The Disloyal Opposition
(Page 3 of 4)
Under the new law, the board’s authority over textbooks was limited to compiling lists of books that were factually accurate and covered at least half of the curriculum that Texas students were expected to learn. (Books that covered all of the curriculum made a preferred list.) When Ratliff sent the board a letter explaining that it could no longer influence the content of textbooks, the reaction of the Double R’s was denial. “Senator Ratliff is just one man of many,” Stevenson said. Ballard said that she did not consider herself bound by Ratliff’s description of the law’s intent. Christie pointed out the obvious: that the board was obligated to follow the law and would be unwise to thumb its nose at the Legislature. For this and for his support of Goals 2000, the Double R’s came to view Christie as an adversary. And Ratliff and other influential legislators viewed the Double R’s the same way.
One can see in these two fights the dilemma that every ideological movement faces following electoral success. Does it move away from its constituency to achieve some influence, or does it forgo influence to stick close to its political base? The Double R’s chose the latter, carrying on the fight over Goals 2000 even after their fears should have been allayed and over textbooks after a change in the law should have convinced them that they had no legal ground to stand on.
JACK CHRISTIE DOESN’T LIKE THE DESIGNATION of Offutt and his followers as part of the religious right. “I’m a Christian,” he told me. “I’m a conservative. When you call them the ‘religious right,’ you suggest that anyone who doesn’t agree with them isn’t religious or on the right. I went to hear Ralph Reed [the former head of the Christian Coalition] speak once, and I kept nudging my wife, ‘I’m for that. I’m for that.’ This isn’t about religion. This is about power.”
Before the Double R’s came along, the typical state board member had some experience in education, either as an employee or as a school board member. Christie, a chiropractor by profession, followed this traditional path, serving on the Spring Branch school board and seeing the district change from mostly white to 52 percent minority. “We still have the best test scores in Harris County,” he told me proudly one day in his West Houston office. He is a tall, gangly man who gets excited when he talks about education. “It should be the state’s highest priority,” he said. “I remember that when I went on the school board in 1978, prisons and roads were the state’s top priority. Now it truly is education. The Russians aren’t coming and the ozone layer is going to be all right, so let’s put schools first.
“We had one school where 92 percent of the students had free and reduced lunch,” he continued. “It had the worst problems you could imagine: truancy, vandalism, eight people showing up for PTA. We got a new principal who always had a coffee pot going and put a washer and dryer in the school, and pretty soon parents were strolling their kids through the building. In two years so many parents showed up for PTA that they had to have two meetings.” As he went on about teachers hauling buckets of water to a family whose service had been shut off, I realized just how wide was the gap between Offutt, the man of belief, and Christie, the man of experience.
Christie won his state board position in 1990, when the Democrats still had a majority. “I really miss the old days,” he sighed. “They were beautiful. If I didn’t vote with Monte [Hasie], we’d laugh and go on. I just enjoyed everybody. It was just like any public service position I’d ever been in: Tell me what you offer for the public; don’t tear down other people.”
In 1994 Bush was elected, and he named Christie chairman. One of Christie’s first acts was to name Offutt and Ballard chairs of two of the board’s three committees. That fed speculation that Christie was aligning himself with the Double R’s—but it didn’t last long. “I saw a little signal from Offutt’s committee when he wanted to get rid of our long-term goal, ‘All children can learn,’” Christie said. “We admit defeat if we don’t believe that. But he wanted to say, ‘All children must be presented the opportunity to learn.’ That’s a big philosophical change. It gives us an excuse not to teach lazy, economically deprived, or troubled kids. Good teachers don’t give up on kids. By April I’m being researched by a political consulting firm so that someone can run against me. Then they say that Goals 2000 is designed to let Bill and Hillary take over public schools. You and I know that’s a crock. The icing on the cake of Goals 2000 is that local districts can apply for waivers of federal regulations. We led the nation in waivers.”
Christie had to leave; the patients were stacking up. As I got up, I noticed his honorable discharge certificate from the army that was framed on a wall. “They’ll have to give you another one for this war,” I said. Christie broke into an announcer’s voice: “The State Board of Education today honored retiring chairman Jack Christie. The vote was ten to five.”
THE BREACH BETWEEN CHRISTIE AND the Double R’s ended any possibility that a unified Republican majority would set the agenda for the board. But the 1996 elections swelled the faction’s ranks by two more members, David Bradley of Beaumont and Richard Neill of Fort Worth, giving them six of the fifteen slots as the board undertook its most important task: the rewriting of the curriculum, which is a statement of what every student in Texas is expected to learn in every academic subject. This should have been their best moment, when their insistence on high standards would prove to be a positive force for education in Texas.
Offutt in particular is attuned to curriculum issues (as he demonstrated with his analysis of the end-of-course U.S. history test). He understands that underneath such issues as whether reading should be taught through phonics and whether students should be required to memorize dates and names lie some profound philosophical differences about how children should be educated. These differences have nothing whatsoever to do with religion. They have everything to do with what children learn. He had won some earlier victories in 1995 by reintroducing spelling books and preventing grammar books from being phased out—two successes that he uses to refute charges that he is just against everything. Yet before the curriculum fight was over, Offutt and the Double R’s would go horribly astray.
The new curriculum was called TEKS, an acronym for Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills. Between those last two words—“knowledge” and “skills”—is a gulf that separates two competing philosophies of how students should be taught. What might be called the old-school approach is that every student needs to acquire a body of knowledge: spelling, grammar, dates, places, events, computations, familiar literature, basic scientific laws, and the workings of democracy and government. The new-school approach is that students should have skills that they can take with them into the workplace: how to read a graph or a chart, how to use a calculator, how to read a simple paragraph. The old-school approach demands that students know the capital of Vermont; the new-school approach wants them to be able to find Montpelier on a map. To old-schoolers, the new-school approach is nothing more than dumbing down. To the new-schoolers, the old-school approach is boring, requires rote memorization, emphasizes rules rather than critical thinking, and has the consequence that many students hate school, find it irrelevant, suffer a loss of self-esteem, and eventually drop out. The U.S. history test that Offutt gave me is a new-school test. It measures the ability to read a map, interpret a cartoon, or comprehend a paragraph, not historical knowledge.
