Bushwhacked_ Life in George W. Bush's America Large Print - Molly Ivins [38]
The father of education reform in Texas was no Horace Mann or John Dewey devotee. Democrats controlled Texas in 1983 when H. Ross Perot was summoned to Austin and asked to make our schools right. Perot was a quirky, data-hustling billionaire from Dallas, ordering his own hired commandos into Iran to get his employees out of trouble. He hadn’t developed into the endearing caricature who ran for president in 1992. In his reform effort he did some real good. But his big goal, which he never achieved because he got into a fight with the state’s football coaches (always a bad idea in Texas) was to link teacher pay to student performance. That bit of bad policy will also come later—after we field-test it in Texas.
The Perot-led outbreak of reform in Texas, which did do some good by raising standards, was driven by the business community’s demand for a basic level of competence in workers. Big bidness was tired of waiting for the public schools to provide it. They wanted results, even though they weren’t willing to pay for them. So they began to push for standards. If you buy the big-business plan—and a lot of people do—then you buy into the standards movement.
Our current crop of CEOs is not nearly as much fun in part because they’re not charming Texcentrics like Perot. They’re all business, guys like IBM chairman Lou Gerstner, who wrote Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America’s Public Schools. They believe teaching children is like running a business. You have inputs (the dollars you spend on public education) and outputs (test scores). If the test scores are high enough, graduates are ready for jobs in the low end of the labor market. Turn out enough kids with basic literacy and number skills, and the nation is positioned to compete in the global market.
Kids are “human capital,” parents are “customers,” and teachers are “sellers in a marketplace.” The idea is to set up strategic partnerships that involve market penetration in schools. Education is all about business. When Bush invited a group of education leaders to the White House on his first day in office, the guest list read like a Fortune 500 CEO’s Rolodex. It was an important symbolic moment that not only said, “Education First!” but also said, “We Mean Business!”
To be fair, Dubya Bush has made education his issue; he’s passionate, as he would say. He ran on it. Made countless speeches about it. His and Rove’s favorite photo op is Bush reading to a circle of small, preferably minority children. He was sitting in front of a classroom in the Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Florida when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center.
Even if the policy experts he brought to the White House looked like the boys from the Bohemian Grove, at least Bush convened an education meeting on day one of his administration. Other than Saddam Hussein and tax cuts for the rich, education reform is the only policy initiative that interests him. But he believes public education is too important to leave in the hands of principals, teachers, school administrators, and local, democratic institutions like school boards.
Read the Business Roundtable position paper The Nation turned up, full of warnings that “voices of opposition [to standardized testing] would emanate from parents and teachers.” The “leadership and credibility of the business community is needed,” say the Roundtablers, to make standardized testing standard practice in public education.
There’s grassroots democratic participation in public schools for you.
AWARE THAT HIS SECRETARY of education was an unlikely candidate to explain education policy to Congress, much less get a bill passed, Bush enlisted Sandy Kress, an attorney who had served on the Dallas school board. “[Education secretary] Rod Paige was never a player,” said a Senate staffer about the