How Republicans Can Save Education...and Win Votes
By Matthew Clavel

Since volunteering for Bill Clinton’s first Presidential campaign as a high school senior, I have wavered back and forth between competing political ideologies. Over the last five years, though, there has been one issue that has swung me safely toward the Grand Old Party for the foreseeable future—the woeful state of our schools.

 

When I began teaching in 1998 in the South Bronx as a Teach For America corps member, I was placed in a large public elementary school. This school certainly had the potential to deliver a decent education to its young charges; we had plenty of money, supplies, and more than enough well-paid teachers. As I quickly found out, though, we were located in District 9—one of New York City’s most notorious districts for corruption and political patronage. Bureaucrats at the city and district levels seemed intent on making us teach inane curricula that were not giving students the basic math and English skills they so desperately needed. The school itself, disorganized and chaotic, did not show the sense of urgency needed to work with a population of inner-city kids.

 

Over the last few years, I have spoken to centrists, Democrats, even a former Naderite, whose only common agreement seems to be that they consider themselves “conservative” on education. Many of them are parents who are simply fed up with popular fads like whole language and fuzzy math. Others prefer Republican ideas that focus on market approaches to education reform, like school vouchers and charter schools. Many Americans, disgusted by what they read of corruption among education bureaucrats and teachers unions, are convinced that the Democratic Party does not have the will to shake up a structure that supports it.

 

Two obstacles hold the Republicans back from achieving dominance on education. One is the traditional American suspicion of a powerful federal government. Practically since the birth of the United States, local communities have fiercely guarded their schools and fought attempts to transfer educational decision making to the national level. For conservative enclaves of the West and South that back school prayer and repudiate sex education, this local independence is considered crucial.

 

The other main problem has to do with financing: The Democratic Party has proved masterful at shaming state legislatures into lavishing more and more money on schools with virtually no accountability. In order not to be labeled stingy, Republicans often assume the defensive posture and join in the spending game. 

 

The irony is that for decades, liberal ideology has destroyed the learning environments of our public schools. Whole language, whereby children were expected to learn to read by teaching themselves, has largely been discredited. But, thanks to whole language, millions of schoolchildren in the 1990s never learned to read adequately. Republicans should be banging the drum about issues like this one. And the GOP should follow President Bush’s lead by pushing for an overhaul of the research methods that produce so many of our schools’ disastrous classroom policies. 

 

It is impossible to view these theories outside of their political bent. Left-wing pedagogical theorists, who have been so influential since the Sixties, take a relativist view to all sorts of school rules: If a student regularly disturbs class by talking out of turn, he’s just exhibiting a cultural trait that is no worse than anything else—just different. Consider the attempt to encourage speaking Ebonics in schools in Oakland, California. This well-known instance is but the tip of an iceberg that eschews realistic modes of learning for a dangerous “anything goes” political agenda.    

 

Educational theorists have long shown a disdain for the will of parents. Sexual orientation workshops are notorious because they are so often held without parental consent. Many parents would be horrified to learn about the content of their children’s sex-ed classes or the political agenda of many social studies curricula. I only became conservative when I realized that schools are often run in the name of extreme-left ideologies.

 

Introducing market forces into our school systems may be the last best hope for many public schools, and the only party that can be trusted to encourage such a market is the GOP. Charter schools (public schools with independent budgets, hiring, and curricula) provide an excellent way to loosen the educational establishment’s grip on local schools. It is no surprise that so many teachers unions and Democrats oppose charter schools. 

 

School vouchers, an idea that is even more dangerous to the education establishment, have been maligned for years by teachers unions and Democratic politicians. Claiming that vouchers would “drain money” from poor schools (even though a voucher is often worth far less than the per-pupil expenditure at a regular public school) and lobbing scores of other alarmist charges at the pro-school-choice movement, Democrats have sought to frighten voters into opposing the idea. 

 

Democrats’ real fear, of course, lies in the inevitable weakening of unions that will result from competition. Catholic and other religious schools are often far better at educating inner-city kids than public schools, and if these success stories became common knowledge, school districts would no longer be inclined to cave in to the wishes of  teachers union if they could count on private school seats. Vouchers are an escape hatch from broken systems, and are wildly popular among inner-city blacks and Hispanics.

 

Education spending has soared since the 1960s. At the same time, academic performance of American students has, infamously, dropped. Inner-city schools, often awash with extra money for special programs, are the worst, and show no signs of being allowed to improve with traditional teaching methods and effective management. Democrats seem to have no ideas for education except to clamor for ever more funding.

 

Isn’t the Democratic Party interested in improving our schools? Of course it is—but it is also inextricably tied to the two major teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA). Teachers unions exert tremendous power at both the national and state level. What many in the mainstream media do not understand is that teachers unions are not there to fight for kids—their role is to protect the rights of adult employees. The AFT and NEA are granted far too much respect in the press, and Democrats who rely on their strong support during campaigns fail to toe the union line at their peril. 

 

A strong Republican education platform should include: strong support for curricula that follow statistical research, not baseless “findings”; a real effort to uncover the corruption and waste of many urban school systems; no fear of taking on teachers unions; promotion of market reforms; and closing failing schools when they don’t improve.

 

To take this debate to a national level, Republicans will need to go a step further by ceding some local educational authority, even though this would be a bitter pill for many small-town conservatives. President Bush has already moved the party in this direction by strengthening national standards through his No Child Left Behind Act.

 

If Republicans complete such a transition, it should be clear whose policy proposals are the most likely to succeed and whose are based on fads and politics.

 

Matthew Clavel taught in schools in Harlem and the Bronx, and is finishing a degree in public administration.