Unfortunately, within months, we were confronting dissidents and protesters who accused us of trying to advance Christian values in the school. Yes, we were Christians, but we never sought to impose Christianity on our students. However, some liberal activists seemed to think that the word “rigorous” was somehow code for “religious.” They even accused us of objecting to showing the movie Aladdin, because we allegedly feared the depiction of a magical genie. Well, of course, that was bogus. We weren’t afraid of Robin Williams and his character; our objection to showing Aladdin was that kids don’t need to go to school to see fantasy movies. They can see them at the movie theater or at home. Students should go to school to learn the best that has been thought and said. If you wonder why kids get less than they should in education and why they graduate with minimal skills, it’s because too many “experts” think that comedy cartoons are a legitimate part of a curriculum.
The Minnesota charter school law mandated that 51 percent of the school board be composed of licensed Minnesota teachers, so parental input was always going to be outnumbered by the professional staff. Unfortunately, rather quickly it became apparent that the original mission of the school’s founders wasn’t shared by the board. If the board couldn’t agree on the school’s direction, how could we go forward? Parents put time and effort into the school because they wanted high-quality academics for their children. When they sensed that the mission of the school had changed, to focus primarily on at-risk kids with lower levels of academic achievement, they took their children and left. Ultimately, Marcus and I saw we wouldn’t succeed in restoring the school’s original focus, and so I and other board members stepped down. The school survived, and many excellent and dedicated staff remain. The focus was, indeed, on “at risk,” and today, I am proud to say that the school fulfills a positive purpose in reaching out to kids who otherwise could have fallen through the cracks of the system.
The New Heights experience taught me a lot. I learned about school governance, and also about the ins and outs of dealing with state and local authorities. And I certainly learned that the fight for education reform would not be won easily. Yet at the same time I could see hope. I could see, among the majority of folks in Stillwater, and among a majority of Minnesotans, a great hunger for better education. The relentless dumbing down of the schools since the sixties had inspired an unexpected boomerang. By the nineties, parents had wised up; they wanted better schooling for their kids because they wanted them to succeed. And that inspired me. I might not always succeed, I told myself, but I will always keep trying.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan campaigned for the presidency on a platform that included abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. Only recently created by President Jimmy Carter as a political favor to the teachers’ unions, the department had failed to deliver either better test scores or more rigorous curricula dedicated to academic excellence. That sounded like a good idea to me, because I have never believed in federal control of the schools. The vast majority of parents can figure out for themselves how to educate their children and how to provide them with good values. And if some parents can’t do so, well, there’s most likely someone nearby who can step in. That’s what I mean by local control and by the wisdom of letting the fifty states—all those separate laboratories of democracy—chart their own courses on education. The challenge of good schooling, I firmly believe, is best addressed as close to the student as possible.
Yet during the eighties, a new idea took hold: that the federal government should take the lead in education, not just as a matter of national policy, but as a matter of international policy. That is, the U.S. government should work with the United Nations to remake American society, as part of global “solidarity.” This story seems astonishing, I know—it astonished me when I first learned about it. But this larger context for education reform is so important that I am providing details and documents in an appendix at the back of the book even as I focus here on the American part of the story.
As a result of new-style educational thinking, Americans were saddled with Goals 2000, enacted by Congress in 1994 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. That piece of legislation sets forth a lofty set of goals for the nation, starting with the blanket statement “By the year 2000, all children in America will start school ready to learn.” Well, obviously, everyone is in favor of such a goal. But how do we go about accomplishing it? And did anyone honestly think that a federal program would produce that? That seems like a nice notion, but in the real world, such goals can be achieved only in the old-fashioned way—by working for them. Can the federal government do it? Can Uncle Sam, in view of his abysmal track record on social policy, be relied upon? Can we trust Bill Clinton—or any president—with our children?
So as we poke around in Goals 2000’s fine print, we see, for example, that an official federal goal is to make sure that “every parent in the United States will be a child’s first teacher and devote time each day to helping such parent’s preschool child learn.” Okay, that sounds fine, in the aspirational sense, but here comes the kicker: “and parents will have access to the training and support parents need.” And what “training and support” is that? Who will provide it? Well, it means that if a parent can’t handle his or her parental duties, a benevolent-seeming bureaucrat will step in to “help.” You know the old line, “We’re from the government, and we’re here to help you.” Indeed, as Goals 2000 makes plain, if children and parents for any reason don’t measure up to federal requirements, there’s a “partnership” or “team” of agencies that will happily move in and take charge. Yes, that’s our federal government—always efficient, always effective, always at your service!
Here’s another goal: “By the year 2000, United States students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement.”
Oh my, who can be against that? Who can be against winning the international brain race? But wait, there’s a small detail left out: actually doing it. How will this victory happen? And will these same people who brought failure now bring success? I recall my foster daughter, the one whose eleventh-grade math homework consisted of coloring in a poster: Was her colorful homework helping to fulfill Goals 2000? The truth is, the United States hasn’t been anywhere close to first place in math for a long, long time. These days, countries such as Finland and South Korea are always at the top; they are the new Iowa, you might say. Typically, the United States ranks down in the teens and twenties in international rankings of math and science; a recent study the World Economic Forum ranked the United States forty-eighth in the quality of math and science instruction.
But wait—there’s more! Goals 2000 still had more to offer: Washington now decreed that a greater percentage of students would graduate from high school, that more students would be proficient in foreign languages, that the dire achievement gaps between population groups would disappear, that all students would be knowledgeable about diversity—and, of course, that the lion would lie down with the lamb. I made that last one up, but the fully delusional quality of these goals is captured in goal (7)(A): “Every school in the United States will be free of drugs, violence, and the unauthorized presence of firearms and alcohol and will offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning.”
Needless to say, I am 100 percent in favor of our having safe schools, free of drugs and violence, offering “a disciplined environment.” But it’s preposterous to claim that a federal government that can’t even be bothered to defend the U.S.-Mexican border against human traffickers and narcoterrorists is qualified to lecture the rest of us on how to keep our schools safe.
Indeed, the Goals 2000 pledges were so ambitious—and so ludicrous in their pseudodetailed optimism—that they are worth recalling in full (they are appended in the back of the book). Yes, they make for turgid reading, full of stilted bureaucratese, but trust me: Every word therein was crafted by “experts,” working their part of a grand central plan in
which a new kind of bureaucratic-corporatist ideology—of schools as state-supervised education factories, doling out dumbed-down instruction to meet the plan—replaces our traditional love of children and the child’s innate and joyful striving for excellence.
It’s worth remembering, again, that these fantasy goals became the law of the land in 1994. And if now, seventeen years later, they read like some cosmic practical joke, well, please be advised that you paid for it—through the nose, with your own hard-earned money. Your tax dollars at work. The federal government has indeed spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to do all these things. Moreover, while the goals statement consists of only about 1,300 words, each item comes with its own wagon train of fine print and regulation. And it’s within all that red tape that the bureaucrats find their power—and even more of your money.
So if the gap between the stated goal and the reality is so vast—wider than a mile, to quote the songwriter Johnny Mercer—as to make the whole goals process comical in its costly incompetence, well, now you know why I got so fired up in Stillwater.
Because even as the central bureaucrats in Washington were grinding away, peripheral bureaucrats in each state capital were similarly grinding. In Minnesota, the state department of education bureaucrats in St. Paul were all too eager to join in on the effort, creating their own mini version of Goals 2000. So in 1998 the state launched a new education plan called Profile of Learning, as mentioned in chapter 1. And as always happens when the government unveils a new program, eager spin doctors rushed to herald the “historic breakthrough”—while relying on the silent assumption that nobody would actually read the fine print. Or remember how the previously heralded “historic breakthrough” had worked out.
In reality, of course, when the bureaucrats do their thing, educational verities erode, reduced to their lowest common denominator. Moreover, the many localities out in the provinces are disempowered—not by accident but by design. The bureaucrats’ hope is that the public will give up and a passive fatalism will set in, so that the rule makers rule, overseeing a long slide into politically correct mediocrity.
As my friend Allen Quist, a former Minnesota state legislator and Republican gubernatorial candidate, said at the time, the Profile was a power grab. Yet it was not just a power grab of our schools, but a power grab of our whole way of life as free Americans. Students were now to be seen for their value to the economy, for their usefulness to a future employer. No parent sees his or her child only in such utilitarian terms, but central planners do—and that was the problem. Embedded in the Profile was a vision of top-down control in which children become mere cogs in a vast bureaucratic machine.
For my part, as an ordinary citizen, I came to understand that if a leader isn’t actively paying attention to the procedural workings of government—that is, if he or she isn’t drilling down into the day-to-day shuffling of papers—then a reckoning will come, and he or she will discover that cunning underlings, operating on little cat feet—or, I should say, bureaucrat feet—have altered the political landscape to their own liking. Corner offices for all!
In other words, it was the Minnesota bureaucrats—not even the elected politicians—who now had the power of the federal government behind them. So these functionaries could do what they had always wanted to do, and if they ran into resistance—from either a politician or a citizen—they could say, “Hey, don’t blame me, I’m just following orders from Washington.” It was a nifty way to pass the buck. So the politicians usually went along meekly, even heedlessly, with the new education rules; for one thing, they had more important goals to worry about—such as getting reelected.
So the pushback on all these policies, if there was to be any, would have to come from the people. Can you fight city hall? Can you fight the statehouse? And the federal government? Sure you can. It just takes a lot of work. I joined a citizens’ group called the Maple River Education Coalition, and we found that together we were more than just a group, or even a team. We were a movement—a volunteer movement of concerned citizens and activists. We were a proto–Tea Party, you might say.
So I started researching the Profile, decoding the bureaucratic spin that came with it. Just as I had once studied the innards of the tax code, I was now studying the innards of our education system. It was hard work—I put in five years of my life—but it was important work.
I teamed up with another education activist, Mike Chapman, and soon we had put together a report on the Profile and then a presentation that we could show to other parents. In our presentations, Mike and I would analyze the components of the Profile, examining each part in turn, highlighting all its flaws and false assumptions. And because there was so much material, our presentations grew increasingly long and comprehensive. Yet we found that Minnesota parents, once engaged, were riveted—and then galvanized. And so our audience grew. Mike and I did all the work at our own expense—and at the sufferance of our families—because we knew that what we were doing was important. Our sessions with groups of parents, including the inevitable questions and answers, might easily stretch into two or more hours. And by the time we were done, our audience—who beforehand might have known nothing about the Profile—was ready to grab a pitchfork. They’d say, “Not with my kid, you don’t!”
Soon we each traveled to various venues around the state, packing our materials in the trunk of a car, getting lost on snowy roads as we went from one living room—or auditorium or gymnasium—to another. And wherever we went, Mike and I, plus a growing number of friends and allies, learned more and more about our state’s educational malpractice and malfeasance. We’d meet parents whose kids hadn’t been taught multiplication tables. And interestingly, we met public-school teachers who had protested against this foolishness but had been punished by their bosses for speaking out.
Of course, we wanted to share our concerns with our elected officials, but precious few of them were interested in listening. As I have mentioned, my own state senator didn’t wish to be bothered. And he was hardly alone. Our governors back then viewed us as nothing more than a nuisance. The governor at the time was a Republican, although in the years after he left office in 1999, he would go on to endorse John Kerry against George W. Bush in the 2004 presidential election and Barack Obama over John McCain in 2008.
His successor as governor turned out to be Jesse “The Body” Ventura, the ex–pro wrestler, who won in a three-way election. Ventura ran as a member of the Reform Party, and yet, for all his populist fervor, the reform we saw was lowering the tab fees for license plates. That was great, but at the same time, he also pushed the biggest government intrusion into education that the state had ever seen. Even before he was sworn in as Minnesota’s thirty-eighth governor in January 1999, he was surrounded by liberal Democrats. And so despite populist hopes, the permanent St. Paul establishment seemed to continue to rule the day. And that meant, among other things, ignoring the pleas of Minnesota parents and teachers and our reform-the-schools campaign.
By now, I was active in statewide education reform. That same year, 1999, five openings came up on the local school board. I’d spent countless hours trying to inform Minnesotans about the negative impact of the Profile; now, maybe, there was an opportunity for like-minded parents to take a majority position on the school board and push for academic excellence. I let myself, in my enthusiasm, be persuaded to run for office, for a post on the local school board in Stillwater. Five political novices agreed to run as a slate—what a mistake. We tried to squeeze all five of our names onto one sign. And while we had the best of intentions, the problem was, we didn’t know the first thing about running a campaign. So while our goal was to work for local control and academic excellence, the local teachers’ union wanted to retain its control of the school board. Meanwhile, the big guns of Big Education, Minnesota style, were all aimed at us. Even Planned Parenthood campaigned against us. Why would a proabortion group get involved in school el
ections? Well, that tells you a lot, doesn’t it? It’s a reminder that Planned Parenthood’s true intentions go far beyond legalizing abortion; in fact, the group seeks to get to kids at an early age with their vision of sexual permissiveness.
And so in November 1999, all five of us lost that school-board election. It was a chastening experience; losing an election among your friends and neighbors is no fun. As a result, I resolved not to risk embarrassing myself ever again. Yet my resolution held firm for only a few months—until that fateful rendezvous with destiny in April 2000 at the Republican district 56 convention in Mahtomedi.
CHAPTER NINE
Taking On the Establishment in St. Paul
THE 2000 state senate campaign was on. Although I wrested the Republican endorsement away from the incumbent state senator in April 2000, the senator chose not to concede. So I had to face him again in the September Republican primary.
And I had to put together a real campaign. In political terms, I was nobody from nowhere, but because of my work against the Profile of Learning, many activists already knew me. Thanks to them—and thanks to their good hearts and boundless energy—we had more than a campaign. Once again we had a movement.
For my part, I went door knocking. And as I drove around, if I saw a stray voter, I would pull over and introduce myself. It was hard work, and it forced me to spend hours, days, and weeks listening to voter after voter at the door. It was there, at the door, that I learned the voice and dreams of the people I hoped to represent. I felt that I was doing something important—something that could potentially help all the families of Minnesota. And so with more activist zeal than political skill, I won the GOP primary by more than twenty points, 61 percent to 39 percent.
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