Stand for Something

by John Kasich

  Perhaps the most telling piece to the puzzle of public school education is that you can’t throw money at the problem and expect it to go away. Increasing a school budget is no guarantee of success. In fact, some of our school districts with the highest rates of per-pupil spending post some of the worst results in statewide achievement and competency tests. How does that happen? Well, with God being thrown out of our schools, and discipline right along with Him, it’s no wonder there’s chaos in the classroom. I’m more comfortable putting my daughters in a school where they can talk about God or sing Christmas carols than I am consigning them to a school where they can’t. That’s how it was for me, in a public school setting. We read the Bible to start the day—the Old and New Testaments. Right there in class. We took turns. Try as I might, I still don’t see what the harm is in acknowledging a higher power at the start of each day, but I guess I’m in the minority on this one.

  I’ll never forget one morning, just after we’d set aside our Bible reading and moved toward math, I was pulled aside by my teacher for talking to this pretty girl who had been seated in front of me. I guess I wasn’t supposed to be talking, because the teacher hauled me off toward the back of the cloak room and swatted me on the backside with a paddle. And after he was through I looked at him and said, “I hope you don’t tell my parents.” That was my greatest fear, that my parents would punish me or ground me for one of these relatively benign transgressions, and it’s amazing to me how far we’ve moved from those times. Realize, I’m not suggesting that the answer to our public school problems is to paddle our children, only that it would be a welcome development indeed if there was once again room enough in our classrooms for the kind of discipline that left kids more inclined to follow the Golden Rule than to blow the whistle on their teachers and threaten to call the family attorney if they’re not left alone to do their thing—whatever it is that thing happens to be.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO DISCIPLINE?

  Paddling is a relic of the past, but it’s amazing to me how far we’ve moved from the impulse behind it. In some academic circles, the debate doesn’t even center on issues of discipline. It’s criticism and competition that are at issue. Realize, the national Parent Teacher Association now suggests that school administrators outlaw playground games like tug-of-war in favor of more socially tolerant pastimes like tug-of-peace, and to deemphasize “threatening” activities like tag and dodgeball, which can create self-esteem issues in certain kids. Physical educators advocate activities through which children compete only with themselves, such as juggling, although even here it seems we need to offer a further assist in the interest of self-esteem; the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports recommends that gym teachers use scarves to teach juggling skills because they’re so much more forgiving (and easier to juggle) than tennis balls or bean bags.

  There’s even a movement among classroom teachers to promote the use of kinder, gentler colors like purple and green when grading papers, setting aside the proverbial red pen in favor of muted tones intended to have a more calming influence on our children.

  I look on at such as this and think, What the heck is going on here? Surely, children who are protected from the sting of honest, constructive criticism can’t hope to compete with their counterparts around the world where educators are free to push kids to achieve their level best. Surely, kids can meet the high expectations of their teachers without being coddled. We can protect them all we like from stressful situations, disappointments, and threats to their self-esteem, but in the long run is it really in their best interest to paint everything in such pleasant-feeling tones?

  Still, the opportunity for discipline remains. What is discipline anyway but a negative consequence or a series of negative consequences or the threat of negative consequences intended to curb bad behavior? In a private school setting, the ultimate consequence is expulsion; in a public school setting, you get suspended; and the answer to some of the more garden-variety behavioral problems lies somewhere in between.

  Remember that story, not too long ago, where students recorded footage of a teacher blowing his top at the unruly behavior in his classroom with the camcorder feature on their cell phones? It made the rounds of all the news shows and Web sites for the way it demonstrated how easy it was for certain students to push the buttons of certain teachers—and to very often get their way as a result, to see the teacher disciplined instead of the student. Mercifully, the school ended up backing the teacher in this one case, and refused to consider the video footage showing the teacher as something less than cool and calm and professional, but it was nevertheless a distressing reminder how much power students have in today’s classrooms. Goodness, you’ve got schools catering to kids who cause trouble, and precious little support for the teachers, and administrators who reach into their bags of tricks to cover up for the weaknesses in their school districts, and it’s no wonder we’re struggling.

  DOLLARS AND SENSE

  For too long now, the rallying cry among public school educators has been that if they just had enough money they could fix the problem. Aw, give me a break! Money is not going to fix the problems endemic to our primary and secondary system of public education any more than a fresh coat of paint for our little red schoolhouses—and we do our kids a great disservice when we hide behind this argument. Too, we miss the point when we pin it all on the parents, by suggesting the problems in our schools would melt away if the parents were more involved in their kids’ schooling. Absolutely, teachers would have an easier time of it if parents weren’t so blind to what was going on in their classrooms, just as they would have an easier time if parents didn’t blindly support their kids in every student-teacher conflict. Absolutely, our parents are not involved in the ways they need to be to reinforce achievement at home. For the most part, they don’t have a clue. They send their kids off to school with no more thought than sending them down to the local barbershop to get a haircut, and they expect them to return all spit-shined and polished and ready to meet the challenges that lie in wait, but it requires more of a hands-on effort, don’t you think? It means parents might need to take those televisions and video game players out of their children’s bedrooms and pay closer attention to the work they’re meant to be doing. It means parents must be willing to give over a certain amount of authority to educators in their communities, while continuing to hold those educators accountable for that authority.

  There’s an adversarial relationship in place these days, between teachers and parents, and it ought to be more of a partnership. That said, it’s not just on the parents any more than it is just on the teachers, or the administrators, or the elected officials charged with the care and feeding of our public school systems. The irony here is that when parents do get involved they frequently bump up against teachers and administrators who don’t know how to handle them, but parents must persevere in this area—as partners and as quality-conscious consumers. Once, when I was out in California, I was riding in a cab through a local community and noticed a long line of well-dressed, well-mannered adults that seemed to stretch for several blocks. I asked the driver to stop, and I walked over to talk to the people in line, to find out what was going on. (I was running for president at the time, and this is the sort of thing presidential candidates are inclined to do.)

  I asked the first person in line who made eye contact with me what they were doing, and I learned they’d been queued up for hours, hoping to get a spot for their children in a new charter school program that was to begin the following school year. Then I walked to the very back of the line and asked the woman standing in the last spot what she would do if she reached the front of the line and learned there was no longer any room for her child. “There are only so many spaces,” I said.

  She couldn’t imagine that would happen, she said, and I thought, Oh, yes it will. She, or someone in line, would get to the door and it would slam shut and there’d be a sign dangling from the window saying, “Sorry, sold out,”
like she’d been waiting on line for tickets to a show. She’d have done what she could, and meanwhile her kid, her flesh and blood, her future, would be denied an opportunity to truly learn and flourish in a landmark school environment

  I came away thinking we have no choice but to open up all of our schools in just this way, so that we can finally put some teeth into the “No Child Left Behind” mantra that passes for an education policy these days, and if we can’t give parents full choice on the education of their own children then we ought to at least fight for a robust charter school movement. There’s a rousing example of a charter school in Las Vegas, funded by the tennis player Andre Agassi, where the school day runs eight hours instead of the traditional six. “That’s a third more time on task,” notes Agassi, who opened the school in 2001 in hopes of giving something back to his home community, and providing a blueprint for how charter schools might flourish in other parts of the country. That two-hour difference each day might not seem like much, Agassi notes, “but at the end of an education, instead of going to twelve years of school, you’re going to sixteen years of school.”

  It’s that kind of outside-the-box thinking that will shake some of the dust from our primary and secondary school models and leave our children in a better position to compete in a global marketplace of ideas. Already, the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy, which expects to graduate its first class in 2009 and where admission is done by lottery, boasts a waiting list of more than three hundred children, so in at least one neglected neighborhood in at least one of our booming metropolitan communities, we see that the charter school movement can work—in a big way, by combining public and private monies with a little bit of ingenuity and progressive new approaches.

  VOICES OF REASON

  We ought to find some way to inject competition into a tired, rickety system and see if that doesn’t help, because competition drives everything in our society. Better computers. Better cars. Better medicine. Better opportunities. Better everything. And yet the powers that be have decided that in this one area there will be no such thing. It’s like the airline industry, where the barriers to entry were such that for the longest time there was no real competition; the giant airlines lumbered along under the constraints of federal regulators that left them with no good reason to innovate—and so, they didn’t. Along came Southwest Airlines, and other short-hop, regional carriers, and a relaxing of some of those regulations, and all of a sudden these upstarts had reinvented the wheel. They figured out how to take care of the customer, how to keep labor costs in check, how to break the mold and look at the tired, rickety ways of doing business from a fresh perspective. And we’ve all benefited from it—with more efficient, more affordable service.

  Over time, we’ll see some of the same benefits in our public schools, I’m sure of it, if we find a way to harness that same spirit of competition and put it to work for our children. Trouble is, we’re running out of time. This is another one of those areas where things have got to go horribly wrong before they’ve got a chance to go haltingly right, and the way I look at it we’re well past horribly wrong. We’re well past the point when some group or individual needs to rise above the mess and demand proactive change, and I’m afraid it’s not going to be the parents, and it’s not going to be the school administrators, and it’s not going to be the politicians, and it’s certainly not going to be the students. That leaves the teachers. Imagine the powerful message our teachers could send if they simply threw up their hands and said, “This is a farce.” Imagine the strength of that kind of argument, because who knows better than our teachers that our public system of primary and secondary school education is simply not working? They know it firsthand and full well.

  Imagine in your own hometown what would happen if a group of teachers stood united against the low standards of your school, if they walked out in protest, and contacted the media, and otherwise called attention to a systemic problem we’ve looked away from for far too long. What would happen? Well, I’ll tell you one thing: Those teachers would never be fired. The administration would be so paralyzed it wouldn’t know how to respond, and parents would lend their voice to the protest, and soon enough something would be done about it. I’m not suggesting that we organize these spontaneous protests all across the country to bring about these much needed reforms, but the power of one such act—one school, one place, one time, one stand—would be enormous, don’t you think?

  I’ve got no idea where it might take us, but it would be a start.

  8

  TAKING A STAND

  ON POPULAR CULTURE

  “I wouldn’t have turned out the way I was if I didn’t have all those old-fashioned values to rebel against.”

  Madonna

  Janet Jackson flashes her breast during the halftime show at Super Bowl XXXVIII—one of the most watched broadcasts in television history—and later blames a “wardrobe malfunction” for her state of undress as sales of her new album soar . . .

  Comedian Bill Maher, who had already been chased from ABC’s late night schedule when he argued on his Politically Incorrect talk show in September 2001 that the terrorists who flew the planes into the World Trade Center were not “cowards,” now suggests on his HBO Real Time program that the U.S. military has picked all the “low-lying fruit” from our inner cities and rural areas and will continue to fall short of its recruiting goals . . .

  Lifestyle expert Martha Stewart resurfaces after five months in a federal prison in West Virginia, for lying to federal investigators, and another five months under house arrest, and announces she will star in an NBC prime-time television show, in a deal that was struck while she was incarcerated . . .

  Ozzy Osbourne, a founding father of heavy metal whose dark, satanic music with Black Sabbath purportedly influenced hundreds of impressionable teenagers to contemplate suicide, and whose onstage antics included biting off the heads of live chickens, allows MTV to film his dysfunctional family for an expletive-laced reality television series, and emerges as a lovable, irascible “sitcom dad” whose drinking and drug use have merely left him unable to find his car keys . . .

  It’s enough to make you cringe, isn’t it? Anyway, it does me, and try as MTV might, I will never be able to snicker at Ozzy Osbourne’s years of excessive and reckless behavior—an inside joke that I guess is over my level head. I will never get that our celebrity transgressions carry no real consequences to the transgressor; indeed, they often return a substantive windfall, in the form of a book deal, a television show, a commercial, or a rejuvenated public image. I will never accept that disorder has become the order of the day. I will never understand how yesterday’s R movies have become today’s PG fare, and how what used to be unthinkable on prime-time network television is now so pervasive that most of us don’t even think about it. I will never stop seeking the national conscience that ought to lie beneath everything that passes for entertainment.

  And so I cringe instead, at the general coarsening of America’s ethical standards, and when I’m done cringing I get to wondering if I’ve become so out of touch with the mores and manners of our popular culture that my own standards come across as old-fashioned. Or maybe it’s that the lines of acceptable behavior have been so radically redrawn over the last couple generations that I’m left toeing the traditional lines of my growing up, trying to figure when it was that the world passed me by. But then I check myself and think, Heck, Kasich, you’re not that old, and your world hasn’t changed that much; it’s just that my perspective has changed, as I’ve taken on the role of father, and what was once acceptable (or, hardly worth noticing) suddenly looms as all-important. And it’s not just me. There are millions of young-at-heart parents out there and they’re probably cut a lot like me on this one, wondering how to stand against the constant bombardment of negative messages that now permeate the popular culture. We’ve all been caught napping, while our standards have slipped to where they no longer seem to be standards at all, and our kids have been le
ft to essentially figure things out for themselves.

  Britney Spears and Madonna leave off writhing onstage long enough to lock lips at the MTV Video Music Awards, in a steamy kiss that raises more than a few eyebrows in the increasingly uninhibited entertainment industry and sends shock waves across the American heartland . . .

  I’ll tell you how old I am: I can still remember the first time the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. My, what a fuss we made over these British imports—in McKees Rocks, and across the country. It was all anyone seemed to want to talk about, the end of civilization as we knew it, in much the same way Elvis and his gyrating hips had marked our decline just a few years earlier. My parents weren’t exactly aghast or put out when the Beatles burst onto the scene and into our living rooms, but in our household these guys were almost counterculture, with the noise everyone in the media was making about their long hair, and their rock ’n’ roll music, and the raw adulation heaped on them by their female fans. This is what I mean by perspective, because nowadays of course we look back on the Beatles as a mostly positive phenomenon, and apart from their very public experimentation with drugs their musical influence turned out mostly to our great and lasting benefit, but back then there was a sense among my parents’ generation that they were up to no good.

  Everything is relative, I guess, and perspective is all, so when we look at these various sea changes in our popular culture we have to be careful that we’re not merely resistant to change. And that we don’t come across as old fogies. That’s about the last image I want to put out about myself, and I’m betting that most of my readers feel the same way regarding their own views. In my case, I’m about as plugged in to the latest trends in music and movies and fashion as any other old fogy in my acquaintance. I know full well that times change, and that our tastes change right along with them, and I’ve been pretty good over the years, trying to stay on top of each, and I recognize that we have become a society of extremes. What is Ashton Kutcher’s Punk’d, after all, but a more provocative version of Allen Funt’s Candid Camera? And what are any of our contemporary entertainments but more provocative versions of the books, movies, music, and television shows that inspired them? Everything old is new again—but unfortunately we live in a time when everything must be new and improved and more sensational than ever before, and I don’t know that we’re coming out ahead on the deal.