by Bobby Jindal
Teachers’ union leaders and other interest groups endlessly complain that our schools lack resources—as if performance would dramatically improve if we would only throw more money into a failing system. History shows otherwise. According to the U.S. Department of Education, by the end of World War II we were spending $1,214 per student in 2001 inflation adjusted dollars. By the fifties that number nearly doubled to $2,345. By 1972 it had nearly doubled again to $4,479. By 2002, more than thirty years later, it had nearly doubled yet again to $8,745 .7 And what has happened to American education? Do I really need to answer that question?
Don’t get me wrong, resources are important. In fact, in my first budget as governor I included enough money to raise the salary of Louisiana teachers to the southern average, and we’ve kept it at that average ever since. While good teachers should be well-paid, however, right now the U.S. education system pays its highest salaries and best benefits to teachers based simply on longevity in the classroom. One study found a high-quality teacher is only about half as likely to make it to the seven-year mark as a low-quality teacher. What this means is that too many good teachers get pushed out of the system.8
Pay should be tied to performance, not seniority. Is there anywhere in America (outside of government) where your salary is based solely on how long you’ve been there rather than results? If a teacher takes students who are three grades behind in reading and brings them up to their age level, that teacher should be rewarded. Also, we should reward teachers who are teaching a difficult or high-demand subject, or those teaching in an area where it’s hard to recruit teachers.
Let me be crystal clear with regard to my admiration of teachers and the teaching profession. In politics, when you challenge the way our current education system works, you are often attacked by your opponents as “anti-teacher.” That’s politics for you. I am hard pressed to think of a more noble or more important calling in life than being a teacher. They are almost certainly undervalued and underappreciated in our society. In my own experience, it was the patience, thoughtfulness, and determination of teachers that gave me many of the opportunities I have had in life. Without dedicated teachers, America has no chance to thrive.
In my first year as governor, I proposed a flex pay program for teachers so that school districts could pay more to attract the teachers they need. But local school leaders said they couldn’t adopt the program because the unions would make their lives miserable. You see, paying individual teachers for high performance, or because they teach a hard-to-fill subject, disrupts the herd mentality on which the union leadership thrives; the union’s goal is to convince teachers that seniority is the only fair way to allocate pay. But that’s hardly in the best interests of individual teachers who want to excel; it actually encourages teachers to simply follow the pack and serve out their time.
Flex pay or merit pay may inconvenience union leaders, but it’s a much better model to drive outcomes in our classrooms, as well as a better model for young, motivated teachers and experienced teachers who are achieving impressive results or teaching complex subjects. Young teachers and high-performing teachers need to force their union leaders to truly represent their interests—and the best interests of our children.
In 2010, we passed a value-added teacher evaluation bill geared toward teaching and student achievement. In fact, the Washington Post called our education reform agenda “ambitious” because it brings accountability to schools and actually measures teachers and classrooms based on results.9 This legislation assesses teachers fairly, based on a student’s true progress over the course of a year. These data will help to identify the good teachers to reward them, and the struggling teachers to provide them the training they need to become more effective. The result will be better teachers and better student outcomes.
There are countless heroic teachers performing miracles in our schools every day—but too often they succeed despite, not because of, the way they are compensated.
Throwing money at schools has been tried many times. In a famous 1984 court case in Kansas City, Missouri, Judge Russell G. Clark used his powers as a federal judge to take over the Kansas City school district to try to rectify educational inequality. He unilaterally ordered the near doubling of city property taxes to fund lavish education spending. The school district built swimming pools and TV studios, bought computers and hired a legion of specialists. And what happened? Test scores stayed flat, the dropout rate increased, and attendance dropped. “They had as much money as any school district will ever get,” reported Gary Orfield, a Harvard investigator who tracked the ten-year experiment. “It didn’t do very much.”10
Money is not the problem. The simple fact is the engine of American education is broken because it is badly designed. Our education system doesn’t lack money; it lacks healthy competition, incentives to excel, and high expectations.
Have you ever wondered why our K-12 system is failing our children but our university system is the world’s best? The difference is easy to explain: colleges and universities compete for students, scholars, and grant dollars. Students aren’t required to attend them.
Compare that to elementary and secondary education. If your children, attend public school, their school is probably determined by your address. Why do we allow this local monopoly? Why don’t we force public schools to compete just like private and parochial schools do? Today, if parents don’t like their local public school they have three choices: they can home school or pay for private school tuition—if they can afford it—or they can move.
Imagine for a minute if our universities and colleges operated under the same rules as our elementary schools. If you lived in one part of Louisiana, you could only attend Louisiana State University. If you had a different zip code, your only option would be the University of Louisiana at Monroe. Students from one part of Massachusetts would go to Harvard, those from another to Boston University. In other words, universities would be guaranteed a set number of students regardless of their performance. And what if research grants were offered to universities not based on what they could do, but based on the simple fact that these schools existed? What would happen to our universities? With no incentive to compete or improve, they would quickly decay.
Competition forces school officials to focus on getting results. During his January 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama said education quality shouldn’t be based on your zip code. Virginia’s Republican governor Bob McDonnell said the same thing in his response. So why can’t we make this a reality?
In my first year in office, we pushed legislation for a student scholarship program in New Orleans. (We also passed a modest tax deduction to help parents who are spending their own dollars for tuition and other education expenses.) The premise was simple: in New Orleans, we spend roughly $8,400 per child. If parents had a child in a failing public school in New Orleans, I proposed letting them take a maximum of 90 percent of those funds and use them to pay tuition at a participating private or parochial school. I called it a student scholarship program. It lets parents, and private and parochial schools, decide if they want to participate, and it has essentially no effect on the budget. Indeed, the average scholarship size has been much less: $4,593. Most importantly, this program targets those parents who need it most. In fact, the average income for the scholarship applications we received was $15,564.
Who in their right mind would oppose giving parents such a choice? The education establishment, of course, because they believe they are entitled to your children and your tax dollars. For trying to give parents a choice in the matter, I was charged with attacking the public schools. Well, despite that nonsense we passed the bill, and I proudly signed it into law—and the program’s chief supporters have been parents.
Every year, many of these parents take time off from their jobs to tell lawmakers at the Capitol how important this program is to them and their children. You should hear these parents; some of them have tears in their eyes when they relate how
they finally feel good about the opportunities they’re giving their kids. They have hope in their eyes. No one should ever think these parents care any less about the quality of their child’s education than more affluent parents do. I can’t imagine why the education establishment refuses to learn from parents like these who are desperate for a choice. Why should wealthy families be the only ones who have choice?
In 2005 Louisiana experienced the horrors of Hurricane Katrina. Over a thousand people died; tens of thousands were displaced. Some have said there was some kind of silver lining to this tragedy. They are wrong. There is no silver lining to a tragedy this devastating. But we did have a choice as to how we would rebuild.
The hurricane delivered a knockout blow to one of the worst performing school districts in the nation. In 2003-2004, New Orleans had fifty-five of Louisiana’s seventy-eight worst schools. In 2005, more than half of the 65,000 kids in New Orleans public schools did not have basic competence in math and English at the fourth, eighth, tenth, or eleventh grade levels, according to test results. Fully 74 percent of eighth graders had failed to show basic skills in English, and 70 percent scored below the basic level in math. Of the city’s 108 public schools, 68 were rated “academically unacceptable” by the Louisiana Department of Education.11 The district had lots of money, but auditors estimated the school system was running a $25-30 million deficit—they couldn’t even state a precise figure because the financial books were in disarray. The Department of Education discovered that $70 million in federal money allocated to low-income students was misspent or simply missing. More than two dozen indictments for fraud, kickbacks, or theft soon followed. In 2003, the valedictorian for a New Orleans area high school got an 11 on the ACT, a score lower than 99 percent of the kids taking the test nationally. The structurally flawed New Orleans public schools let that girl down.12
The New Orleans Parish School Board operated like a centralized monopoly. Innovative ideas (like charter schools) were resisted and bureaucracy ruled. School administrators and teachers couldn’t repair a building or implement even minor reforms without the board’s authorization. Adam Nossiter, then a writer for the Associated Press, noted just months before Katrina, “In the dismal gallery of failing urban school systems, New Orleans may be the biggest horror of them all.”13
Katrina forced the city to begin anew. Nearly two-thirds of the city’s school buildings had been destroyed or damaged by floodwaters. While private schools set about to clean up and reopen quickly, public schools were mired in bureaucracy as much as mud and debris from the storm. So local leaders and the state Legislature pushed for the schools to be run by the Recovery School District that answered directly to the state. Seemingly overnight, New Orleans became the most chartered city in America, with nearly 70 percent of students in public charter schools. With this experiment, the state Legislature nullified the collective bargaining agreement between the New Orleans Parish School Board and the teacher unions. Charter schools are public schools, but they’re free to develop innovative solutions to meet the needs of their students. And charter schools have no monopoly on local kids; parents can choose their child’s school. Not all charter schools are great, but competition will allow parents to at least make a choice.
Every student is different. When I was growing up I was inquisitive—in fact, sometimes too inquisitive. I drove my mom nuts constantly asking her what some word meant. One day I read a biography of Abraham Lincoln that explained how our sixteenth president was an “inquisitive” boy. I asked her what that meant, and she told me to look it up. I was proud when I discovered the meaning. “President Lincoln was inquisitive and so am I,” I told her smugly. “And you can’t be mad at me for doing what the president did.” For some reason she found this argument less than convincing.
Some children are naturally inquisitive, some possess a creative flair. Some are strong in math, others get lost in literature. Some are filled with potential but need someone unique to crack through a rough outer shell. Charter schools allow parents to make the right choice for their unique child, picking from schools that have been approved by state or local officials and are held accountable for their results. Because charter schools have to compete against each other, they tend to make a point of recruiting energetic teachers, focusing on academic performance, and offering creative and practical courses for students.
All sorts of charter schools have blossomed in New Orleans. Some focus on foreign language immersion. Others are based on the Montessori Model. National charter school entities, such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), now educate more than 1,000 children in the city. In the last four years, assessment scores have improved citywide in New Orleans. Individual schools have demonstrated even more spectacular results. In 2010, the Sophie B. Wright Charter School celebrated that 62 percent of their 8th graders passed the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) test. This is a huge improvement from 2004-05, when the school still functioned as a regular public school, and 83 percent of 8th graders scored below “basic” on the test in English, and 76 percent scored below “basic” in Math.14
The New Orleans charter school system is not perfect. Initially, Louisiana law dictated that charter schools should not “be supported by or affiliated with any religion or religious organization or institution.” This was unnecessarily restrictive, because federal laws already prevent publicly funded schools from engaging in religious discrimination or conducting religious instruction. But there is no reason why we shouldn’t tap the expertise of churches and faith-based groups to help us reform and enhance our education system. As governor, I have worked to eliminate restrictions that have shut these groups out.
The key to success in charter schools is getting parents and the community involved, so we’ve tried to make parental involvement as easy as possible. We’ve also empowered teachers with a new law allowing a traditional school to become a charter school by a simple faculty vote. Traditional public schools often complain that comparisons to charter schools are not fair since charters face fewer restrictions and less bureaucracy. With that in mind, we passed the Red Tape Reduction and Local Empowerment Act that gives all our public schools the same flexible options charter schools have. A well-respected superintendent who headed our state association marveled, “The legislation was almost too good to be true; I thought I was dreaming.” With this flexibility comes accountability in terms of student performance. Schools that don’t improve will be taken over and reconstituted so their students succeed.
If we’re going to have successful schools, we need to be able to define and measure success. Louisiana has won national recognition for our accountability programs that track the performance of individual students, teachers, schools, and districts, and even tie that performance back to colleges of education that prepare our teachers. States can use high stakes testing, school report cards, and other mechanisms, but the important point is that parents must have access to easily understandable, quantifiable, and objective data about how their children are doing. That is why we passed a law giving Louisiana schools letter grades. Just as students get a report card, so should our schools.
Beyond restructuring our education system through choice and competition, we need to return discipline to the classroom. Kids today should not fear going to school because bullies are on the prowl; and teachers should not worry about how to handle troubled students. We are all familiar with the terrible school shootings in places like Columbine, Colorado, and Red Lake, Minnesota. But other acts of violence and intimidation happen every day that we don’t hear about. A survey a few years ago asked teachers what they needed most. Higher pay ranked beneath everyday concerns like a better teaching environment, more authority to deal with unruly students, and more parental support when they did so. Likewise, a survey by Southern Media and Opinion Research found the number one problem teachers face in the classroom is classroom discipline, followed by lack of parental support. National surveys have revealed similar concerns by teachers
around the country.15
We need higher standards not just in academic achievement but in personal conduct—the two often go hand in hand. As governor, I pushed for and got a Teacher’s Bill of Rights as well as legislation that gives teachers more authority to remove disruptive students from the classroom. Moreover, if a student is suspended, the new law requires that he make up all the schoolwork he’s missed. Suspension should not be vacation. And we get parents involved, too. The law allows the courts to require parents to attend after-school and Saturday behavior intervention programs with their kids. If they don’t cooperate, the parents can be fined or required to perform community service. Similarly, kids who fail to meet school attendance requirements or are constantly late can now have their driving privileges suspended.
High standards are an expression of love—I learned that from my parents and teachers. By tolerating lower standards we have hurt our children. We need to raise the bar for everyone—students, parents, and educators. It’s a sad commentary on our education system that we need to import scientists and engineers because we can’t produce enough of them here at home.