by John Kasich
WHY EDUCATION MATTERS
I’m not the only one worrying that our public schools have been leaving our kids in the dust. Our tired public school system is log-jammed, broken-down, paralyzed . . . and it’s been unable to reform itself. That’s because it’s beyond fixing, I’m afraid. I’m not just talking about schools in our inner cities; the problem runs to our small towns as well, and all across the country, and I hate to paint every public school district with the same brush of gloom and doom but the problem is too widespread to be considered on any kind of individual basis. It’s endemic, and systemic, and I sometimes worry we’ll never dig ourselves out from all these years of neglect and malaise. To be sure, there are glowing exceptions to my sweeping generalities—and I’ll shine a light on a couple in just a bit—but it’s on an individual basis that we get ourselves into trouble. It’s elementary. People tend to look at their local schools the way they look at their congressmen; they might not like what’s going on in Congress, but they support their local congressman. They might not think the education system is working, but they like their kid’s teacher, or they think her heart is in the right place or that she’s doing the best she can. And that might actually be the case, because teachers tend to be a dedicated, passionate lot. Understand, I’ve got nothing against our teachers. By and large, they’re the under-the-radar heroes in the lives of our children, and it’s only through their extra efforts that we’re even able to hold our heads above water on this one. But their hands are tied by an antiquated system that has run its course, and we are duty-bound to give them the resources they need in order to do their job to the best of their considerable abilities, and the room to reform a system that is in desperate need of an overhaul.
In contrast, higher education has in place a dynamic model of competing for the right to educate our children, and it’s the envy of the world. Somehow, at the undergraduate and graduate school levels, we’ve managed to get it right—and the reason we get it right, I think, is because schools are forced to compete with one another. That’s the real bottom line. Public institutions and private, it’s much the same, and our system of higher education will continue to thrive as long as competition for students and their almighty tuition dollars remains strong.
In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll state once again (for the record, this time) that I teach at Ohio State University, my alma mater, which may or may not explain why I look favorably on academia these days. In fact, I used to hold a dim view of higher education as well, until I was in its middle and saw it as a boundless opportunity to think, discuss, and innovate. It’s certainly given me a new perspective on it, but I don’t think I’ve taken a biased view. Rather, it’s as a direct result of this front-row seat to the doings on one of the largest public university campuses in the country that I’ve come to realize what a tremendous national resource we have in our state university systems. American college campuses continue to attract a great many international students, primarily because our system encourages diversity, innovation, and independent thinking in a way not found on campuses abroad, where professors are often bound by traditions and academic models that no longer seem relevant. And more to the point, there are so many choices in American higher education that the competition for our best and brightest students has forced administrators to keep ahead of the curve and out on the cutting edge.
The rap on higher education in some circles is that our campuses lean a little bit to the left—and there’s some truth to that, even though I don’t see a whole lot of harm. Yes, college professors tend to be a bit more liberal than conservative—maybe not in our schools of engineering, but certainly in the social sciences—but I don’t think that this is anything to get all that worked up about. By the time we send them off to college, our kids should be well equipped to make informed decisions and to think for themselves; the political views of the professor standing at the lectern shouldn’t be an issue, and yet there have been bills introduced in various state legislatures seeking to regulate the political content of some of these classes. I hear this and think, Get over it, people. There are so many things to worry about in this life, and I’m afraid this is just not one of them, and there should be no legislating academic freedom, not least because college kids don’t need to be spoon-fed their educations in some watered-down way; teaching is more than just spouting off, and we need to give these professors room to do their job, and students enough credit to filter fact from opinion.
Lord knows, college professors are not getting paid all that much, and yet our campuses continue to attract dedicated teachers and leading researchers who see what they do as a kind of calling. It’s a special thrill to them, to hand off what they know to a younger generation determined to know more of the same. The trade-off to the low salary, of course, is academic freedom, and contributing to the fulfillment of the students’ hopes and dreams, and you can’t put a price on that. Universities are the one place in the world where people have a chance to think outside the box a little bit, to come up with creative solutions to old problems. It’s critical to our health as a society, to our strength and vision, and to our shared ability to put contemporary advances into historical context. Indeed, these very freedoms might one day yield some positive solutions to some of the problems plaguing our primary and secondary schools, so we’d do well not to curb any of them in the name of political correctness.
That said, our public universities are hamstrung in many of the same ways as other big institutions. There are layers and layers of bureaucracy. They’re bound by unions and tenure, and entrenched in teaching models that in some cases are in desperate need of a facelift. And on top of everything else there’s the constant worry over money. That’s one of the things I think our big-time universities have to watchdog carefully—the tug and pull in regard to money. Too often, university officials sell their souls in the name of fund-raising, or they overemphasize their intercollegiate athletic programs, which of course are a tremendous source of income as well as school pride. There’s nothing wrong with having successful athletic programs, but you don’t want your booster club having a say on the direction of your medical school. You don’t want your enthusiasm for your football program to diminish your enthusiasm for a new science lab, because that starts to erode a school’s foundation. And you certainly don’t want to violate any of the recruiting rules put in place by the NCAA, or fall short in any of its academic standards, because that just puts a stain on the entire campus and throws the integrity of the administration into question.
BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER
Higher education is all about issues and ideas. I can think of no other place in our culture where people get paid to think, and it’s a wonderful ideal, so much so that pioneers in every imaginable field find themselves daydreaming of the things they might accomplish in an academic setting. One of my closest friends, Mark Bechtal, is a doctor—the kind who still makes house calls, I should add—and he recently traded his medical practice for a second career as a professor. It was something he’d been meaning to do for the longest time. He had it all figured out, and when he laid out his plans for me one day while we were riding in the car I turned to him and said, “Mark, are you nuts?”
But he’s not nuts, is he? He told me that he longs for the opportunity to work with medical students at the Arthur James Cancer Center on the Ohio State campus, coming up with new solutions to the problem of melanoma, conducting research, advancing new theories. He told me he’d have to take a hit in income, but he didn’t even think of that as an issue. He was so passionate about teaching that when I got out of the car I called the dean and told him if he didn’t hire this guy he was out of his mind, because my friend represents the best of what our universities have to offer.
And yet for every Mark Bechtal there’s a Ward Churchill, or some other loose cannon who hides behind his tenure and abuses his position to advance his controversial views. Churchill, for those who missed these outrageous headlines in January 2005, was
the chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and a tenured professor there. His incendiary remarks, pulled from a 2001 essay on the September 11 attack on America, in which he called workers at the World Trade Center “little Eichmanns” and suggested that they might have in some way brought the attack upon themselves, put a planned speaking appearance at New York’s Hamilton College on hold, and put academics on alert that their unfettered views had better be rooted in common sense and decency. When the dust settled, Churchill ended up resigning his post as department chair, and Hamilton officials ended up canceling his speaking appearance after planned protests became a legitimate safety issue, but he stayed on as a tenured professor and forced university administrators and Colorado legislators to reconsider their positions on tenure and its place in higher education.
My own take on this Churchill scandal was that he should have been fired, despite his tenure, because his academic freedom and his freedom of speech should not extend to scurrilous remarks that defile the memories of thousands of innocent men and women who died in those buildings. His comments, which he later claimed were intended as provocative, hit so many hateful, hurtful notes they put me in mind of a wrong-minded activist shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater and defending his right to do so as freedom of speech. In this case, it seemed to me, the freedom of speech aspect was almost beside the point, as were the academic freedoms at issue. Certainly, his speech should be protected, but that protection should not extend to his job, because with his comments he discredited himself and his university. A public institution like the University of Colorado should not be in the business of underwriting such invective with taxpayer monies, and a private institution like Hamilton College should think twice (at least!) before endorsing these views with a public speaking fee.
Still, as the debate swirled around Ward Churchill I realized that such as this was a small toll to encourage open intellectual thought—and I reminded myself that we’d been paying the toll for generations. When I was a student, we had a professor at Ohio State who wondered aloud whether his students should toss rocks through the glass windows of the affluent homes in the area, in some sort of misguided protest against our well-heeled neighbors. I went to the vice president of student affairs and argued that this guy had to go, and after a couple weeks he was eventually fired—not because of me, I’m sure, but because he was a nut case, and tenure or no, the school wasn’t obligated to keep a nut case on its payroll. At around the same time, our speakers bureau invited the political activist Angela Davis, an avowed Communist, to speak on campus, which I thought was just outrageous and offensive and unnecessary, not least because we were fighting a war that was ostensibly against Communism, but her appearance went off as planned, and I mention it here as a reminder that even unpopular opinions can find their place on our college campuses, then as now, and that students need to take in all kinds of viewpoints in order to formulate their own. It’s when these unpopular views become inflammatory and hate-filled that I begin to have some trouble—and when they’re underwritten by university funds, which in a way is tantamount to giving these inflammatory speakers the endorsement of university officials.
Here again, I’m astonished at the way some of us can’t seem to learn from the missteps of others, because we’re hardly through discussing the confrontational remarks of a Ward Churchill before we’re made to consider the invective of another academic, off on his or her own tirade. Just a few weeks after the Churchill debate had faded from attention, there was a professor at Brooklyn College who touched off a great campus controversy by dismissing religious individuals as “an ugly, violent lot” and “moral retards.” And—get this!—just a couple months later, the news hit about a university professor convicted on child sex abuse charges and still getting paid by the university because of his accrued vacation time, protected by their due process provisions for tenured professors. This last should not be tolerated by university administrators, because it threatens to undermine the legitimate reasons for tenure.
Even in the marketplace of ideas, justice and righteousness manage to prevail, and we should never lose sight of the fact that it is indeed a marketplace. Colleges and universities, public and private, go to great lengths to keep their market share—which in academic circles means that their classes remain fully enrolled, their dormitories filled, and their admissions offices inundated with enough applications from hopeful students that they can be selective in assembling each incoming class. Competition is key, across the board. College students have so many choices available to them that they’re able to search for schools that offer the best fit, the newest facilities, the nicest campuses, the most dynamic professors, the richest opportunities in their intended fields of study. They can even shop the best deals, comparing financial aid packages or consider schools that do their best to keep costs under control over ones given to runaway spending.
THE BENEFITS OF COMPETITION
The reason America can boast the finest system of higher education in the world is because colleges and universities compete for the right to teach our children, and yet it’s this very competition that’s missing from our primary and secondary school system. The little red schoolhouses that sprang up in the eighteenth century are in desperate need of refurbishing, but there’s no incentive to rebuild because the public school establishment has a kind of monopoly. I guess the thinking here is that as long as the building hasn’t fallen down around them they’re still in business, but there are too many cracks in the foundation at this point. Sure, there are an overwhelming number of dedicated, talented teachers out there, but I’m afraid that at the same time there are just too many substandard teachers who are allowed to keep their jobs because of tenure or complacency. Sure, there are private schools where the spirit of competition is alive and well, and more and more we’re seeing families of means opt out of public schools in search of a more rigorous, more inspiring, more meaningful educational experience for their children, but many parents can’t afford to make that kind of choice for their children. Why shouldn’t every parent have the right to choose where their children go to school? Why shouldn’t teachers have to compete for the right to educate students? Why is it that local politicians and school administrators are so petrified of the teachers’ unions that they can’t bring about change where change is needed most? That they allow teachers to hide behind tenure instead of holding them accountable?
Now, I’ll shine that light on two of the glowing exceptions. I wrote briefly about the first in the opening pages of this book: the Frederick Douglass Academy, in New York City’s Harlem, which stands in proud tribute to what a public school administration can accomplish by demanding excellence. From its teachers. From its students. From its entire community. This is a school that was shut down in the early 1980s because of excessive violence. It was located across the street from a crack house in one of the most depressed neighborhoods in the city. And yet it’s been reopened and turned around on the back of an administration that believes strongly that students need to set the bar high for themselves in order to succeed, rededicated to the belief that excellence is an achievable goal. That there needs to be discipline and respect. That the front-burner question for high school kids should be, Where am I going to go to college?—and not, Where am I going to get my next fix?
Here’s another shining example: a private high school in Jackson, Missouri, called Piney Woods Country Life School. It’s run by a tremendous crusader for education reform named Charles Beady, and it caters mostly to students of low-income families that have been characterized as at-risk during their previous (and, for the most part, public) school careers. Like the Frederick Douglass Academy, Piney Woods demands excellence—and Charles Beady decided early on that firm discipline was essential to transforming at-risk youngsters into college-bound scholars. He developed his work ethic as a student himself, when his own father used to warn him not to bring home any Cs—“because they’re as close to th
e bottom as they are to the top.” Now, Piney Woods students are expected to dress neatly and work diligently. There are mandatory study halls. And all around the campus, posted on bulletin boards and signs and banners, is the school’s slogan:
Fame Is Vapor
Popularity an Accident
Riches Take Wing
Only One Thing Endures: Character!
And the message has taken hold. Virtually all of Piney Woods graduates go on to college, many of them to prestige universities like Harvard and Princeton and to top black schools like Tuskegee, Grambling, and Morehouse—and every last one of them winds up closer to the top than the bottom, and I can’t shake thinking that if we had a few thousand more principals like Charles Beady around the country we’d be doing a whole lot better on this score.
But I can shine a light on schools like Piney Woods and the Frederick Douglass Academy all day long, and it wouldn’t change the fact that these are the exceptions. Both schools have unique models backed by the strength and vision of passionate, dedicated leaders. Both have accomplished great things by demanding that their students accomplish great things. Indeed, individuals can overcome models, but too often we find the model holding sway, and I can’t for the life of me figure out why we cling so desperately to our tired old system.