Can we educate Republicans: how Republicans can take back the education issue from President Clinton

National Review, June 17, 1996 by Chester E. Finn

How Republicans can take back the education issue from President Clinton.

ADOPTION, welfare, crime, and gas prices aren't the only items on Bill Clinton's list of Republican issues to co-opt this year. He's also playing the education-reform fiddle like a Stradivarius, while Bob Dole, the 104th Congress, and the GOP in general have been unable to make any music on what some surveys say is the top issue on voters' minds.

At the recent education ''summit,'' Clinton was masterly, delivering a speech that Ronald Reagan could happily have given. Far from touting federal education programs and pressing to fatten their budgets, he said next to nothing about Washington. Rather, he saluted the governors and business leaders in the audience as real education reformers. He endorsed higher standards -- and scoffed at the infamous national standards for history and English. He said little about his cherished Goals 2000 program, disingenuously depicting it as a way to ''give greater flexibility to the states . . . and to try to promote reform without defining how any of this should be done.'' He endorsed hard work and accountability for students: ''In the world we're living in today, 'Does it count?' has to mean something, particularly in places where there haven't been any standards for a long time.'' He argued for ''no more social promotions, no more free passes . . . an assessment system with consequences.''

He lauded basic skills, ''begin[ning] with a concrete standard for reading and writing.'' He said technology is fine (this is the Administration that wants to connect every school to the Internet) but ''should be used first to give children the proper grounding in basic skills.''

He urged holding principals accountable for their schools' performance. He even (though a mite gingerly) okayed off-loading bad teachers, saying, ''There ought to be a fair process for removing teachers who aren't competent, but the process also has to be much faster and far less costly than it is.''

Sounding another GOP theme, he declared that fewer dollars should be squandered on school bureaucracy. ''We cannot ask the American people to spend more on education until we do a better job with the money we've got now.'' Within limits, he even welcomed school choice. Not vouchers, mind you, but ''more options for parents,'' charter schools, and schools that ''stay open only if they do a good job within the public-school system.''

He spoke solemnly of schools free from violence and drugs, drawing applause when he observed that ''This entire discussion . . . is completely academic unless there is a safe and a disciplined and a drug-free environment in these schools.''

He mentioned character education and religion, asserting that recent guidelines issued by the Education Department showed ''that our schools don't have to be religion-free zones.''

For their part, the Republican governors, although they had a healthy majority at the summit, did not even get their issues on the agenda. For the sake of bipartisan consensus, they refrained from mentioning vouchers, parent rights, school prayer, teacher unions, and kindred obstacles to real reform. They were mute on the myriad ways whereby the Administration's actions belie the President's words. Nor did they summon a prominent GOP speaker to balance him. No Bob Dole. No Bill Bennett. No Lamar Alexander. And Newt Gingrich, who gives a heckuva speech on education, was reportedly vetoed as ''too political.''

THE summit, in short, was a cameo version of how education as a whole has played in Washington this past year and how it's likely to play in coming months unless something dramatic happens.

After the 1994 election Republicans promised that the Education Department would be eliminated, the federal role downsized, Goals 2000 repealed, and control restored to parents and communities, but essentially nothing has actually been done. Though some obnoxious features were finally trimmed from Goals 2000 (with Administration acquiescence), it and its Department remain vigorous. Nothing has been block-granted, nothing voucherized, nor anything of significance scrapped. The Democrats deftly depicted Republicans as ''anti education'' rather than ''anti federal control.'' The GOP did a woeful job of making its own case. Ultimately, it failed even to enact a tiny District of Columbia ''scholarship'' program to help a handful of low-income minority youngsters escape from some of the nation's worst public schools.

Education reform fared marginally better in the House than in the Senate, whose leadership displayed little interest and no game plan. If that remains true of Bob Dole, Clinton will wipe the schoolroom floor with him.

Yet this issue could so easily be a Republican strong point today, as it was a few years back. A powerful and convincing GOP strategy would rest on three legs.The first, of course, is unabashedly to become the party of education's consumers, tying the teacher unions and other ''producer'' interests around the Democrats' necks. This should be a cinch so long as members of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers make up the biggest bloc of Democratic convention delegates, meaning that neither platform committee nor President is free to do anything that truly discomfits them. And numbers hugely favor whichever side wins the consumer vote: for starters, the U.S. has 50 million schoolchildren, compared to 2.7 million teachers. Republicans could also seize the moral high-ground; nobody likes teacher unions, and few have kind words to say about the rest of the ''education establishment.'' While it's worth distinguishing between the unions and thousands of honorable and hard-working teachers who are ill-served by them, nevertheless the GOP could easily and properly make itself into the party of parents, children, taxpayers, employers, and other education consumers.