The Repulican Party officially nominated Mitt Romney as the candidate for president, with Paul Ryan as his running mate, at the party’s convention last night in Tampa. We thought you would like to know about the party’s official position on issues related to education. Please keep in mind, these statements represent those of the political party, not necessarily of Mitt Romney.
Please note: In this post, my personal comments are in bold with a wider left margin, and the words of the Republican Party platform are in regular type and set closer to the left margin, like this paragraph. I will leave all of the Republican Party platform’s paragraphs in tact as I interject my comments. That is, I’ll save my comments about each paragraph for the end of the paragraph.
Education: A Chance for Every Child
Parents are responsible for the education of their children. We do not believe in a one size fits all approach to education and support providing broad education choices to parents and children at the State and local level. Maintaining American preeminence requires a world-class system of education, with high standards, in which all students can reach their potential. Today’s education reform movement calls for accountability at every stage of schooling. It affirms higher expectations for all students and rejects the crippling bigotry of low expectations. It recognizes the wisdom of State and local control of our schools, and it wisely sees consumer rights in education – choice – as the most important driving force for renewing our schools.
The phrase “one size fits all” is loaded with contempt for the administration of Barack Obama. It is a move against standardization in general, as is the word “choices.” Note that in the beginning of this paragraph, the Republican Party seems to be against standardization, and at the end of the paragraph, it “requires a world-class education, with high standards, in which all students can reach their potential” and it “affirms higher expectations for all students.” This is an oxymoron. Setting high standards requires the setting of standards in the first place. How can they support the setting of high standards and not believe in standards themselves?
Also note that local control of our schools is basically what we have right now. Republicans in many, many states are trying to strip local school boards of their powers. For example, the Montgomery County (Md.) Repulican Party issued a platform statement, here, saying the school board was living in an “Alice in Wonderland world of budgeting,” simply because it opposed a $45 million cut to public school funding.
The board is considering a lawsuit to stop the council from making the cuts, given that per-pupil spending is protected in Maryland by the so-called Maintenance of Effort law, which is in full force and effect as of this writing. But why should the Republican Party care about laws they don’t like? Why should they allow our citizens, in a lawsuit, to decide for themselves if the council acted according to the law by making the cuts?
The Republican Party wants to stop the board from filing suit. That position, and positions like it, are floating around the country from Republicans, and the statements issued as part of the national Republican Party platform above are inconsistent with actions around the country that would reduce the power and authority of local boards.
Education is much more than schooling. It is the whole range of activities by which families and communities transmit to a younger generation, not just knowledge and skills, but ethical and behavioral norms and traditions. It is the handing over of a personal and cultural identity. That is why education choice has expanded so vigorously. It is also why American education has, for the last several decades, been the focus of constant controversy, as centralizing forces outside the family and community have sought to remake education in order to remake America. They have not succeeded, but they have done immense damage.
This is mostly opinion, and there are no “facts” to check in this paragraph. However, the words are hyperbole: “remake America,” “constant controversy,” and “immense damage” are asserting that American schools are in a crisis. That depends entirely on how you personally define words like “remake,” “constant,” “controversy,” “immense,” and “damage.” I would hold that “remake” is simply defined as “building to something better,” and remember: Americans strive to remake themselves and their country all the time. Just think, in 1800, slaves counted as three-fifths of a person. Glad we moved on from that one.
Also, I think of controversy as debate, and I question the use of “constant” in referring to controversy. In fact, in most of our nation’s schools, there are no debates, let alone controversies. Newspapers have stories like kids going to space camps, football teams scoring touchdowns, drama clubs interpreting Shakespeare, and so on. If there were controversies happening in our schools, newspapers would most assuredly write about it, since controversy sells papers, and newspapers are in the business of selling newspapers. But why should Republicans care about missing the boat on the obvious state of America’s schools? Maybe they’re the ones living in Alice in Wonderland.
Attaining Academic Excellence for All
Since 1965 the federal government has spent $2 trillion on elementary and secondary education with no substantial improvement in academic achievement or high school graduation rates (which currently are 59 percent for African-American students and 63 percent for Hispanics). The U.S. spends an average of more than $10,000 per pupil per year in public schools, for a total of more than $550 billion. That represents more than 4 percent of GDP devoted to K-12 education in 2010. Of that amount, federal spending was more than $47 billion. Clearly, if money were the solution, our schools would be problem-free.
I can’t argue about the graduation rates. It depends on how you define the graduation rate of America, but the numbers are in the ballpark of most estimates currently part of the published record.
However, the claim that there has been “no substantial improvement in academic achievement” since 1965 is worth checking out. I have no idea where they get a baseline of 1965 or why it was used, since the National Assessment for Educational Progress, often called the nation’s report card, only started in the 1970s. The first national assessments were held in 1969, and voluntary assessments for the states began in 1990 on a trial basis, were made a permanent feature of NAEP every two years. But since 1978, scores for 9- and 13-year-olds in math have increased. See the data here. Data for 17-year-olds, though, show that results have been substantially flat on this national assessment. The use of the “no” in the Republican Party platform is therefore inaccurate and exaggerated.
But some trends in academic performance have grown worse. For example, while the black-white achievement gap still exists, scores have improved in the last 20 years—whether or not it’s “substantial” depends on your definition of “substantial.” In 1992, 80 percent of fourth-grade black students scored below basic in math, while last year, only 49 percent were in the low-performance band, a decrease of about 31 percent. The percentage of white students scoring below basic in 1992 was 40 percent, and last year it was 16 percent, a decrease of 24 percent. But, the rich-poor achievement gap has outpaced the black-white achievement gap over the last 20 yeras. The Republican Party platform, in the education section, does not say the word “poverty,” “rich,” or “poor” (in the context of our citizens’ level of wealth). Alice in Wonderland?
More money alone does not necessarily equal better performance. After years of trial and error, we know what does work, what has actually made a difference in student advancement, and what is powering education reform at the local level all across America: accountability on the part of administrators, parents and teachers; higher academic standards; programs that support the development of character and financial literacy; periodic rigorous assessments on the fundamentals, especially math, science, reading, history, and geography; renewed focus on the Constitution and the writings of the Founding Fathers, and an accurate account of American history that celebrates the birth of this great nation; transparency, so parents and the public can discover which schools best serve their pupils; flexibility and freedom to innovate, so schools can adapt to the special needs of their students and hold teachers and administrators responsible for student performance.
Actually, we DON’T know what works or what has actually made a difference in student achievement. We agree it’s not only money, though, so that part’s right on. It’s probably a combination of many, many factors, actually. However, there is absolutely no evidence, let alone proof, to support the idea that “accountability on the part of … parents …” has anyting at all to do with it. I wonder, how many non-teachers will districts have to hire just to keep track of parent accountability? Are those the jobs Republicans say they can create? Nor do we know for sure that “periodic rigorous assessments” drive higher student achievement. In fact, the reverse is probably more correct.
As for providing a “renewed focus on the Constitution and the writings of the Founding Fathers,” what exactly do they want to “renew”? Our schools study the Constitution, the court cases that are relevant to every point in it and every amendment, and so forth. What we need is for Republicans to renew THEIR focus on the Constitution. And, if we actually think kids have time to study letters and such written by Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, or Charles Carroll of Carrollton, they’re in store for quite a shock. Not enough time, at least if we want to test kids rigorously on the fundamentals of math, science, reading, geography, and history, as stated in the Republican platform.
We support the innovations in education reform occurring at the State level based upon proven results. Republican Governors have led in the effort to reform our country’s underperforming education system, and we applaud these advancements. We advocate the policies and methods that have proven effective: building on the basics, especially STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and math) and phonics; ending social promotions; merit pay for good teachers; classroom discipline; parental involvement; and strong leadership by principals, superintendents, and locally elected school boards. Because technology has become an essential tool of learning, proper implementation of technology is a key factor in providing every child equal access and opportunity.
I would rather they support innovations in education in classrooms across America. Education doesn’t happen at the “state level” so reforms shouldn’t be focused there. Rather, positive stories are reported all the time about how individual teachers are finding new and creative ways to teach their students good content. Supporting “innovations in education reform” sounds like people talking who have never worked with children in their lives. It sounds like we are supposed to get on the latest bandwagon and ignore research, because innovative ideas are those that have not had a chance to be proven by research.
Now what about those Republican governors who have led in the effort to reform our country’s underperforming education system? Like Bobby Jindal in Louisiana? The guy who uses vouchers to pay for students to attend Christian school but will not use that money to send Muslims to private school? Is he the Republican governor leading a reform movement? The Louisiana voucher law probably violates the 14th Amendment. Oh, wait, I forgot the fact that Republicans don’t really want citizens to learn the Constitution, just to renew their focus on it, and then, only if they’re students.
Technology is important, but it does not drive student performance. It can, however, save costs in the long run, despite an upfront investment that could carry a hefty pricetag. Textbooks are so last decade.
Consumer Choice in Education
The Republican Party is the party of fresh and innovative ideas in education. We support options for learning, including home schooling and local innovations like single-sex classes, full-day school hours, and year-round schools. School choice — whether through charter schools, open enrollment requests, college lab schools, virtual schools, career and technical education programs, vouchers, or tax credits — is important for all children, especially for families with children trapped in failing schools. Getting those youngsters into decent learning environments and helping them to realize their full potential is the greatest civil rights challenge of our time. We support the promotion of local career and technical educational programs and entrepreneurial programs that have been supported by leaders in industry and will retrain and retool the American workforce, which is the best in the world. A young person’s ability to achieve in school must be based on his or her God-given talent and motivation, not an address, zip code, or economic status.
Generally, it’s hard to argue with anybody who says they want fresh, innovative ideas in education. Everybody says that, though, so this is not unique to the Republican Party platform. I just want to point out, though, that the single-sex classroom is not a “fresh and innovative idea in education,” as the document implies. Likewise, college lab schools, career and technical education programs, and decent learning environments have been around for longer than I can remember. And I have a pretty good memory.
As for “local career and technical educational programs,” do they mean beauty schools? These have been around for a long time as well. Keep in mind, though, that America has become a non-manufacturer. Training kids to work on assembly lines isn’t going to be any good for them. We need to tie career and technical educational programs to the jobs that employers in America are hiring for today. Or, did they want to remake America into a manufacturing country again. Oh, I’m sorry, it was the Democrats that got accused above of wanting to remake America. And what about STEM subjects? Do these career people get STEM classes as well, or was that only good for the last section of this platform?
In sum, on the one hand enormous amounts of money are being spent for K-12 public education with overall results that do not justify that spending. On the other hand, the common experience of families, teachers, and administrators forms the basis of what does work in education. We believe the gap between those two realities can be successfully bridged, and Congressional Republicans are pointing a new way forward with major reform legislation. We support its concept of block grants and the repeal of numerous federal regulations which interfere with State and local control of public schools.
Ooo! I get one more chance to remind you that many Republicans across the country are initiating programs and laws that would directly interfere with state and local control of public schools. Question here, though: Would they eliminate the federal Education Department? Is its creation one of the federal regulations that interfere with local control? Well, of course it is, as it represents a government agency controlling the activities of a local entity. Never heard of that before!
The bulk of the federal money through Title I for low-income children and through IDEA for disabled youngsters should follow the students to whatever school they choose so that eligible pupils, through open enrollment, can bring their share of the funding with them. The Republican-founded D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program should be expanded as a model for the rest of the country. We deplore the efforts by Congressional Democrats and the current President to kill this successful program for disadvantaged students in order to placate the leaders of the teachers’ unions. We support putting the needs of students before the special interests of unions when approaching elementary and secondary education reform.
I’m not familiar enough with the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships to comment on that part. However, I disagree with the statement, “overall results … do not justify that spending” on K-12 education. It’s a political position, though, and they made their position known. What you think about how justifiable a certain expenditure is is up to you. What programs you think money should be spent on is also up to you.
Because parents are a child’s first teachers, we support family literacy programs, which improve the reading, language, and life skills of both parents and children from low-income families. To ensure that all students have access to the mainstream of American life, we support the English First approach and oppose divisive programs that limit students’ ability to advance in American society. We renew our call for replacing “family planning” programs for teens with abstinence education which teaches abstinence until marriage as the responsible and respected standard of behavior. Abstinence from sexual activity is the only protection that is 100 percent effective against out-of-wedlock pregnancies and sexually-transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS when transmitted sexually. It is effective, science-based, and empowers teens to achieve optimal health outcomes and avoid risks of sexual activity. We oppose school-based clinics that provide referrals, counseling, and related services for abortion and contraception. We support keeping federal funds from being used in mandatory or universal mental health, psychiatric, or socio- emotional screening programs.
It’s hard to argue with any idea that would serve to increase literacy not only of schoolchildren but of their families. However, bilingual education tends to work better if students remain literate in both languages, not just in English. Hispanic students also tend to function better in society if they remain literate in both languages. Therefore, working toward an instructional model that eliminates a student’s first language from the classroom would not be the best program to implement. We can’t stop teaching them math, science, history, geography, as supported above in this same platform, if we don’t teach them in a language they understand.
Evidence has shown that abstinence-only education is detrimental to its intended purpose. We find in a 2012 study out of Wright State University, “If there were success rates among the states that have high amounts of abstinence only education funding then a case could be made for these programs, but when the data is gathered and looked at, there is no positive correlation between the amount of money spent on abstinence only education and lowered rates of these sexual health indicators, but rather there is a correlation between abstinence only education funding and high rates of Chlamydia and teenage pregnancy.”
We applaud America’s great teachers, who should be protected against frivolous litigation and should be able to take reasonable actions to maintain discipline and order in the classroom. We support legislation that will correct the current law provision which defines a “Highly Qualified Teacher” merely by his or her credentials, not results in the classroom. We urge school districts to make use of teaching talent in business, STEM fields, and in the military, especially among our returning veterans. Rigid tenure systems based on the “last in, first out” policy should be replaced with a merit-based approach that can attract fresh talent and dedication to the classroom. All personnel who interact with school children should pass background checks and be held to the highest standards of personal conduct.
The law on “highly qualified teachers” defines one as “a teacher who has: 1) a bachelor’s degree, 2) full state certification or licensure, and 3) proof that they know each subject they teach.” That was defined during the Bush administration in 2004. The definition is slightly different for special education teachers. Some states require teachers to hold a certificate or pass an exam in order to “prove” they know each subject they teach, and it is possible to be classified as highly qualified in many situations where there is no suitable test for the subject matter and a certificate with special endorsements will suffice. If we have to switch to a system in which “results in the classroom” determine whether a teacher is highly qualified, it begs the question, How are “results” to be measured? A standardized test? A student survey? A parent survey? An outside evaluator? Well, again, there is no plan to back up what the platform calls for.
I am not a big fan of certification when it substitutes for content knowledge. I am not a big fan of education school students taking watered down versions of mathematics, literature, and science classes when they attend college. But my personal agreement with these statements in the platform notwithstanding, I have to say, we don’t have many other choices in terms of practical implementation of any other method of determining how highly qualified a teacher is.
Not all subjects will or can be tested with a standardized test, and relying on standardized test scores to determine how highly qualified a teacher is, under the law, will bring all kinds of foul play into the picture, as we have documented on these pages many times.
Improving Our Nation’s Classrooms
Higher education faces its own challenges, many of which stem from the poor preparation of students before they reach college. One consequence has been the multiplying number of remedial courses for freshmen. Even so, our universities, large and small, public or private, form the world’s greatest assemblage of learning. They drive much of the research that keeps America competitive and, by admitting large numbers of foreign students, convey our values and culture to the world.
Check.
Ideological bias is deeply entrenched within the current university system. Whatever the solution in private institutions may be, in State institutions the trustees have a responsibility to the public to ensure that their enormous investment is not abused for political indoctrination. We call on State officials to ensure that our public colleges and universities be places of learning and the exchange of ideas, not zones of intellectual intolerance favoring the Left.
False. Or at least, not any more so now than before Barack Obama became president. Not any more so in America than elsewhere in the world. I think there are college presidents, deans, professors, and students who would take great issue with some of the assertions in this paragraph. Universities are centers for learning. Some ideas, especially in political science, have a side to them and a counterargument. University instruction does a good job of presenting all sides, and students are adults who can make up their own minds when it comes to political ideologies expressed in lectures by their professors.
Most subjects and courses of study at colleges and universities in the US present facts, as far as we know them at the time of the lecture. For example, we know species evolve and that we humans have a certain percentage of DNA in common with chimpanzees. We know that the Higgs boson was theorized several decades before it was found. We know light has a dual nature, showing properties of waves and properties of particles. Left or right is absolutely not a concern at our universities and colleges. Now, in Congress, left and right matters a lot: it seems to lead to paralysis, an inability to act, and other symptoms similar to those.
Addressing Rising College Costs
College costs, however, are on an unsustainable trajectory, rising year by year far ahead of overall inflation. Nationwide, student loan debt now exceeds credit card debt, roughly $23,300 for each of the 35,000,000 debtors, taking years to pay off. Over 50 percent of recent college grads are unemployed or underemployed, working at jobs for which their expensive educations gave them no training. It is time to get back to basics and to higher education programs directly related to job opportunities.
No. Universities are doing fine, studying what they always have, when the world was liked by Republicans. None of that has changed. What it’s time for is looking at universities, such as MIT, Princeton, Harvard, the University of Virginia, which are exploring modes of delivering instruction for free. Such work will expand the number of tuition-paying students at these institutions as well and has the potential to reduce the cost to each student.
Much of the debt referred to in the Republican Party platform is owed to financial institutions and backed by the government because of tuition at for-profit colleges. The Obama administration has led the charge to get these schools to clean up their act. There is no mention of these institutions, which often have students taking out loan after loan, in the Republican Party platform.
The first step is to acknowledge the need for change when the status quo is not working. New systems of learning are needed to compete with traditional four-year colleges: expanded community colleges and technical institutions, private training schools, online universities, life-long learning, and work-based learning in the private sector. New models for acquiring advanced skills will be ever more important in the rapidly changing economy of the twenty-first century, especially in science, technology, engineering, and math. Public policy should advance the affordability, innovation, and transparency needed to address all these challenges and to make accessible to everyone the emerging alternatives, with their lower cost degrees, to traditional college attendance.
Yup. And I would add that traditional four-year colleges and universities would be a good place to start developing and testing out new offerings and ideas that incorporate both basic study as well as preparation for jobs in the 21st century. Through policy changes that advance these goals, we can get a handle on college costs and student indebtedness.
Federal student aid is on an unsustainable path, and efforts should be taken to provide families with greater transparency and the information they need to make prudent choices about a student’s future: completion rates, repayment rates, future earnings, and other factors that may affect their decisions. The federal government should not be in the business of originating student loans; however, it should serve as an insurance guarantor for the private sector as they offer loans to students. Private sector participation in student financing should be welcomed. Any regulation that drives tuition costs higher must be reevaluated to balance its worth against its negative impact on students and their parents.
A great deal of financial aid comes from banks, but the federal government does act as the Republicans put forth here. We agree that families should have all information available to them when making decisions about college, including financial information, completion rates, and prospective future earnings. They should also be trained in how to evaluate the estimates and conjectures in the information provided.