The Disloyal Opposition
(Page 4 of 4)
For most of the second half of the century, the new-schoolers have had the upper hand in educational circles. They gave us open classrooms, new math, whole-language reading, emphasis on self-esteem, and other fads, none of which produced results. The counterrevolution began in 1983 with the publication of a study by the National Commission on Educational Excellence that confirmed what was already obvious: Educational achievement was “being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people.” What’s more, we had some very wrongheaded ideas about how to measure the quality of education: We looked at what went into the educational system (expenditures per pupil, teachers’ salaries, class size, equity between rich and poor school districts) instead of results (what children actually learned). The real antidote to low achievement, the argument goes, is to set high standards about what students are expected to know and hold schools accountable for meeting them, using standardized tests like the TAAS to measure student performance. This idea has never been fully accepted by many educators, but business leaders and state-level politicians nationwide—among them George W. Bush—have embraced it. The old-schoolers had won. But the new-schoolers got to write the standards.
What happened in Texas followed the pattern of many other states that tried a results-based approach: The first draft of the TEKS, produced by teams that included educators, business representatives, and parents, came up with standards that were too vague to measure—what Bush called “mushy.” For example, the spelling requirement for students in the early grades was not to spell correctly but to write “with increasingly accurate spelling.” When do they have to learn how to spell? The answer was never. In grades nine through twelve, the standard was: “spells with increasing accuracy.” Nor was correct grammar mandated, only that a high school student “attends to grammar and usage in writing.” Writing standards included using the graphs and charts that new-schoolers adore and emphasized writing as a way to improve self-esteem: “The student uses writing as a tool for reflection and personal growth.”
The Double R’s, as Ballard put it to a group of supporters, “pitched a fit.” Moses, who had become commissioner after the TEKS process was well under way, went back to the drawing board. The Double R’s could not have been in a better position. Moses and Bush wanted fifteen votes for the TEKs, a unanimous endorsement. At that moment, everything was on the table. They could have gotten almost anything they wanted, short of an endorsement of creationism. For once they were on the same side as the governor. No one in the process had more leverage. They asked for a role for a member of the Eagle Forum. Moses put a Forum representative on the reading team. They asked a nationally known conservative education expert to review the work of the teams. Moses used several. They told Moses that some of the teams had too many educational establishment types. he added more parents. After the second draft came out in the fall of 1996, Moses took changes from individual board members. But they weren’t satisfied; as an anonymous critic of the Double R’s told a reporter: “These people cannot take yes for an answer.” In a caricature of the kinds of stupid mistakes that fringe groups make in politics, they squandered their leverage by focusing not on how to make the final version of the TEKs better, but on how the first draft got to be so bad. Their conclusion: It was a conspiracy (although they are careful never to use the c-word), and Hillary Clinton and friends were behind it.
Like any conspiracy theory, this one had anchors in reality. Early in 1997, the Double R’s revealed what they had uncovered, once for the state board and again on a videotape that was distributed to their religious right constituency. It is a long and tortuous story, but this much is undisputed: at the beginning of the TEKS process, long before Mike Moses became commissioner, the Texas Education Agency consulted with, received training from, had myriad other kinds of contacts with, and became a partner in the New Standards Project, a Washington D.C.—based consortium managed in part by the nonprofit National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) to raise standards nationally. Now, let’s go forward to the 1997 videotape, where Donna Ballard is talking to a packed room of parents at an nondenominational church in Fort Worth. With her shoulder-length blond hair and breezy way of talking, she is bursting with charisma. “Who is NCEE?” she says. “We asked that question. Who heads up that board? That led us to the most interesting information. The person who is the executive director is Marc Tucker, and Marc Tucker is very close friends with an individual by the name of Ira Magaziner and Hillary Clinton. You see, Ira Magaziner and Hillary are the ones who designed the universal health care plan, and Marc Tucker and Ira and Hillary are the ones who designed the radical restructuring of education in the United States. . . . Basically, the idea is similar to the German model and the Soviet model of combining the workplace and the schoolhouse under government control.”
What is there to say? Hasie defended the TEKS process, Will Davis wanted to know what was wrong with the TEKS, and Moses put out a 64-point memo addressing the elements of the conspiracy theory. The only effect of the presentation by the Double R’s was to fatally damage their own ability to affect the TEKS. For a short time Moses continued to make changes that the Double R’s requested, still hoping for a unanimous vote. Instead, they went off on another tangent, supporting a language arts curriculum prepared by teachers working on their own and called the Texas Alternative Document. The TAD was an impressive production, but no public board is going to throw aside three years of work involving thousands of citizens to adopt something that came in over the transom. Moses decided it was time to move on. “I became very frustrated that no matter how many changes we made, we never got to a point where those members would support the document,” he says, “and I related that to the governor.”
When the TEKS finally came up for the long-awaited vote in July, Christie brought a registered parliamentarian to the board meeting, at Moses’ suggestion, in case the Double R’s tried to delay the vote. Christie got a ruling that allowed him to trump Robert’s Rules of Order and cut off debate over amendments. The interplay was savage; one of the Double R’s would propose a change, the same two Democrats would promptly move to table and second the motion, and the amendment would be tabled. Not once did the Double R’s get more than their own five votes. When Christie tired of the game, he cut off the amendments on the grounds that they were dilatory. It was a public shunning.
FOUR YEARS OF FIGHTING HAVE INFLICTED heavy casualties on the board. Christie, Hasie, and Stevenson will not be back next year; the last two did not seek reelection, and Christie, his term as chairman having expired, is expected to step down to allow Bush to name his successor. It is a sure bet that the new member will not be a Double R. Supporters of Moses fear that he will not stick around to have indignity heaped upon him. In a way Ballard was a casualty too; her attacks on Bush while a board member caused many of his loyalists in West Texas to openly oppose her campaign to return to the board.
The list of the wounded grows longer. The Double R’s are so suspicious, so negative, so intransigent, and so politically inept that they have ostracized themselves—not just from rest of the board but from the political mainstream. Even if they do get a majority, the Legislature will restrict the board’s powers or change it from elected to appointed before lawmakers allow the reforms that they enacted to be scuttled.
Finally, at the top of the casualty list, is the public schools. Often the Double R’s are right about the little picture. Education bureaucrats do need reining in. The curriculum does need higher standards. The TAAS test does have many deficiencies. The federal government does have to be prevented from taking over education. Excessive emphasis on career programs will lead to dumbing down. But they are wrong about the big picture. The public schools need to be improved, but they also deserve to be defended. The curriculum that the Double R’s fought so hard to defeat has been rated by the Fordham Foundation, an old-school, high-standards organization, as one of the top three in the country. Even Offutt concedes that the standards improved, in his estimation, from an F to a still-unacceptable B; perhaps, with a little less worry about Hillary Clinton and a little more fence mending, the Double R’s could have raised them to an A. Texas (along with North Carolina) has posted the greatest gains in test scores in the country, thanks to the TAAS test that the Double R’s want to abolish. Even the career programs that they warn against have some merit, as long as they are voluntary. The public schools, after all, are designed to produce good citizens who can hold a job and function in the adult world, not a nation of intellectuals. But the Double R’s will never make a difference until they learn to regard every defect as fixable—not fatal.
