Building a Competitive Education Industry
A Weekly Column by Myron Lieberman

As a result of President Bush's strong support for H.R.1, the conservatives for whom education reform was a high priority are demoralized. After criticizing the Democrats for "throwing money at the problem," they find themselves with a Republican president who didn't just throw money at education; he shoveled federal funds into K-12 educational programs that have never led to improvement in the past and never will in the future. Example: H.R. 1 provides $11.5 billion for Title I programs to raise achievement levels in reading in 2002 and the amount rises annually to peak at $17.2 billion in 2006. The Senate authorized an 11.5 percent increase, and automatic 3.5 percent increases after that - all for a program that has been in existence since 1965 without effectuating any sustainable improvement in its objectives. At the same time, the president abandoned the legislative objectives of the conservatives; the highly publicized abandonment of a weak school choice provision was only one of several conservative objectives abandoned in the legislation.

Inside the Beltway, the word is that President Bush's real education slogan was "Leave No Democrat Behind." By insisting upon a bipartisan bill, the President gave Senator Ted Kennedy and Representative George Miller of California veto power over the bill, and it appears that these Democratic negotiators delivered big for their clients. Meanwhile, the conservative members of Congress, like Pete Hoekstra of Michigan and Bob Schaffer of Colorado were taken to the woodshed for their opposition to legislation that incorporated virtually every conservative objection to federal educational legislation.

Although I have advocated a competitive education industry for 20 years, I am not alarmed by the President's readiness to drop the educational choice provisions of H.R.1. The notion that we need more "experiments" or "demonstration projects" to show that a competitive education industry would be more effective than a government monopoly is ridiculous. Time after time, when supporters of school choice fail to enact meaningful school choice legislation, their face-saving concession is an "experiment" or "demonstration project" that would only delay meaningful legislation if it were taken seriously. After all, if a project is truly an "experiment," we should await the results before promoting legislation based upon its outcomes. In fact, the teacher unions have latched on to this point by repeatedly asserting that school choice is an "unproven remedy" for our educational ills. And they see no inconsistency in opposing "experiments' with school choice while lobbying for more research. When school choice is the issue, the unions argue that "our children are not be treated like guinea pigs and used for social experimentation."

Consequently, jettisoning school choice from H.R.1 was not a major policy setback although conservatives think it is. President Bush was elected to cut taxes, to be in charge of national security and foreign policy, to straighten out social security and effectuate reform in Medicare. Despite the media hype about education being the "No. 1 priority," the thinking of the Bush administration was rightfully focused on the political implications of H.R. 1. Ever since the Great Society was launched, voters have deemed the Democrats better able to deal with educational problems than the Republicans, and this perception has been heavy baggage for Republican candidates. In order to persuade voters that President Bush is "pro-education" and "bipartisan," the President had to take the lead in supporting legislation that would get rid of this baggage. To achieve this objective, however, the Bush administration must not be perceived as being dragged, kicking and screaming into supporting more federal spending for education. Instead, why not be perceived as the sponsors of it, and get the credit for being "pro-education" and "bipartisan," without having to make any major concessions on the issues on which presidential leadership is essential. The case for adopting this strategy was greatly strengthened by the likelihood that Republican defections would lead to enactment of more federal spending for education, even in the face of presidential opposition to it. Is the strategy working? In a presentation at the Capitol Hill Club on May 15, Presidential advisor Karl Rove asserted that for the first time, public opinion polls showed that voters regarded Republicans as more capable than Democrats of handling our educational problems. Clearly, as far as the Bush administration is concerned, the strategy is working very well and the extreme but hopefully temporary discomfort of the Republican base was a small price to pay for this political outcome.

We shall have to await the election outcomes in 2002 and 2004 to know whether the strategy was successful, but H.R.1 marks the end of any hope for educational reform through federal legislation, unless and until there are viable Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, probably not even then. The upshot is that efforts to achieve educational reform must be state-centered, but the Bush administration seems to lack any ideas on how to facilitate state efforts to achieve meaningful reform. This is evident from its claims about the testing program in H.R.1. Supposedly, by requiring all students to be tested, parents will know whether their children are being left behind and will be motivated to do something about it if they are. At best, this rationale for the testing program in H.R.1 is naïve. There is no need for additional testing to find out who can read and handle simple arithmetic; there are plenty of tests available that will do this. The problem is not the absence of testing; it is the absence of honest reporting by school districts to parents about the educational achievement of their children, and H.R.1 does not address this problem in any way. The question to be asked is why aren't parents and school officials motivated now to support drastic changes in our schools. There are several reasons, but the most important is the fact that as a result of phony report cards, most parents are satisfied with the status quo. More testing will do nothing to remedy the dishonest reporting to parents that underlies their acceptance of the status quo.

In my opinion, the Bush administration could have established an education program that would facilitate meaningful reform by states and local school districts. Such a program need not mention "school choice" or "merit pay" or any of the other items on the conservative wish list. For example, a defensible research program would show that school boards are paying billions every year in salary credit for Mickey Mouse courses, such as travel that supposedly enhances teachers'cultural awareness. It would identify the huge taxpayer subsidies to the teacher unions in various paid leaves of absence to conduct union business. It would document the fact that government statistics on the cost of education omit several substantial costs, hence grossly underestimate the average cost per pupil in average daily attendance. There are dozens of issues like these that could be combined with an outreach program to foster meaningful reform but no such effort seems to be forthcoming. The educational debacle in Washington is demoralizing because the Bush administration has given no sign that it understands what can be done in the absence of legislation to move a conservative agenda at the state and local levels, which is where most of the battles will take place. The teacher unions utilize their enormous national resources to defend the status quo in these battles, but the Bush administration shows no awareness that a similar but highly do-able strategy could achieve conservative goals even in the absence of federal legislation.