control of their own affairs.–Farheed Zakaria

Dare we say that the explosion of freedom in the Middle East and North Africa might be the equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall?  We can pray that it is at least as eventful and we should be doing everything in our power to ensure that it is so.  We can do a lot worse than be guided by two references:  one, George W. Bush’s second inaugural address of January 2005 and two, Natan Sharansky’s classic The Case for Democracy.  Bush essentially invoked the criteria established by Jeanne Kirkpatrick in her Dictatorships and Double Standards, the gold standard in distinguishing between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes and why it matters.  This makes a significant difference in the current cases when determining which messages to send to the respective regimes in the region.  Sharansky, of course, makes the case for the fact that the desire for freedom is universal and that a regime must ultimately be judged and dealt with based on the way in which it treats its own people.

This is a major watershed event, world historical, a huge opportunity, but our response to this combustion has been mixed at best.  We were slow to recognize the scope of the revolutions across North Africa and worse, very tentative in standing with the insurgents in the streets.  The response in Libya has been particularly disappointing.  Here we have a brutal dictator and enemy of long standing and the administration cannot even bring itself to acknowledge these facts in spite of direct questioning.  And while we have now at least demanded that Gadhafi leave the country, we have a situation in which this delusional tyrant is murdering his own people and we are relegated to appeals to the United Nations and its committee on human rights on which Libya serves!

I have repeatedly emphasized since 9-11-01 the absolute necessity of moral clarity in dealing with and defeating the forces arrayed against us in the Islamic world.  Why is this so difficult for this administration?  Why the relativism?  Why the confusion when identifying the enemy, even when it has clearly exposed itself, as in the case with the Fort Hood shootings and other terrorist attacks and attempted attacks on Americans over the past two years?  Say what you want about the mistakes of George W. Bush, but moral clarity was not a problem for him, and I suspect that Gadhafi would be as well aware of that as he was during his encounters with Ronald Reagan.

We know that revolutions often do not end well for the people, and we have only to look at history to confirm this.  Of the major revolutions of the past 250 years only the American resulted in a better deal for the people, and the reason was that it alone was a battle for the acknowledgment and  restoration of rights that are God-given, not a battle for rights to be granted by the state.  The French, Russian, and Iranian revolutions were disasters for their people, and we would be well-served to help the struggling freedom fighters of the Arab Middle East and North Africa understand the difference.

The Fordham Institute, an organization I admire for its work in education policy, has given the Texas public education social studies standards adopted by the State Board of Education a grade of D and criticized the standards for rigor and clarity as well as a political agenda that biased the curriculum from a leftist orientation to the far right.  I quote the report:  “In Texas, they are trying to resurrect the old triumphal narrative in which everything in American history is wonderful, as opposed to the left-wing narrative in which America is uniquely evil.  And in the end, who suffers but students, because they don’t learn history at all.”

This is embarrassing and I suppose we should plead guilty, although as I monitored from afar the debates on the standards last year, while lamenting some of the extremes in the content, I justified the final product in the interest of rebalancing the curriculum that had become extremely biased to the left over the past several decades.

But further reflection is warranted.  For in my estimation the ultimate culprit is the abdication of higher education in its leadership role as purveyor and curator of our cultural heritage.  After all, it all rolls downhill and our leading intellectuals have debauched the core curriculum, virtually abandoned the systematic study of the Western intellectual tradition, and denigrated the study of America and its ideals.

In spite of this development, an American Enterprise Institute study last fall found that 83% of social studies teachers view the U. S. as a unique country that stands for something special in the world and just 1% want students to learn that the U. S. is a fundamentally flawed country.  That’s the good news.  Not so encouraging is that only 24% of teachers indicate that their students can identify the protections of the Bill of Rights, 15% think that their students understand concepts such as federalism, and 11% believe their students understand the basic concepts of the free market.  So it appears that the biases of the teachers are not the problem and that they deserve standards that properly reflect a rigorous,  balanced and objective view of our history and ideals.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences, at the request of Congress, has recently established the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences “to bolster teaching and research in the humanities and social sciences”.  I’m not bowled over by the membership of this Commission, but maybe it will shed some light on the confusion in the field and help to restore some order and depth.  In the meantime, I have a suggestion for the Texas SBOE:  retain the National Association of Scholars, a nationally recognized organization of leading liberal arts scholars, to review and make recommendations on the social studies standards.  Of course, this suggestion from someone like me will be DOA, so there will probably not be a resolution of the problem until the overhaul of public education governance in Texas to extricate the standards from partisan politics.

As I write, the NCAA basketball championship game is upon us, and there is no bigger spectacle in college athletics than the Final Four.  And I’m a big fan, but I continue to worry about the imbalances in the way we measure and reward success for these young athletes and the schools they represent.  I have mentioned on several occasions the report of the Knight Commission which highlights these imbalanced priorities and I wonder who is paying attention to the perverse incentives that are being cultivated and the resulting corruption of the mission of higher education.  On the eve of Final Four weekend Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wrote a compelling op/ed in which he reminds us of the Commission’s analysis which shows a revenue formula badly skewed to reward success on the court despite a total absence of success off the court by players at many participating schools in terms of progress toward graduation.  In fact, over the past five tournaments, 44% of the total payout of more than $400 million went to teams that were not on track to graduate at least half of their players!

Several schools have good records in this regard, and the women’s programs have much better records than the men’s programs even on the same campuses.  For example, the Connecticut women’s team has a graduation rate of over 90% vs. the men’s average of 50% and only 25% for its black players.  Need I add the obvious conclusion that the difference is almost surely the fact that the men’s game has been more corrupted by the monetary incentives of the professional leagues?

It has been suggested to me that these imbalances as well as those that plague college football can only be cured when we find a way to alter human nature.  Well, maybe so, but I have a few suggestions to change the incentive structure:  One is to change the weighting of the criteria in the revenue distribution formula to reward schools that have an acceptable percentage of their players on track to graduate; two is to disqualify from the playoffs those teams that do not have a three-year trailing percentage of on-track players of at least 50% or maybe higher; and three, which applies to football as well, is to adopt the same recruiting rules as with college baseball, which provide that once a recruit signs to attend and play for a school, he isn’t eligible for the professional draft until age 21 or completion of eligibility.  There are other changes I would make as well, such as requiring that the NFL and NBA reimburse the colleges for the total cost of the scholarships for players drafted each year on the grounds that they now are providing a cost-free farm system for the professional leagues.  And there is one change I wouldn’t make, which is to compensate the college players, but these are debates for another day.

I am resigned to the reality that we will never achieve the purity of the student-athlete myth in the major sports in the top division of intercollegiate athletics except in the rarest of cases, but we must halt this slide toward the corruption of the mission of higher education that is manifest in the perverse incentive system in college athletics.