To Save America

by Newt Gingrich

  A couple precautions: under current law, churches cannot endorse candidates but pastors can, if done correctly. Politicians can speak to the congregation but they cannot ask people to vote for them. To find out what churches can and cannot do legally, contact either Liberty Council (www.lc.org) or the Alliance Defense Fund (www.alliancedefensefund.org). If a church is threatened, these groups can provide the legal defense, usually pro bono.

  The Founders who declared our independence and created a government based upon their understanding of God’s principles were committed to the idea of a federal government with limited power. Because of their success, our government today is now the oldest government on earth. The best way to ensure its continuation and to secure religious liberty is to further limit federal powers and maintain the right of redress articulated in the Declaration of Independence:That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,—That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

  Remember Jefferson’s great insight: “The God who gave us life gave us liberty.” Religious liberty is much too precious to allow it to be further eroded. People of faith must educate themselves, get involved, and encourage others to do the same. For too long the secularist campaign against religious freedom has gone unanswered. But to change that we need only reflect on Psalm 11:3 (NIV): “When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?”

  There is a great deal we can do. And when we do it we will not be without God’s help. Our national motto says it all: “In God we trust.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Solving the Education Crisis

  With

  Lisa Graham Keegan—Advisor, American

  Solutions Learning Project

  Nancy Sinnott Dwight—Advisor, American

  Solutions Learning Project

  Fred Asbell—American Solutions

  Education Policy Director

  No American should underestimate the continuing crisis in our educational system or the threat that crisis poses to our nation.

  This is not a new problem. More than a quarter century ago, in 1983, the Reagan administration released “A Nation at Risk.” That devastating critique of our education bureaucracy declared that if a foreign power were doing as much damage to our children as our unionized, bureaucratic, government schools, we would consider it an act of war.

  Nearly a decade ago, in March 2001, the Hart-Rudman Commission on National Security—the most comprehensive review of national security requirements since 1947—warned the second greatest threat to America was the failure of math and science education and the failure to sustain our scientific investments. It argued this failure was a greater threat than any conceivable conventional war.

  Today, any American can go to 2mmillion.com and see Bob Compton’s remarkable documentary film 2 Million Minutes, which compares two Indian, two Chinese, and two American high school students. Even though the Americans are from a “high-performing” high school, they simply cannot compete with their Chinese and Indian peers. Compton has since filmed a movie on the Basis School in Tucson, Arizona, which he asserts is the best high school in the world. He upholds the school as proof Americans can perform and compete when the system is changed from bureaucratic mediocrity into a learning-oriented, high-standards model that both challenges and reinforces students.

  THREE IMPORTANT LEARNING TRENDS IN TODAY’S AMERICA

  The challenge we face involves three crucial trends:1. The coming revolution in learning through technology and brain science.

  2. The requirement that all Americans learn all their lives.

  3. The failure of unionized bureaucratic education and the need to replace it with a student- and parent-centered competitive model.

  First, we are on the edge of a revolution that will outstrip anything we have ever imagined possible in human learning and adaptation. The combination of breakthroughs in neuroscience and the emergence of inexpensive wireless technologies with massive computational powers (enabling expert systems and personalized learning feedback applications) will revolutionize how we think about learning in the next decade.

  Therefore, we must design a system of learning that is available 24/7 every day for all Americans to learn with unprecedented speed and effectiveness at their convenience and in their homes or communities. The work of Apple on iPhone applications, of Amazon on Kindle applications, and of neuroscientists who have developed many startup companies studying how advances in brain science might improve our lives, are all encouraging indicators of a future learning system more personalized, more convenient, and more effective than anything we have in the unionized, 1840s-era bureaucratic model of education today.

  Second, we have to think about learning policies for every American at every age. Every American will have to learn virtually his entire life. We cannot go into states like Michigan with massive structural unemployment and consign thousands of middle-aged Americans to unemployment or underemployment for the rest of their lives. With huge scientific advances (4 to 7 times as much new science in the next twenty-five years) combined with the pressures of competing in a world market, Americans will have to commit to lifetime learning if they want to be effective.

  Furthermore, we will discover we need to learn different things at different times. Someone can be an expert in one area and a beginner in another. We must integrate learning at every age and on every topic so there is a seamless web of opportunity that Americans can access. This requires Congress and the state legislatures to rethink the artificial divisions they now have between primary learning, vocational education, adult education, and the like. We may need new committees that cover the entire spectrum of learning. We may also need to rethink how learning is organized in the state and federal government to bring together activities that today are spread across the Department of Education, the Labor Department, the Commerce Department, Health and Human Services, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.

  Third, we have to recognize the greatest barrier to the coming revolution in effective, convenient learning for all ages is the unionized, bureaucratic systems that absorb vast amounts of money while protecting bad teachers and bad schools. This system cripples the future of young Americans, especially the poor and minorities. As long as our system is characterized by waste such as New York City’s $65 million-per-year rubber rooms for failed teachers, it will never substantially improve learning outcomes.

  Instead of wasting resources harboring incompetence, we should be investing in a new campaign to recruit the finest and the fittest to lead our classrooms and laboratories, an “Operation Teach” that spotlights the twenty-first century imperative of teacher recruitment. We should build on programs that pull highly qualified college graduates into teaching, such as Teach for America, KIPP schools, and others.

  While attracting the very young into this vital profession, older generations could be mobilized to patiently teach the generations to come. We should recruit retired professionals eager to share their knowledge with the next wave of learners: museum and library workers to teach science and literature; retired military officers to lead classrooms in mathematics and geography; retired medical professionals to share their knowledge in biology sections; journalists to teach the texting generation how to write and read. This will require a whole new approach to part-time and specialized teachers that breaks all the molds of bureaucratic structure, useless credentials, and tenured unionization.

  Twenty-first century teachers should be masters of their subject’s content and methodology, earning salaries that reflect a community’s real commitment to learning. Teacher certification should no longer be tied to the vagaries of union demands but t
o measured student advancement and performance.

  This requirement for a fundamental improvement in learning is more than a national security issue or an economic issue. It is the issue that will determine our nation’s future. Learning and its fraternal twin, education, are this century’s battleground in a three-century quest for equality in America—this is the number one civil rights issue of the twenty-first century.

  At American Solutions, we believe lifelong, limitless (but not effortless) learning is the key to a successful America, an America that embodies prosperity, safety, and freedom for every American of every background and every neighborhood.

  We must be an intellectually hungry, morally strong, and urgently demanding nation with an education system capable of responding to a voracious American desire to learn. The following solutions can put American education on that path:1. A model charter school law featuring freedom in personnel decisions, direct and full funding, and no limits on growth should be adopted in every state with these provisions:a. All the money allocated for student education goes directly to the school.

  b. The school manages its own staff, whereby it is exempt from laws regarding tenure and unionization.

  c. The school defines its own curriculum in line with state standards and assessments. Students in charters are not exempt from state assessments. The schools are not exempt from reporting requirements, nor should they be.

  d. State law allows the schools to “franchise” its model without limitation. That means they need not apply for a new school every time they want to build one. If they have the demand, they should be allowed to meet it.

  e. The state has no caps on the number of charter schools that can be approved, and the process for approving charter schools is smooth and efficient.

  2. All states should use student achievement and outside performance data as key components of teacher evaluation. Exceptional teachers deserve greater leadership roles and higher pay, and this judgment must be made by reviewing the success of the students they teach.

  3. Parents whose children are currently trapped in failing schools must be given immediate, broad options for change.

  4. The president and all fifty state governors should make learning and education reform a top priority and pledge specific action.

  5. States should revise their teacher certification processes to provide preferential and expedited access to unquestionable excellence. Every state should open its systems up to part-time expert teachers so that retired physicists, neighborhood pharmacists, local accountants, and others can teach one or two hours a day, bringing knowledge to the classroom and business-like adult expectations to the students. Programs like Teach for America should be encouraged and expanded.

  6. States should adopt new technologies in teaching, including online schools and the use of web-based curricula within their legal frameworks.

  7. Business leadership should engage directly in partnerships with schools to create job-ready graduates.

  8. States and school districts should provide expansion incentives for any school with a breakthrough record of achievement.

  9. Every state should adopt an early learner program so students can learn faster than the state curriculum. Students who can graduate early could be awarded the cost of the years they skip as scholarships toward college or vocational school.

  These initial, practical steps can be adopted in the near future with bipartisan majorities. President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have advocated similar measures such as open-ended charter schools, real accountability for teachers and schools, and a much faster system of firing bad teachers and attracting better ones. We should act now on these issues.

  Ultimately, I favor a “Pell Grant for kindergarten through twelfth grade” (as Senator Lamar Alexander describes it) so all parents can send their child to the school they believe is best for that child. The Netherlands and Israel have done well with this kind of open-ended public funding of non-bureaucratic learning, which sparks competition and encourages start-ups and creativity.

  Liberals passionately support Pell Grants for colleges so poor children can continue their education, but they tend to oppose Pell Grants before college. As a result, they keep America’s poorest and most disadvantaged children trapped in bureaucracies that cripple their future and leave them without enough education to ever use a college Pell Grant.

  It’s time we learned form the success of America’s competitive, open-ended higher education system and applied the same principles of choice and competition to K-12 learning. We would immediately increase learning and dramatically reduce the ineffective, unionized bureaucracy. America would be stronger on both counts.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Why the Second Amendment Is Vital to Preserving Our Freedom

  In order to preserve liberty from encroachment by government and politicians, the Founding Fathers passed a Bill of Rights consisting of ten amendments to the Constitution. The Second Amendment says, “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

  The secular-socialist Left argue that militias no longer exist the way they did in the eighteenth century. Thus, they say, the Second Amendment is antiquated and the individual’s right to arms is no longer relevant.

  This is a willfully false reading of the amendment. The experiences and writings of the Founding Fathers indisputably demonstrate they intended for the Second Amendment to be understood as an individual right that exists outside the context of using weapons as part of service in a militia.

  Nine provisions written in state constitutions during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries included language asserting the people’s right to “bear arms in defense of themselves” as well as in defense of their state. So the right to bear arms was commonly understood at the time as applying to self-defense.

  But more important, the Second Amendment not only guarantees the individual’s right to defend one’s self, family, and property, but to defend against the inherent danger of tyrannical government.

  The men who wrote and enacted the Second Amendment had a keen sense of words and a thorough knowledge of history. In addition to their own experiences fighting against British tyranny, they were steeped in Greek, Roman, and English history. From this, they concluded that politicians could not be trusted, that power corrupts, and that governments were a permanent threat to liberty.

  The lessons of the English Civil War taught the Founders that government had to be controlled by the people or it would drift into a tyranny over the people. And the experience of their own American Revolution, especially the battles of Lexington and Concord, convinced them that an armed citizenry was an essential requirement for preserving freedom.

  David Hackett Fischer, in his brilliant history Paul Revere’s Ride, captures the lesson. The British Army had had a long experience of crushing peasant rebellions in Ireland, Scotland, and rural England. Faced with rabble, the disciplined force of a relatively few men could dominate and impose the government’s will.

  That is why the colonists’ victories at Lexington and Concord were such an enormous shock for the British Army. As Fischer recounts in vivid and compelling detail, more than a century of self-defense, self-organization, and self-government had created communities capable of governing themselves and defending themselves. When the British collided with this organized community, they were outnumbered and in many ways outgunned.

  Civilian soldiers made a crucial contribution to victory during the agonizing eight years of the Revolutionary War. At Saratoga, one of the greatest victories of the entire war (and the key event in convincing France to enter the war on our side), the militia played a decisive role in isolating and surrounding an entire British Army.

  The Founding Fathers knew full well the original march to Concord and Lexington aimed to seize the largest powder supply in New England. They knew the British believed disarming citizens
was the key step toward controlling and subjugating them.

  Throughout history, we have constantly seen regimes attempt to disarm and thereby control people—and with good reason. Armed, independent civilians are a threat to tyrants.

  Thus, the right to bear arms became a key building block in the fabric of freedom.

  Since the Founding Fathers deeply believed in the weakness of human nature and the tendency of power to corrupt those who wield it, they wanted to preserve the citizens’ ability to defend themselves against tyranny, even against a tyrant of their own nationality.

  In The Federalist No. 46, James Madison wrote that if the federal government were ever to act in a way that violated the rights of Americans, a federal army “would be opposed [by] a militia amounting to near half a million citizens with arms in their hands.” Madison argued that if the people of Europe, where “the governments are afraid to trust people with arms,” had a militia organized by local government, “the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it.”

  Madison’s point has held true in more modern times. Imagine a Nazi Germany in which the Nazis hadn’t passed special laws to disarm Jews and other anti-Nazi groups. Under those conditions, the Holocaust would have been virtually impossible to implement.

  Anyone who has studied Afghan history knows that the power of the Afghan people to resist every foreign invader—including the British, Russian, and Soviet empires—is based on the Afghans’ widespread ownership of arms and skill in their use. Our own commanders in Afghanistan know if they were to alienate the Afghan population, the country would be ungovernable. We can be in Afghanistan as liberators and allies, but never as conquerors or dominators.