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As President, Bush would take the Texas reforms national, and so actually
accomplish something, instead of shillyshallying around, the way the last few
Presidents had (including his father, who declared himself the "education
President" but didn't pass any major legislation). Kress wrote in the notebook
"No magic bullets. No press events every three or four months to announce a few
new federal education programs to show he 'cares' about education. No
'accountability proposals' without accountability. Just an experienced, steady,
capable, and ongoing effort to match the quality and, even more, the
effectiveness of the federal effort to the noble cause it serves."
In a little over a month, Congress will go on its August recess, which means
that the part of a new Presidency in which it is easiest to make dramatic
changes will be over. During his opening run, Bush will have passed two major
initiatives, the tax cut and education reform. The tax cut, in a sense, is a
negative achievement: a diminution in government revenues that will lead to a
diminution in government action. The education bill is affirmative. It will
directly affect the lives of tens of millions of people -- soon. Especially now
that the Republicans have lost their Senate majority, education is likely to be
the first and the last of the big Bush programs.
Sandy Kress's notebook lays out the essentials of the Texas education reform.
The state adopted standards -- sets of basic knowledge and skills that all
students in public school are supposed to master -- and then wrote tests based
on those standards. Students in most grades were tested every year. The
material on the tests fell well within the bounds of basic, non-tricky stuff
that you'd want your kids to know. (For example, a question on a fifth-grade
math test shows a rectangular flag, gives the measurements of the sides, and
asks what the perimeter is.) The scores were published, and sent to parents,
and used to rate the performance of schools. What's more, every school was
rated not just on the performance of its student body as a whole but also on
the performance of its African-American and Latino and poor students
specifically. ("Disaggregation' is the jargon for this.) If a school didn't
raise the test scores of its black students, it was put into receivership: new
curriculum, new teachers, new principal. To protect itself from the temptation
of writing meaningless tests that everybody would pass, Texas also used an
independent national test as a benchmark. And, sure enough, since the system
was put in place, the performance of Texas students, including minority
students, has risen steadily, on both the state tests and, in most subjects, on
the national one, too. This was what lay behind Bush's education slogans, the
promise to "leave no child behind" and to eschew "the soft bigotry of low
expectations." (It's also what gave substance to his broader slogan,
"compassionate conservatism.") Unlike previous Presidents, he would deliver a
real education for the worst-off American kids.
Education was the issue that made Bush President. The movement for educational
standards has been a growing force in American politics for the better part of
two decades. The standards movement started in the South and wound up
propelling several Southern governors, including Bill Clinton and Bush, into
national politics. (Bush was not the first standards-embracing governor of
Texas; the basic system was enacted under his Democratic predecessor, Ann
Richards.) The South, as America's Third World, was the first part of the
country to realize that economic development requires better public schools.
But by the end of the century, just about every state's governor had come
around, and had launched a standards program. The politics of the standards
movement are especially propitious for Republicans, because at least some of
their interest groups are much more enthusiastic about it than the Democrats'
interest groups are. Businesses see educational standards as a way to insure a
supply of better workers. Teachers' unions and minority organizations worry
that all the new tests (tests are an inevitable part of every standards regime)
will be used to declare black and brown kids, and their teachers, to be subpar.
So standards present Republicans with an opportunity to steal middle-class
suburban voters -- who overwhelmingly send their kids to public school and who
think of a good education as the best way to guarantee their economic future --
from the Democrats.
Standards were also a way for Bush to promote the Republican view of life, in
which discipline and toughness produce better results than misty-eyed
understanding. Liberals always accuse conservatives of being uncaring; Bush was
saying, in effect, I'll show you who's uncaring: liberals think they're giving
poor kids a progressive education and protecting them from the harsh negative
judgment of standardized tests, but they're actually consigning them to poverty
by sending them out into the world not knowing how to read or figure. Much of
what deep-seated pain and cynicism there is in American life comes from the
persistence of low academic performance by minority students, despite decades
of efforts to do something about it. Bush would claim that Texas was working on
a solution to the problem.
During the Presidential campaign, Al Gore usually spoke about education in a
strained, careful voice, obviously trying to find a way to support standards
without alienating his constituency. One of Bush's cleanest scores in the
debates came when he said, repeatedly, that he was going to test students every
year in reading and math, and Gore didn't say whether he thought that was a
good idea. In the early stages of the Presidential campaign, I watched Gore, in
Dallas, make a speech on education to a group of African-American mayors, in
which he tried, without much evident conviction, to cast Bush's record on
education in a bad light. Sandy Kress was there to run an after-the-speech spin
room for the Bush campaign, which entailed publicly opposing the Presidential
candidate of his own party. The intense loyalty of Bush's close aides can be
startling -- is there something there that they see and we don't, or do we see
Bush more clearly from a distance than they do up close? In one of my
conversations with Kress, when he was talking about an early Bush maneuver on
behalf of the bill -- nothing terribly unusual, just chatting up some members
of Congress -- a wave of emotion came over him and, with a murmured apology, he
started to cry.
With the fervor of true believers, Kress and his partner in the White House,
Margaret La Montagne, the head of domestic policy and formerly Bush's education
adviser in Austin, wanted two things: education reform on the Texas model and a
big win for their boss. They've got the big win -- the most significant piece
of federal education legislation since at least 1965. But whether they've also
achieved education reform of the kind they got in Texas is not at all certain.
A great deal depends on what Bush does this month, when nobody's looking.
On the day after the House of Representatives passed the education bill, by a
vote of 384 to 45, I went to see George Miller, of California, the ranking
Democrat on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. Having spent
half a year covering the Bush Administration, I found it jarring to enter what
was obviously the lair of a liberal. There were no portraits of Friedrich von
Hayek or Winston Churchill on the walls; instead, there were books by Jonathan
Kozol, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Randall Robinson, posters commemorating the
Mondale-Ferraro campaign and the struggle against the Contras, an old
summer-camp bunk pressed into service as a coffee table. Miller is a big,
muscular guy with a bristly white mustache. He was wearing a tie but no jacket,
and his sleeves were rolled up to reveal giant forearms. He looked like the
high-school history teacher who also coached the football team, and then got
promoted to principal.
Several years ago, Miller went into what he calls "a slow burn" about
educational standards and began pushing them in the House, with no success. He
thought Bill Clinton had lost his old gubernatorial fire on standards during
his Presidency, as he came to rely more heavily on the support of the
traditional Democratic interest-groups. In 1994, Miller proposed an amendment
to an education bill that would have required teachers to have been certified
in the subject they teach. It failed by a vote of 424 to 1, and Miller's office
had to shut down its switchboard for three days; an orchestrated political
telemarketing campaign by homeschoolers had flooded it with calls. In 1999,
Miller wrote a bill proposing a major federal standards-and-teacher-quality
program, but it never became law.
Last December, Bush held a meeting on education at the Texas governor's
mansion, in Austin. "The New York Times asked somebody how come I wasn't
invited," Miller told me. "So I got invited. It was a lunch. Everybody spoke
about what they thought was possible. I spoke at the end. I said, 'I've been at
this for twenty-six years. I went to Washington at twenty-nine.' Bush said,
'Hell, you should have met me at twenty-nine!' I said there's a reason
for the federal role in education: to equalize the funding. You have to put in
more money. You can't do it without money.
"We hit it off. We hit it off very well. We sat next to each other. He has" --
Miller chuckled helplessly -- "a very relaxed manner. I was sitting next
to him, and he was giving me a running commentary on what people were saying."
By the end of the meeting, Miller had acquired his official George W. Bush
nickname, Big George, and Bush had acquired an important ally.
Around this point in our conversation, the phone in Miller's office beeped.
Miller's press secretary picked it up. "The President is on the phone," he
said. Miller went into a small anteroom to take the call. Through the closed
door, I could hear, periodically, his low, rumbling chuckle. After a few
minutes, he came out with a big smile on his face. "Well!" he said. "He was
nice enough to congratulate us for a good job."
Bush's relationship with Miller is a relatively rare example of a way of
operating that was supposed to characterize his Presidency. He'd reach out to
Democrats, he'd give them responsibility and credit, he'd compromise. Miller
and the Republican chairman of his committee, John Boehner, of Ohio, were
remarkably effective in steering the education bill through the House. Boehner
had to defy the sentiment of his own party in dropping a provision that would
have created federal education vouchers; Miller had to go against his party in
keeping the feature that was most important to Bush, yearly testing. Still,
they got the bill passed by a huge margin.
The Senate was trickier. In a departure from the usual protocol, the White
House did not treat the chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions
Committee, James Jeffords, of Vermont, as the person in charge of the bill; his
switching parties surely has something to do with the fact that he was not
given control over the most important piece of legislation ever to move through
the committee during his tenure as chairman. Instead, the White House treated a
whole bunch of senators -- including Ted Kennedy, of Massachusetts; Judd Gregg,
of New Hampshire; Joseph Lieberman, of Connecticut; and Evan Bayh, of Indiana
-- as quasi-managers of the bill, with the result that all of them are
bursting with parental pride, in amounts totalling more than a hundred per
cent, and that the bill didn't move along as quickly as it had in the House.
The last thing the White House wanted was a long, slow period of national
debate in which the many interest groups involved in education could marshal
lobbying campaigns. That was what had killed the equivalent initiative in the
Clinton Administration, health-care reform. On the education bill, neither the
House nor the Senate even held hearings. Still, in early spring, criticism of
the bill began to appear, and to hold things up in the Senate. The most
significant opposition from the White House's perspective came from a group of
Republican governors led by John Engler, of Michigan, who were worried that the
bill would declare too many of the schools in their states to be falling below
standards, and that they would be blamed for it.
As originally written, the bill would be brutal on schools that had low test
scores. Every school would have just ten years to bring up to standards every
subgroup, and the federal government would begin to require corrective action
-- new curriculum, new staff -- after three years if it didn't. (Texas law
stipulates that students with unacceptably low scores not get promoted or
graduate; in the federal bill, there are no consequences of bad scores for
students, only for schools.) I went to see Engler not long ago, during one of
his visits to Washington. "I think there will be tremendous pressure on
schools," he told me. "The bill said, All right, if only fifty per cent can do
math, in ten years it has to be a hundred per cent. That's five per cent better
a year. If it was only twenty per cent who could do math, then they'd have to
gain eight per cent a year. These are rates of annual progress heretofore
unknown. Two things happen. One, you dumb the test down. Two, every school,
even good schools, gets labelled non-performing. So when this language emerged,
drafted by the gnomes in the Congressional Research Service, or wherever they
are, we said, 'Folks, we're not happy with what you've written."' Engler's
cause got a boost when Jeffords's staff director, Mark Powden, distributed a
series of charts showing that the overwhelming majority of schools in several
states -- including Bush's home state, Texas, and Lieberman's home state,
Connecticut -- would be labelled low-performing under the bill.
Here is an odd thing about Washington. The education bill is hardly an arcane
piece of legislation, like revisions in the capital-equipment-depreciation
schedules or intercontinental-ballistic missile basing. Ninety per cent of the
schoolchildren in America are going to take the tests it requires. And yet,
when it comes down to the crucial point in the negotiations, the community of
people who know and care about what's going on with a bill like this is quite
small -- intimate, really. That's because Washington's master narrative -- what
gets talked about at parties and on television public-affairs shows -- has to
be kept simpler than any bill of this importance can ever be. To the extent
that there was public discussion of the education bill outside the trade press,
it was mainly about whether vouchers would be a part of it. The cognoscenti
knew that vouchers had been dead from the beginning. Bush didn't push hard for
them when he was governor of Texas, and he hinted broadly as early as the
post-election meeting in Austin, and several times thereafter, that they were a
weak preference for him. What he cared about, what the bill had to have, was
testing for every student every year. Nonetheless, "Will there be vouchers?"
was the official Washington question about the bill through the winter and
spring.
Part of the fun of belonging to the cognoscenti is knowing what the real drama
is. In late April and early May, the education insiders knew that the White
House was getting hammered by the governors on the "A.Y.P. formula" (A.Y.P.
stands for "adequate yearly progress"), and that was what everybody was
E-mailing and voice-mailing everybody else about. One Saturday afternoon, word
spread instantaneously within this group (while the world slumbered on): Sandy
Kress had just rewritten the A.Y.P. formula.
Kress softened the strict Texas-style requirement -- which sailed right through
the House -- that schools would be judged not on their over-all performance but
on the progress made by each individual subgroup, including poor and black and
Latino students. As the bill was originally written, if you taught your white
kids algebra successfully but not your Mexican-American kids, the government
would come and get you. What Kress did was to create a new measure of adequate
yearly progress, in which every group would have to advance one per cent a
year, but the over-all progress of the school would be gauged by a new
statistic that would blend the groups' results into a single number. He
retreated, in other words, from the majestic moral simplicity of the Texas
system.
The Senate began to debate the bill. Then, a few weeks later, word spread
again: at a meeting with groups that had been suspicious of the bill, such as
the teachers' unions, Kress and the participants had mused together over the
possibility of softening the A.Y.P. formula even further. He even discussed the
idea of using a non-race-specific requirement that every school raise the
performance of the bottom quarter of its students every year, and dropping the
directive that all students be proficient by a particular date. In that case,
"the soft bigotry of low expectations," to the extent that the phrase is meant
to have a racial connotation, would live to see another day.
I asked Kress about all this, and it was clear that he'd got caught up in the
classic reformer's dilemma of trying to find a position that was neither so
workable as to be impure nor so pure as to be unworkable. It sounded as if he
was no longer at all comfortable with the House version of the bill, but he
called the language he'd written into the Senate bill "Rube Goldbergesque," and
didn't seem comfortable with that, either. He was trying to find a way to make
sure that the law would label only a small percentage of schools
non-performing. "I worry about these arbitrary systems," he said. "If we create
a system where some schools are very likely to fail, what teachers will go
there? What principals? What about a school that's at forty per cent of
proficiency and has to gain six per cent a year? Do you go there? You might
say, 'I can get three per cent a year.' We reward those schools! To say that
we're going to call it a failure if you fail for African-American kids for one
year, that we're going to put a big ol' badge on you -- we just don't think
that's the right way to go."
Kress did, however, vigorously insist that the White House will push as hard as
it can for a law that requires progress by every subgroup every year, rather
than one that allows schools to hide the low performance of their poor and
minority students behind over-all averages. "We will not -- we have been
blood-committed to disaggregated data," he said. "Not only producing it, but
using it. That's at the core of the President's views -- lift all groups
above the bar. We're never backing off of that. We will never
side with a proposal that allows ranking based on how the whole student
body is doing." So his marker is down.
The education bill now goes to conference, where the differences between the
versions the House and the Senate passed will be resolved. Then both houses
will pass identical versions and Bush will sign it into law. At the moment, two
things are certain: Bush will have passed an important bill, and there will be
a lot of new, federally required testing of American schoolchildren. (The
commercial test-publishing industry, which will be called upon to produce many
of these tests, is the one indisputable winner the bill has produced thus far.)
Whatever else it accomplishes, the bill will be significant for substantially
increasing federal control over what has long been the developed world's most
localized education system.
So far, though, headlines about the bill, when they appear at all, tend to be
along the lines of "HOUSE PASSES
MAJOR OVERHAUL OF SCHOOLS." As soon as people figure out what the bill does,
there will be caterwauling throughout the land. Teachers and principals will
complain about having to submit their students to torturous drills, instead of
true learning, to bring their scores up. Poor and minority districts will get
the lowest scores and will complain that they're being anathematized. Rich
districts will complain that teachers are "teaching to the test," that their
children's education is being dumbed down. All of this has been going on at the
state level ever since the standards movement got rolling, and now it will go
on nationally.
But Bush is right that you can't figure out whether schools are doing a good
job unless you have some way of measuring how much their students are learning.
Go on the Web and read a Texas Assessment of Academic Skills test -- are you
really comfortable with kids' not knowing that material? Even in adequately
funded schools with small class sizes, it isn't safe to assume, with no proof,
that the students are learning. A guarantee by the national government of a
decent education for every child is a noble cause, and so is the idea that all
Americans will acquire a common body of skills and knowledge as they come of
age. (Memo to Scarsdale, New York, where parents have been boycotting state
tests: Your kids should learn that stuff, too, after which they can go back to
being little geniuses.) Bush isn't inclined to put these tasks directly into
the hands of the federal government, and even if he were it would be
politically impossible right now. He has to rely on states and local districts,
which have an immense capacity for screwing up. That is why the guidelines the
federal government gives them now are so important.
How will Bush's education bill turn out? There are a number of ways it could
turn out badly. The states could be free to give local districts so much
latitude to pick tests that it would be impossible to tell whether students are
really learning. Instead of a single trustworthy national benchmark to check
against the use of junk tests, there could be several different benchmarks.
Instead of using tests that measure mastery of curriculum, schools could choose
vaguer, "norm-referenced" tests that rate students in comparison with other
students rather than on how much they know. (These tests, when they are made
consequential, lead to a great deal of non-curricular test-prepping.) The
Administration could fail to commit enough money to pay for good tests, and to
make the worst schools better. The adequate-yearly-progress formula could get
so watered down that genuinely low-performing schools wouldn't be identified as
such. Schools could duck the obligation to improve the education of their poor
and minority students by hiding their performance beneath averages. And the
list of pitfalls goes on. A national tidal wave of lousy tests, sloppily
administered and scored, could lead to a wholesale revolt against educational
standards, and a return to the old business of the liberals wanting more money
and the conservatives wanting vouchers.
Much of this will be settled in conference, and how it will be settled will
depend on what the President pushes for and how hard. The whole world will not
be watching. The whole world will be too confused to follow the action.
The next month will be a pure test of Bush's level of energy, commitment,
attention to detail, political skill, and courage on the issue that took him to
the White House and that he cares about most. I asked Margaret La Montagne if
she would have taken the job of chief of domestic policy in the White House,
which has entailed spending weeks away from her children for nearly half a
year, if Bush had told her that he wasn't going to push for the education bill.
"Probably not," she said. "It's what I came here to do. It's what he
came here to do." If Bush came to Washington to put the Texas-standards
system into place, he has not yet done so, because of the weakening of the bill
in Congress. But he will have another chance this month in the conference.
During my meeting with George Miller, once he had come down from the high of
his Presidential phone call, we got onto the subject of the conference, and he
sounded worried. "It's already starting to slide away," he said. "A lot of the
governors -- well, nobody really wants to be accountable. It's
select-a-test. Kabosh, kaboo, kabee -- it's like talking to the fucking Marx
Brothers! It's up to the President of the United States. He's the only one who
can rescue it now."
I asked Miller if he'd told Bush that. "Have I told him? No. Will I? Yes. It's
his friends the governors who are leading the charge. You either have a tight
system or a loose system, which works really harshly against poor and minority
students. Averages, composites -- how can you ever figure out what's going on?
It's the euphemisms that kill you in this business. Language is crucial. Words
become important. What side Bush comes down on will determine the outcome. And
so far we don't know how he comes down." Miller shook his head. "The President
has a lot at risk. If it comes out squishy, it'll become apparent."
What if it comes out squishy and nobody notices, I asked. "Oh, I'll notice," he
said. "You have a Republican President coming to Washington, saying, 'I want to
target the poorest schools and get measurable results.' For it to work out now,
he cannot go squishy. That's the trap Bill Clinton fell into. You either repeat
history or you change history."
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