No Apology: The Case For American Greatness

by Mitt Romney

  Even among students who receive high-school diplomas, their average educational aptitude is woefully lacking. On the most recently available National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, the averages of all eighth-grade American students scoring proficient were a mere 27 percent in science, 17 percent in history, 31 percent in reading, and 22 percent in civics. What does such a level mean in practice? Here’s one telling example: when the same eighth graders were asked what organ a human being cannot live without—an appendix, the liver, a lung, or a kidney?—only 42 percent correctly chose the liver. The majority thought you couldn’t live if you lost your appendix, or one of your two kidneys, or one of your two lungs.

  There is no greater indictment of American government than the sorry state of American education. It is an epic failure.

  The consequences of a failing educational system reach to the foundations of our democracy. During the 1960s, the idea set associated with progressivism gained ascendancy in educational circles. Our classical education tradition had held for decades that we should imbue each generation with the wisdom of the ages and the discoveries of modernity. Progressives, on the other hand, rejected the notion of universal truths, objective judgments, and, ironically, progress itself, embracing neutrality among competing belief sets and rejecting the primacy of Western civilization, the great thinkers of the ages, and the principles espoused by the Founding Parents of the nation. In their view, all cultures are of equal value.

  Progressives de-emphasized the subjects that had previously been considered essential. Rather than teach the history of Western and American civilization, for example, they presented all the world’s cultures to our children and insisted that none was superior to the others. Presidents, generals, founding patriots, and heroes proved in liberating strife were less important than the champions of social causes. If our children do not learn about and come to cherish America’s heritage, history, culture, and founding principles, how can they be expected to defend the freedoms on which their country is based? How can young citizens become adult citizens equipped to critically examine contemporary political ideas in the light of history, or become informed about matters of public policy, or even simply understand the value of voting? Even in 2008, a year in which record numbers of young people were engaged in the presidential election, still only 52 percent of eligible voters under thirty bothered to vote. The abysmal voting patterns of young Americans are ample evidence that our education system has not equipped our children with the requisites of citizenship that sustain a democratic republic.

  The 1983 warnings by the National Commission on Excellence in Education did not go entirely unheeded. Politicians set out to significantly increase education spending and to shrink the average number of students in public school classrooms. The average amount spent per pupil, adjusted for inflation, rose by 73 percent between 1980 and 2005, and the average class size was reduced by 18 percent. But during that same period, the educational performance of our children has hardly budged. Why not? Why have we failed at this most essential task? And how do we repair public education in America?

  Studying How We Teach

  Following my election as governor of Massachusetts, and knowing that I now shared responsibility for the education of hundreds of thousands of young people, I studied the education literature to gain perspective. What I found was a virtual quicksand of differing opinion in which it would be easy to sink, but what was missing was an examination of data. Instead, most writers sought to convince their readers by appealing to their inherent prejudices and by recounting anecdotes that supported their particular policy preferences. But as R. Glenn Hubbard of Columbia Business School has observed, real data is the collection and processing of anecdotes into reliable information. Anecdotes are illustrative but data is compelling—particularly if it is comprehensive and presented by an unbiased source. Far too often, I found that neither of these conditions prevailed when it came to discussions of education policy.

  During my four years in office, several education policy debates emerged in Massachusetts. A requirement that students pass the statewide assessment exam as a condition of receiving a high-school diploma was scheduled to go into effect. Parents, teachers, education-union leaders, and politicians wanted to see that provision relaxed, if not eliminated outright.

  In addition, bilingual education was slated to be replaced by English immersion, a move vigorously opposed by nearly all of the loudest voices in the education establishment.

  And, of course, there were the perennial education debates—how much more funding should we allocate for schools, colleges, and universities, and by how much should we shrink our average class size. A large revenue shortfall in Massachusetts made these latter two issues particularly emotionally charged.

  In 1993, the state was ordered by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to raise education funding levels in low-income school districts to a minimum acceptable level. The increased funding would have to come from the state. A negotiated agreement on the new funding was reached between then Governor Bill Weld, a Republican, and the Democratic Party leaders in the legislature. Funding in low-income school districts would be dramatically increased, but all students would be regularly tested in math and English. And the agreement provided that in 2003—my first year as governor—students would have to pass a test in order to graduate from high school. Further, schools where students consistently fell below agreed-upon levels of achievement would be subject to remedial actions—including the possibility of being taken over by the state Department of Education and being subject to the cancellation of any union contract provision that was deemed to interfere with student achievement. And finally, the state opened the door to the creation of charter schools. People on both sides of the aisle deserved credit for enacting such bold reforms. It was the sort of meaningful and practical reform agenda that is needed across the United States.

  Objections to the graduation requirement became increasingly intense as the first school year of my administration was drawing to a close. Ninety-two percent of our seniors had passed the test by the end of their senior year, and those who had not would be entitled to summer school and another try. The parents of the 8 percent of students who failed to pass the test were vocal and angry. Despite the program’s apparent early success, the Massachusetts teachers’ union launched a 600,000 advertising campaign, calling the graduation requirement flawed and unfair.

  As the issue continued to heat up, Mayor Scott Lang of New Bedford announced that he would direct his local high school to give diplomas to all seniors, regardless of whether they had passed the state test. My powers of persuasion were unable to dissuade him, but when I announced that I would enforce powers given the governor under the legislation and cut off all state education aid to his school district—an amount of tens of millions of dollars—he came around to my point of view.

  Elsewhere, the city of Springfield, the third largest in Massachusetts, was on the verge of bankruptcy. I obtained emergency powers from the legislature to appoint a finance control board to take over the management of the city. The board’s focus was on the city’s fiscal health, but the failure of its schools emerged as a critical priority. Student outcomes were far behind state standards. And there was an even more immediate crisis. Many of the city’s best teachers were opting to abandon the inner-city schools. In fact, we couldn’t find teachers to fill Springfield’s most severe shortages in math and science classes. The teachers’ union refused to allow the city to either assign teachers to the schools where they were needed most or pay a bonus to those willing to teach in the inner city or give higher pay to science and math teachers. The union was, in my view, putting the interests of its members—narrowly defined—ahead of those of the students.

  Armed with the club of a potential bankruptcy filing, we finally got the teachers’ union to budge. An agreement was struck that allowed us to assign teachers where they were needed most, to pay more to those who accepted difficult assignme
nts, and to boost salaries for new math and science teachers. When I spoke with the head of the state teachers’ union, I recognized that he and his members had made very significant concessions, and we agreed that it was an encouraging sign that we had found consensus on an experiment to remedy a broken school system.

  Even the provision for new charter schools came under attack during my term. The legislature passed a bill that put a moratorium on any new charter schools—a law that went into effect immediately. Yet because the bill was enacted at the beginning of summer, it would force the abandonment of three new charter schools only recently constructed and scheduled to open in the fall. The teachers for these schools had already been hired. The students had applied, been accepted, and had notified their regular public schools of their decision to attend the new charter schools. It was an egregious exercise in special-interest-driven legislation, and evidence of how fervently the teachers’ unions oppose school choice. I vetoed the bill. And while Republicans made up only 15 percent of the legislature, enough Democrats joined with me to uphold my veto, and the new schools opened as planned.

  There was another education success during my time as governor that was the product of collaboration with the legislature. As noted, Governor Weld had successfully championed a testing requirement for high-school graduation, and I had defended it at every turn, so there was a stick to get our kids to learn enough to pass the exam. But we wanted to create an incentive for more students not just to pass the test but also to excel. I proposed offering a scholarship to our best-performing students. We agreed that the those who scored among the top 25 percent in their school on the graduation exam would be entitled to receive a four-year tuition-free scholarship at any of our state institutions of higher learning—a savings of about 2,000 per year. I called it the John and Abigail Adams Scholarship because I had just read David McCullough’s biography of the president and was moved by the Adamses’ intellect, education, and erudition. And after all, they had been Massachusetts citizens and among the country’s greatest patriots.

  Some of my favorite moments as governor came on the day each year when we announced the scholarship recipients. I asked the school principal of a high school I had selected to invite all those who had scored in the top 25 percent to come to a special assembly. Of course, they did not yet know that they had placed in the top quarter of their peers, nor were they told why they were coming together. David Driscoll, the head of our state Department of Education, and I then addressed the students. At one point I asked them to reach under their seat, remove the envelope that had been taped there, and open the enclosed letter. The letter broke the news: they had scored in the top 25 percent and had been awarded an Adams Scholarship. The cheers were deafening. I got more hugs than I get around the tree at Christmas. Kids had me talk to parents on their cell phone—by special dispensation, they had been allowed to bring phones to school. More than once, parents told me that they had not thought they could afford college for their child before, and that the scholarship would make the difference.

  Massachusetts once took pride in pioneering bilingual education, creating a system in which elementary school students were taught in their native language, often for a number of years. Like smaller classes, the concept made sense—many feared that foreign-language-speaking immigrant children would be left behind if they were thrust into a standard English-speaking classroom. Yet I also had heard about students graduating from Massachusetts high schools who were not fluent in English, and I could not imagine how they could successfully make their way in our English-speaking society. Solid, reliable data comparing student achievement in bilingual programs with the results of those in immersion programs was scant, so I called principals in California, where bilingual education had been replaced with English immersion programs. The administrators I spoke with were very supportive of immersion.

  Not surprisingly, there were a number of advocates that remained fierce defenders of bilingual education. In Massachusetts alone, the bilingual program had required that we employ hundreds of teachers to instruct youngsters in Cambodian, Vietnamese, Spanish, and Portuguese—teachers who in many cases would be otherwise unemployed in teaching because they weren’t proficient in English. In speaking to immigrant parents, I was surprised to learn that many of them had wanted their child to attend regular English-speaking classes, yet despite this often expressed preference, school officials had shuttled them into bilingual classes instead. For me, that was a warning sign.

  One morning, I visited an elementary school in Boston where most of the school’s students were taught in bilingual classes. At a student-body assembly I asked how many youngsters were born outside the United States. Only a few hands went up. Surprised, I asked my next question: How many of you are in bilingual education classes? This time, the great majority of hands shot skyward, and the truth became obvious. Kids who were born in America, who watched television in America and played video games in America—thoroughly American kids—were being assigned to bilingual classes only to allow bilingual teachers to keep their jobs. The result that these students would be less fluent in English didn’t seem to bother anybody! From that morning on, I became an even more ardent proponent of English immersion and sought to rapidly implement it throughout the state. Under the immersion program, recent immigrant children who spoke no or little English would initially receive instruction in their native tongue, but would be moved into English instruction as soon as possible. Time and again, I heard from parents in the immigrant community who applauded the decision to scrap bilingual education in favor of English.

  The National Assessment of Educational Progress exams—known as the Nation’s Report Card—test fourth and eighth graders from every state in math and language skills.

  During my third year in office, Massachusetts fourth graders scored first in math out of all fifty states. And they scored first in English.

  Our eighth graders were also number one in math. And they were ranked first in English.

  This was the first time any state had been ranked number one in all four measures. What Massachusetts was doing right during those years under Governors Weld, Cellucci, Swift, and Romney and the collaboration of an overwhelmingly Democrat legislature—measuring student progress, establishing high-school graduation standards, providing for school choice, and rewarding excellence—was consistent with the lessons we had learned from educational studies and data around the world. These results have helped to inform my beliefs about what we must do to regain our country’s tradition of educational excellence, to close the achievement gap both within America and with other countries around the globe, and to prepare coming generations for the economy of the future and the demands of a democratic republic.

  At the outset of my term as governor, my perspectives were shaped by the writings and studies by education experts, by discussions with teachers, principals, parents, and students, and by my study of statewide data on student achievement that was mined, collected, and carefully analyzed. What I learned was in large measure confirmed by data collected at the national and international levels, but even so, I did my best not to close the door entirely on alternative views.

  When it comes to the question of class size, there was and still remains a near-consensus among the general public that the smaller the class, the better the education the student will receive—a view that’s also widely promoted by teachers’ unions and a number of education experts. Parents especially love the idea of smaller class sizes.

  The data in Massachusetts told a different and surprising story. Because the state had a long history of testing its students’ math and verbal skills, we were able to determine the average education score for students in nearly all of our 351 cities and towns. We then matched a municipality’s test scores with its average class size, expecting to see what common sense told us: that towns with smaller class sizes would evince higher average student scores.

  The data revealed that there was no relationship between class
size and the performance of students. None. Cambridge, the city with the smallest class size, ranked in the bottom 10 percent in student achievement, for example, and its average classes had just half the number of students as the state’s largest classes.

  The data at the national level told the same story. When the average class size across the nation had been reduced to its smallest level in history, the performance of America’s students had failed to appreciably improve. It goes without saying that the data doesn’t endorse unlimited class sizes—a class full of a hundred first graders would be unimaginable, of course. But within the range of most school systems nationwide, class size has very little impact.

  Class Size and Student Performance, 2005

  (dots represent Massachusetts school districts)

  McKinsey & Company analyzed a total of 112 studies evaluating the effect of class size on student achievement, fully 103 of which found no relationship whatsoever or a negative one. Only nine studies found a positive relationship, and in none of these was the positive relationship statistically significant.

  Internationally, some nations whose students far outperform our own go to school in much more packed classrooms than ours. South Korea’s student-teacher ratio, for instance, is thirty to one—almost twice ours at sixteen to one and well above the seventeen-to-one average of OECD nations.

  Given the very persuasive data, why do politicians continue to promote and fund the massive investment required to reduce class size? To a certain degree, they are playing to the pervasive public perception that smaller classes mean better education. Politicians may also wish to curry favor with teachers’ unions. Smaller classes mean more teachers, more union dues, and more power, so teachers’ unions are almost always supportive of the idea, claiming that small classes are an educational reform they can support. Embracing such a nonreform reform also spares many the hard choices involved in making real productive change in our classrooms.