Politicians often say silly things, and Bill Clinton says more than most, but probably nothing that has come out of his mouth in his long career in public life is more preposterous than his call for a new approach to education.
“One of the greatest sources of strength throughout the Cold War was a bipartisan foreign policy; because our future was at stake, politics stopped at the water’s edge,” he declared in his State of the Union address. “Now I ask you–I ask all our nation’s governors, and I ask teachers, parents and citizens all across America–for a new non-partisan commitment to education, because education is one of the critical national security issues for our future, and politics must stop at the classroom door.”
It must? Does this mean Clinton, in the interest of national unity, will no longer question any measures recommended by Republicans as they strive to address this problem? I suspect not. More likely it means he wants Congress and the citizenry at large to shut up and salute whenever he offers some poll-tested scheme in the name of advancing education.
Actually, Americans may labor in vain to remember a time in the Cold War when politics stopped at the water’s edge. Not during the Korean War, which destroyed Harry Truman’s presidency. Not during Vietnam, which caused violent unrest on college campuses and forced another president from office. Not during the Iran hostage crisis, which was fatal to Jimmy Carter. Not during the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan wanted to expand our nuclear arsenal and help anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua but Democrats strenuously resisted.
Those national disagreements are nothing to regret. Politics is the pejorative term for the normal, healthy give-and-take that is supposed to characterize the process of governing in a democracy. It’s not a weakness or an obstacle. It’s the crowning glory of self-government.
The fact that education is important doesn’t mean it should be off-limits to this often raucous and unappetizing means of problem-solving. Just the opposite. We might trust a dictator to collect the garbage and pave the streets–it’s on matters of great moment that the voice of the people is crucial. If we don’t want politics to intrude into the decisions we make about our schools, we should petition Queen Elizabeth to revert to monarchy.
Some of the recommendations made by the leader of the free world don’t require much discussion–like his solemn insistence that parents start singing to their infants (“immediately,” no less). Given the merits of his more substantial proposals, though, it’s not surprising that he would prefer to choke off debate.
First, he wants to spend more money. But the United States already lavishes some $318 billion dollars a year on elementary and secondary education. In inflation-adjusted terms, we spend 48 percent more per student today than we did 20 years ago. If money were the solution, there wouldn’t
be a problem.
That there is a problem is evident from the extreme modesty of Clinton’s ambitions. He asked for a million volunteer tutors to “to make sure every child can read independently by the end of the third grade.” Americans are already contributing great sums in taxes to support a system that, it turns out, is incapable of teaching children to read over the course of four years in school.
Asking volunteers to teach 9-year-olds to read is like asking citizens to pitch in at the Post Office so mail deliveries won’t take so long. It utterly misses the point.
The president called for the creation of 3,000 charter schools in the next three years. These are spared some of the normal bureaucratic requirements placed on public schools, which raises the question: If breaking those chains improves education, why free only 3,000 schools? Why not free them all? The chances that Clinton will push for charter schools worthy of the name are remote. Teachers’ unions don’t like the whole idea, because one of the burdens charter schools are supposed to escape are costly union contracts. And teachers’ unions are probably the most powerful constituency in the Democratic Party. At last year’s Democratic convention, 12 percent of the delegates were affiliated with the National Education Association or the American Federation of Teachers. If Clinton is joining the charter school movement, you can be sure the effort will be diluted to the point of meaninglessness.
The real point of his “national crusade” on education is to make himself sound powerfully concerned about an issue that is important to most Americans. It may impress some people, but not those who think irrelevant blather and phony gimmicks should stop at the classroom door.
