Of course, it is not easy to establish merit pay and abolish tenure. Take Florida, where the legislature passed both reforms but they fell victim to Governor Charlie Crist’s political ambitions. Having changed his party affiliation to Independent from Republican, he vetoed the bill as part of his strategy of moving leftward to try to win a Senate seat in 2010. But at the end of the day, we need to ask ourselves, who loses when we don’t educate our children? Everyone.
Tough Choices for Education
During my decade as governor, there were many situations that confronted me that were not of my own choosing, and the field of education was no exception. It was always easy for some expert from out of state based at a Washington think tank to evaluate the decisions I had to make on the ground. That is the reality of leadership: Every governor in the country has to navigate whatever situation arises.
In December 2002, the Supreme Court of Arkansas finally ruled in a nearly twenty-year-old ongoing lawsuit related to school funding. The justices decided that the state had failed in terms of both educational equity and educational adequacy. The court directed the state to ensure that all students, no matter what their geographical location, be granted access to essentially the same education as all other Arkansas students. This ruling would have several consequences. For one, there would have to be increased spending on a per-pupil basis to deal with the differences in spending between affluent and less well-off communities. For another, objective evaluators would be brought in to determine exactly what was adequate and what was equitable. Arkansas schools spent considerably less per pupil than most states—in some districts, pitifully below others—so there really was no way to argue the propriety of the decision.
This was a very challenging experience. I was confronted with the necessity of getting adequate revenue to comply with the court’s orders and, more important, meet the very real needs of the children of our state. But this could only be achieved if I sailed through some very unfriendly legislative waters. Nor were many people pleased when I suggested that, rather than simply spend more money, we commit to spending it efficiently. Specifically, I argued that we should not raise revenue unless we made the politically tough decision to consolidate many school districts because their separate existence could not be justified financially. Only consolidation, I felt, would produce the economies of scale that needed to be achieved in order to operate an efficient system.
In many cases, my approach was unpopular and would later provide a great deal of political fodder to my opponents in the presidential campaign. They made simplistic charges against me without putting forth any context. Of course, this is one of the most painful realities of today’s politics. If a person has no record at all or, if already in political office, has carefully avoided confrontations and difficult decision making, the voter has no way of knowing what the candidate’s really made of. I have always believed that ultimately, people would rather elect those with the courage to make tough decisions than those who’ve governed so as to preserve their own political future at the expense of a better future for coming generations.
As I’ve recalled for you here, in my experience, educational issues are affected by all levels of government and by the beliefs and convictions of school officials, elected representatives, and outside “experts,” as well as by the legal opinions issued by courts. As I said before, education is a function of state and local governments and was never intended, as evidenced by our Constitution and the words of our Founding Fathers themselves, to be a federal concern. As we look directly into the classroom now, please don’t forget this context. It is complex and can be determinative.
Race to the Top
Although I believe education should be left to the states, I fully endorse the new federal program Race to the Top, which has states compete for additional education funds, allowing them to decide what reforms to enact rather than having specific reforms imposed on them from above. Applications are evaluated under a five-hundred-point system, with points awarded based on criteria in several categories. The greatest number of points (138) is allocated to the category of reforms that address tenure and seniority.
It’s a very clever way to prod states to embrace much-needed reform just out of the hope of getting federal money, without actually promising any particular state anything. The mere prospect of this money has motivated states to stand up to their teachers’ unions or get unions to agree to reforms they’ve opposed in the past. It’s like getting all five of your children to do a great job on their chores knowing that only the one who does best will get an allowance. For all the criticism of the Obama administration (and I’ve been the source of plenty), this is an area where I give them credit. If we’re going to spend federal money on education and have a federal education department (even though it’s not really a constitutional function of the federal government), then we ought to at least make the money count.
The $4.3 billion allocated is less than 1 percent of the money spent annually on education by government at all levels. But small amounts of money—in fact, just the possibility of small amounts of money—can effect significant change. So far about half the states have passed reforms in their effort to get a share of this money. Forty states and the District of Columbia competed in stage one, which concluded in March 2010 with grants to Delaware and Tennessee.
Personalized Learning
Besides attracting and keeping better teachers, we have to help our teachers help our children. One of the major reasons for dropping out is simple boredom. I want to transform America’s high schools by putting each student at the center of his education to make his learning personal, relevant, and respectful of his individual learning style. The New Hampshire Vision for Redesign has done impressive work on this concept of “personalized learning” that can serve as a model for our whole country. A close friend of mine, Fred Bramante, owns a chain of music stores along the East Coast and, after serving on the state board of education in New Hampshire, envisioned a different and revolutionary approach that would center on the interests of the student rather than those of the school institution.
With the help of his parents, teachers, and community, each student drafts a learning plan. For part of each day, he studies the core curriculum. But beyond that, he is encouraged to integrate his personal passions and career ambitions into credits toward his high school diploma. What has traditionally been considered extracurricular becomes a source of academic credit. A student who takes karate lessons gets gym credits. A student who plays in a rock band gets music credits. A student who interns for the local newspaper gets English credits. The opportunities are as limitless as our children’s imaginations, dreams, and talents and our communities’ willingness to help them. What’s brilliant is that students are able to integrate what they are studying with real-world experience so that they understand that what they learn has authentic practical value. It exchanges the make-work of many schools for something vibrant. Fred’s vision is catching on, and rightfully so.
Local businesses should participate to ensure that they have homegrown talent to fill their jobs. Community colleges should get involved to encourage students who were at risk of dropping out to see themselves as college material and to ensure that their transition to higher education is seamless and won’t require remedial classes.
Students don’t have to sit in the classroom all day, staring out the window and watching the clock. Let’s take the walls and roof off our classrooms and realize that they should encompass the entire community. In fact, in the age of the Internet, they should encompass the whole world.
We are a nation proud of our respect for the individual, yet for too long our high schools have been cookie cutter, one size fits all. Let’s encourage the individuality of our children; let’s acknowledge that each one has his special God-given gifts, his unique contribution to make to America. One can play the violin like an angel, and another does science experiments that will help us achieve energy independence. Transforming ou
r schools with personalized learning won’t just lift our graduation rates. It will lift our children into more successful and satisfying lives.
Art and Music Education
The twenty-first century will belong to the creative; they will thrive and prosper, both as individuals and as societies. The creative ones will be the competitive ones. While you can’t teach creativity the way you do state capitals and multiplication tables, you can nurture it by offering art and music to all of our students, all the way through school. I believe that the secret weapons for our remaining creative and competitive in the global economy are art and music, what I call our “weapons of mass instruction.”
Studies have shown a direct correlation between music education and math scores. Music develops both sides of the brain and improves spatial reasoning and the capacity to think in the abstract. Music teaches students how to learn, and that skill is transferable to learning foreign languages, algebra, or history.
Art and music education levels the differences in academic performance among students from different socioeconomic backgrounds and reduces delinquent behavior. Art and music education results in what all parents and school districts are looking to brag about—higher SAT scores.
Some children decide early on that they’re not good at school and they hate it. Art and music can save these children, can keep them in school. For them, biology may be broccoli and Spanish may be spinach, but when they get to art class or band practice, that’s a hot fudge sundae. If it weren’t for these opportunities, where they feel successful and worthwhile, where they’re enthusiastic and engaged, many students would drop out of school. According to research by the Education Commission of the States, there is an established correlation between art and music education and high school drop out rates.
It infuriates me when people, especially my fellow conservatives, dismiss art and music as extracurricular, extraneous, and expendable. To me, they’re essential to a well-rounded education.
In reality, creativity doesn’t really have to be “taught” because it is naturally “caught” by every child. Do you have to beg a three-year-old to sing or a four-year-old to draw pictures or a five-year-old to playact various roles when playing fireman, doctor, or parent? What happens between the naturally creative early years and the bored-to-death teenage years? Those years are spent in a classroom in which students are told to sit down, be quiet, face forward, get your head in the book, and be still. Students today aren’t dumb—the people who run the educational establishment, who want to create a conveyor belt that treats students like parts in a manufacturing plant (like the one in the Pink Floyd videos), are the dumb ones. And there’s no reason to let it stay that way.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Leave Your Campsite in Better Shape Than You Found It
We Need to Take Responsibility for the Environment
My weekly television show, Huckabee, on the Fox News channel, is taped in Times Square, the heart of teeming Manhattan. A walk through that district can give you a slight case of sensory overload, as you might know from experience. A cacophony of noise, pedestrians and cyclists right next to you, the glitter of huge digital jumbotrons—yes, today’s “Gotham” is a long way from Hope, Arkansas, in the 1950s.
Just a quick walk from the studio to a Starbucks on the corner requires quick-witted navigation through a churning sea of humanity. And every one of these people, each of these swiftly moving pedestrians—some forging straight ahead, some blocking the sidewalk to shout into cell phones—has a unique story. It’s humbling. So many millions of human beings dealing with their individual problems, hopes, failures, and triumphs.
Sometimes, though, when I’m making my way down Broadway, one story in particular pops into my mind. It’s about a peculiar, frail young boy who grew up in that neighborhood in the 1860s, during the Civil War. Wearing thick glasses to correct his poor eyesight, he was nearly debilitated by recurring bouts of asthma that would render him limp, struggling to breathe.
His mother would sometimes send him up Broadway before breakfast to buy fresh strawberries at the outdoor market. One morning, he was struck by an exotic sight: a dead seal that had been caught in the harbor displayed on a slab of wood along with the mounds of fish, vegetables, and bread. This was, of course, more than a hundred years before seals were designated a protected species, but the boy had never seen this glistening marine mammal. His heart raced as it somehow brought to life the oceangoing adventure tales he loved to read. For some time, he stared at the seal in awe, until he suddenly realized he’d better get himself home in time for breakfast. I don’t know whether or not he remembered to buy those strawberries.
When he returned the next day, he was excited to find the seal still there. He was on a mission, having brought a ruler in order to measure every dimension and characteristic of the animal. Passersby surely scratched their heads at the sight of this scrawny kid fastidiously recording his data in a small notebook. As it turned out, he dreamed of preserving the carcass in order to author a natural history, but he had no way of doing so. Eventually, almost all of the animal was sold off for its skin, oil, and meat, but the market keeper, well aware of the boy’s intent curiosity, gave him the seal’s skull.
The boy raced home with it and, before a small audience of cousins, declared it the first specimen for their new collection. On his bedroom door he hung a sign that boldly declared: ROOSEVELT MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY.
True story. And if you haven’t guessed by now, that peculiar, sickly (and many would later say “aggravating”) little boy with the goggly specs and fertile imagination was Theodore Roosevelt, who would become the most ardent conservationist (as well as the only amateur ornithologist and zoologist) ever to occupy the White House. Hungry from such a young age for knowledge about nature, he would grow up to set aside 160 million acres as protected federal lands during his presidency, so that Americans could enjoy these preserves for centuries to come. Or as Lyndon Johnson once put it, so that we could see “a glimpse of the world as it was created, not as it looked when we got through with it.”
Roosevelt was a complex, charismatic man about whom volumes have been written, and many more will follow. But the principal thing I admire about his passion for the natural world was his recognition that nature doesn’t exist apart from humanity: It is part of humanity, and vice versa; we are all a part of nature. He understood that sensible existence requires a balance. Today, when we use nature’s resources for our benefit, we must do so responsibly and judiciously, so that the generations that follow us can follow suit. And so forth, ad infinitum.
What I’ve just described is now widely discussed as “sustainability,” but it’s not a new concept in America and wasn’t even in Roosevelt’s time. The Iroquois people, for example, who have lived off American soil for centuries, devised the doctrine of “seven-generation sustainability.” In other words, all decisions, environmental or otherwise, should be made in light of the impact they were likely to have on the next seven generations. For many reasons, generations have become longer than they were even early in the twentieth century, but just as a workable yardstick, let’s estimate that seven generations would be about two hundred years. Now try that measure on what’s happening to nature in your town or neighborhood. Probably not fitting that ideal, I’d guess.
The same idea was phrased another way by the Boy Scouts of America, as I recall from my scouting years: “Leave your campsite in as good or better shape than you found it.” The rule was strictly enforced, at least in my day. I learned the important lifelong lesson that the land and its resources are for our use and enjoyment, not our abuse and destruction.
On this point, Roosevelt argued, “To waste, to destroy, our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them.” His conviction inspired generations of conservationists (and conservatives) to shar
e his passion. In fact, it was Ronald Reagan who explicitly defined the connection between conservation and conservatism: “What is a conservative but one who conserves? This is what we leave to our children. And our great moral responsibility is to leave it to them either as we found it or better than we found it.” For him, the lesson of the campfire applied to the whole of nature.
But both men, if you read carefully, avoided making the mistake of those fervent environmentalists who believe that nature is to be protected at the expense of humanity. I mean, let’s keep it real. We human beings leave a mark on the environment. How could we not? Even in prehistoric times, when the environment was altered only in ways necessary for survival (wood fires for warmth and cooking, game killed for food, forests cleared to grow crops), however small the human foot-print, however much in harmony with nature, it was nonetheless there. It was inevitable. Today, of course, there are billions more beside it. In fact, in some cases, the footprint of humanity has become a defining aspect of the land. But we should not beat ourselves up over this fact. Ours is as legitimate a role in the ecosystem as has ever existed.
Ayn Rand once wrote, in answer to especially fanatic environmentalism, “Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon.” You don’t have to know Genesis by heart to recall that God created us as part of the natural order, and arguably the apex of it. After all, unlike the animals of the forest or the fish of the sea, we alone possess the ability to contemplate our role in, and our impact upon, the environment.
A Simple Government Page 10