Taking a Stand

by Rand Paul

  In the U.S. Senate, I have introduced a bill called the Civil Rights Voting Restoration Act. The bill would allow people with nonviolent criminal records to vote in federal elections. States that don’t go along with it would not be eligible for certain federal prison funding.

  My cosponsor on the bill is Harry Reid.

  I will give you a second to digest that last sentence. While Senator Reid and I don’t agree on many issues, I’m happy to partner with any senator, even the Democrat leader.

  Voting rights is an issue that transcends party lines. The Constitution says that no person shall be kept from voting because of his race or his color. We have all sworn an oath before God to support and to defend the Constitution. We must now act in obedience to that oath.

  8

  Waiting for Superman

  I challenge you to see the faces of the children who are the victims of this strangling bureaucracy (the Department of Education) and not be moved and angered.

  I have and I am.

  In the opening moments of Waiting for “Superman”, the award-winning documentary about the state of our educational system, the educator Geoffrey Canada tells the story from which the film takes its title. Mr. Canada grew up in the South Bronx and was a fan of comic books, especially Superman. When he was eleven or so his mother told him that Superman did not exist. The news crushed young Geoffrey. “She thought I was crying because it’s like Santa Claus is not real,” Mr. Canada said. “I was crying because there was no one coming with enough power to save us.”

  Mr. Canada was talking about life growing up in the ghetto, and specifically about his experience as a kid trapped in a school system for which the word “dysfunctional” is grossly inadequate. Mr. Canada was speaking of the Bronx, but he could have been speaking of Detroit or Los Angeles or Louisville or any number of school systems across the country.

  Our children walk through the doors of these schools and into a sinkhole from which they never emerge. Like the cycle of poverty, the lack of a good education becomes self-perpetuating and lasts for generations. If you don’t finish school your children won’t finish school, and their children won’t, and on and on forever. Some say that failing neighborhoods are to blame for bad schools, but those who know say it’s really the other way around. Bad schools lead to bad neighborhoods. You’ve all heard the numbers before, the embarrassing rankings of U.S. students: twenty-fifth in math and twenty-first in science out of the thirty top developed countries. Many of our schools have become dropout factories. I challenge you to see the faces of the children who are the victims of this strangling bureaucracy and not be moved and angered.

  I have and I am.

  The status quo is unacceptable. But here’s the thing: Washington has no clue how to fix this problem. Washington has no idea why schools are failing. Washington doesn’t know whether you’re a good teacher or a bad teacher. All Washington knows how to do is spend money—your money. And they spend it badly. The basic structure of our educational system is flawed. Public schools are funded by property taxes. Tax revenue is higher in the suburbs and in wealthy areas, so those places get the best schools. But where education is needed most, tax revenue is minimal, and so is the level of the education. Title I funding was supposed to even the playing field. Federal dollars were allocated to public schools serving low-income students. The funding comes from No Child Left Behind (NCLB), a piece of legislation that has only left children behind. Here are the goals NCLB hoped to meet by 2014:

  1. All students will achieve high academic standards by attaining proficiency or better in reading and mathematics by the 2013–2014 school year.

  2. Highly qualified teachers will teach all students.

  3. All students will be educated in schools and classrooms that are safe, drug free, and conducive to learning.

  4. All limited English proficient students will become proficient in English.

  5. All students will graduate from high school.

  Pretty lofty goals, right? But big government initiatives always have great goals. They’re good in theory. But in practice? Not so much.

  Do you want to guess how NCLB did? It might be more depressing than you think.

  As of this writing, only 33 percent of American fourth graders are reading at proficiency, and that number drops to 20 percent with low-income students.1

  Right here, outside my office in Washington, D.C., only 56 percent of high school students graduate, only 18 percent of eighth graders read at level, and yet each student costs more than $18,000 a year in taxpayer money.

  The further shame is that, while there is a general consensus that No Child Left Behind should be dramatically undone, Congress can’t get its act together long enough to undo it. This has to change. It has to change for the sake of our children.

  Today we have a system in which politicians and bureaucrats have too much control, parents have too little, and students’ needs are not being met. Our children have much potential. On an equal playing field I would match them against any other country’s children in the world, but their natural skills and talents are neglected in our education landscape. Their true potential is not being realized.

  So is there nothing we can do?

  There are indeed things we can do, but it will take bold ideas to stop the damage our schools do every day.

  Here’s one idea: how about instead of pouring money into failing schools, we send the Title I funds directly to the parents or guardians of school-age children to pay for the school of their choice. Voucher and charter school programs that allow public education dollars to follow the student greatly improve performance and give children opportunities they wouldn’t otherwise have.

  That’s exactly what I had in mind when Lamar Alexander and I came up with our school choice amendment. The amendment would use the $14.5 billion in current Title I funds to go directly to 11 million students currently attending high poverty, low performing schools, at $1,300 per child. The money would follow a student to any accredited public or private school a family chooses.

  Everywhere it’s tried, school choice has allowed parents to give their children the education they deserve. The Wall Street Journal noted in 2010 that 2,000 of our nation’s 20,000 high schools produce roughly 50 percent of all dropouts. Black children have a 50-50 chance of attending one of these schools. Compare these statistics to Washington, D.C., where a Stanford University study showed that 41 percent of students who attend charter schools learned the equivalent of 72 days more in reading and 101 days more in math each year than similar students attending district schools.

  Today, government holds a virtual monopoly on education. A small percentage of kids who are rich or very bright can elect out of public schools, but most kids do not have that choice. I propose that we allow school choice for everyone, rich and poor. Innovation comes only when individuals are free to choose. Competition breeds excellence and encourages innovation. We need innovation. Don’t get me wrong. There are excellent public schools across our country. My boys graduated from a great public high school, Bowling Green High, and I went to great public schools. The president’s girls go to a great private school. There are a lot of choices out there.

  I want to make it so that all Americans get the option of choosing the best schools for their children. Allowing school choice is a significant idea; education is the great equalizer, and lack of a good education is a lifetime albatross that for many prevents access to the American Dream. A pastor friend of mine in Kentucky has called school choice the civil rights issue of our day. He’s right. Until we treat choice in education as a fundamental right, we won’t be able to begin to understand and alleviate pervasive poverty.

  Here’s another idea. Let’s start thinking twenty-first century when it comes to education.

  I believe Silicon Valley is poised to lead an education revolution. Venture capital and equity financing firms are poised to pour billions into ed tech. I believe a revolution in education led by Silicon Valley would profo
undly change the way our children and their children are taught.

  For example:

  Out of a home office that began in a closet with a $900 Best Buy computer and microphone, Salman Khan built an educational platform that offers free online courses in math, science, engineering, and technology that reaches 10 million students around the world. He calls it the Khan Academy, and Bill Gates is an investor.

  Gates also discovered a college online course called Big History taught by a history teacher from Australia. David Christian’s TED Talk “The History of Our World in 18 Minutes” has been viewed more than 4 million times. You should watch it. Gates thought it would be a great idea for Christian to teach in a high school with a user-friendly interface. So did Christian. The first year it was offered, 2011, only five schools received it. Last year, it was offered free to 1,200 schools from New York City to Seattle.2

  Here’s why it’s a great idea: if you have one person in the country who is the best at explaining calculus, maybe that person should teach every calculus class in the country. Just imagine!

  Imagine the top thousand teachers or experts in a field sharing their skill and understanding with 10 million children.

  Educators have labored for decades to reduce class size so as to enhance learning. Little data exists to support any significant improvement in scores resulting from smaller classes—the Brookings Institution calls the results of such studies “tentative.”3 Instead of going smaller, I think we should consider the opposite. Perhaps class sizes should expand to a million students per teacher or beyond. With the Internet that’s now possible.

  Now imagine if this system evolves into a perpetually sustainable enterprise. In other words, imagine what would happen if it incorporated profit. After all, there are only so many billionaires like Gates in the world, and only a profitable enterprise is sustainable in the long run.

  Can you imagine if our teachers were treated like those who are great in other professions? If we pay our best athletes millions of dollars a year, what would the market pay our best Internet teachers? We have no idea of the value of teachers because we’ve never really had a marketplace for education.

  Would we still have local teachers? Of course. The personal dynamic between teacher and student can be one of the most powerful relationships in anyone’s life. In addition, we should give our children access to truly extraordinary teachers, who could teach millions of kids in the classroom all at once, with local teachers reinforcing the lessons and providing personal guidance.

  Here’s the best part: the cost of education would tumble while its quality would increase. By making exceptional teachers available via the Internet to the entire country for pennies on the dollar, you would also multiply the number of potential geniuses logarithmically. Stay with me here. Remember, it was only about two hundred years ago that a monarchy prevented most ordinary citizens from getting an education and consequently from contributing to innovation and discovery.

  The American Revolution opened access to the vast nonaristocratic classes of people. In all likelihood, America’s independence quadrupled the number of individuals who became inventors and creators. When women came into the workforce we again doubled our innovation. When all races came into the workforce human capital and ingenuity grew again.

  The untapped revolution of the Internet has the potential to bring an online, personalized education to even the poorest kids in America. Companies like Amplify, Schoolnet, and Bookette are already bringing education to the remotest parts of the globe. We’re only scratching the surface.

  Here’s the thing: do not, absolutely do not wait for government to understand this boldness, and do not count on them not to interfere or try to stifle it.

  Remember that Congress established the Department of Education as a Cabinet level agency in 1980. In the thirty-five years since, American students’ scores have stagnated while much of the world has leapt forward. The only thing, in fact, that has grown is the size of the bureaucracy and the budget, nearly doubling during the last ten years. More governmental control over our education system is not the answer. We would be wise to remember what the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said: “The single most exciting thing you encounter in government is competence, because it’s so rare.” No one is educated by a D.C. bureaucrat, and nearly $100 billion a year that could be used in our local schools is instead passed through the sinkhole of Washington.

  Which leads me to another bold idea: why don’t we leave what doesn’t work behind?

  The standardized process of our educational system might have been fine for the 1950s, but it is severely outmoded now. A child in kindergarten today who is lucky enough to stay in school all the way through college won’t enter the workforce until 2029. How can we presume to know what the workforce will look like then? One of the more disturbing statistics that Waiting for “Superman” cites is that by 2020, Americans will be qualified to fill just a little over a third of the highly skilled, highly paid jobs.

  Many Democrats, and even some Republicans, support a national curriculum such as Common Core. I think a national curriculum is a terrible idea. Having one central authority decide the curriculum means that if that curriculum contains errors, students all across the country will suffer. If a national curriculum contains political bias, all students will suffer. Leaving curriculum in the hands of local educators and school boards allows adjustments to occur more rapidly and allows for a quicker and more direct response to parents’ wishes. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have national tests, or even international tests, to compare our students’ progress. It just means that local parents, leaders, and teachers should determine the tests and the frequency of testing.

  By definition, core curriculum limits the education of our children. Why in the world would we think an idea as antiquated as core would be the model for the Internet age?

  Recently, I spoke in Chicago at an event sponsored by the Illinois Policy Institute. The meeting was held at the Josephinum Academy, a small, all-female Catholic high school with mostly nonwhite students. It’s in Cook County, which doesn’t exactly count as a home game for me. But the county’s alignment with the president did little in helping its woes in education. Twenty-seven percent of low-income students there don’t make it through high school.4

  The Democrat Party has opposed charter schools and vouchers pretty much steadfastly, and I would say the teachers unions have as well. I told my audience at Josephinum Academy that I call those opposed to school choice dead-enders. Dead-enders are people who don’t believe in innovation. Dead-enders believe what we have now is the best we can do. Dead-enders throw money at the problem and then look the other way.

  We’ve been trying the same thing in education for too many years. And all this time our education system, particularly in our big cities, has been in a downward spiral. In Louisville’s West End, eighteen schools are failing, and the graduation rate is 40 percent.

  Our children deserve better—they deserve a choice in education.

  Geoffrey Canada’s mother was right. Superman isn’t real. But maybe we don’t need Superman to save our schools. Maybe we just need to empower the people who can make a difference, people like Geoffrey Canada. His Harlem Children’s Zone, a charter school network and nonprofit that currently serves more than 12,300 children, has a 95 percent college acceptance rate among its high school seniors.

  I know the education system in our country presents a very complicated problem, and I don’t want you to think that the little I’ve covered of it here is the complete answer. But one thing is for certain: we need new ideas. We can start by not telling parents how to educate their children. They want to be able to choose what is best for their families and their situation. This isn’t rocket science. It’s regular science, and good old math and American history. Parents know what is best for their children. The best thing government can do is get out of the way and let them decide. I really don’t think anyone would even notice if the whole
Department of Education was gone tomorrow anyhow. Now there’s a bold idea.

  9

  Government Overreach

  The primary purpose of offender-funded justice is simply revenue, and most of the time it’s revenue that is collected from those who can least afford it.

  When I was still an intern at Georgia Baptist Hospital in Atlanta, making $22,000 a year, I owned a convertible Volkswagen Rabbit (the station wagon had died an honorable death). I had a lot of fun in the car, but it was by no means a prize. My friends called it a dog runner. It was five years old, and the frame was bent such that the front two wheels were not aligned with the back two wheels. It looked like a dog running. If that wasn’t embarrassing enough, the top didn’t close without great effort. To close the convertible roof, I had to get under the car and attach a “come-along winch” to the frame and the roof. On my first formal date with Kelley, at a black-tie event hosted by the hospital, we came outside to find it raining and I’d left the top down. I had to get down under the car in my tuxedo to attach the winch to close the roof. Believe me, no girl ever dated me for my car.

  The only thing worse than having a crummy car is having no car. One night I parked the Rabbit in front of Kelley’s house and some punk kids decided to steal it.

  Dog runner or not, I needed my Rabbit to get to work.

  I called the police, expecting them to come and investigate. Instead, they kind of laughed and asked me to give them the vehicle identification number. “It will show up in a few days,” the cop said nonchalantly. He was right, it did. They called me to retrieve it from the impound lot.

  My relief turned to exasperation when the cops notified me that I would have to pay the fee for the tow to the pound. The car also had four flat tires, and I would have to pay another towing fee to take it to be fixed. I don’t know which made me more frustrated—that my car had been stolen in the first place or that the authorities were making me pay coming and going. Actually I do know—it was the authorities making me pay. I wasn’t about to fork over another $150 for the second towing, so I bought four “fix-a-flat” air canisters, injected them into each tire, and took off for the closest gas station. I arrived rolling more on rims than rubber.