On 23 May, the Romney campaign released its education policy
white paper titled A Chance for Every Child:
Mitt Romney's
Plan for Restoring the Promise of American Education. If you liked the
George W Bush administration's education reforms, you will love the
Romney plan. If you think that turning the
schools over to the private sector will solve their problems, then his plan will thrill you.
Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney visits a charter school in Philadelphia. (Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
The central themes of the Romney plan are a rehash of Republican
education ideas from the past 30 years, namely, subsidizing parents who
want to send their child to a private or religious school, encouraging
the private sector to operate schools, putting commercial banks in
charge of the federal student loan program, holding teachers and schools
accountable for students' test scores, and lowering entrance
requirements for new teachers. These policies reflect the experience of
his advisers, who include half a dozen senior officials from the Bush
administration and several prominent conservative academics – among
them, former Secretary of Education Rod Paige and former Deputy
Secretary of Education Bill Hansen, and school choice advocates John
Chubb and Paul Peterson.
Unlike George W Bush, who had to negotiate with a Democratic Congress
to pass No Child Left Behind, Romney feels no need to compromise on
anything. He needs to prove to the Republican party's base – especially
evangelicals – that he really is conservative. And this plan is "mission
accomplished".
Romney offers full-throated support for using taxpayer money to pay
for private-school vouchers, privately-managed charters, for-profit
online schools, and almost every other alternative to public schools.
Like Bob Dole in 1996, Romney showers his contempt on the teachers'
unions. He takes a strong stand against certification of teachers – the
minimal state-level requirement that future teachers must pass either
state or national tests to demonstrate their knowledge and/or skills –
which he considers an unnecessary hurdle. He believes that class size
does not matter (although he and his children went to elite private
schools that have small classes). Romney claims that school choice is
"the civil rights issue of our era," a
familiar theme among the current crop of education reformers, who now use it to advance their efforts to privatize public education.
When it comes to universities, Romney excoriates Obama for the rising cost of
higher education.
He claims that more federal aid leads to higher tuition, so he offers
no new federal funding to help students burdened with debt. His plan
does not mention the fact that tuition has increased in public
universities (which enroll three-quarters of all students) because
states have
reduced their investments in higher education
and shifted the burden from taxpayers to students. Romney will
encourage private-sector involvement in higher education, by having
commercial banks again serve as the intermediary for federal student
loans – an approach Obama had eliminated in 2010 as too costly. (Until
2010, banks received guaranteed subsidies from the federal government to
make student loans, while the government assumed nearly all the risk.
When the program was overhauled by the
Obama administration, billions of dollars in bank profits were
redirected
to support Pell Grants for needy students.) To cut costs, Romney
encourages the proliferation of for-profit online universities.
The Romney education plan says that no new money is needed because
more spending on schools will not fix our problems. However, he proposes
to dedicate more taxpayer money to the priorities that he favors, such
as vouchers, charter schools, and online schools. He also wants more
federal money to reward states for "eliminating or reforming teacher
tenure and establishing systems that focus on effectiveness in advancing
student achievement". Translated, that means Romney is willing to hand
out money to states if they eliminate due process rights for teachers
and if they pay more to teachers whose students get higher scores on
standardized tests and get rid of teachers whose students do not.
In making the case for vouchers – which provide government funding to
pay the tuition at any private or religious school that parents choose –
Romney exaggerates the evidence; indeed, some of his claims are simply
false. He points to the DC voucher program, which began in 2004, the
first program to use federal tax dollars to subsidize private-school
tuition – as "a model for the nation". He
asserts
that "after three months, students [in the DC voucher program] could
already read at levels 19 months ahead of their public-school peers."
This is flatly wrong. A congressionally-mandated evaluation of the DC
program found that students with vouchers made no gains in either
reading or math. As the report stated:
"[T]here is no conclusive evidence that the OSP [Opportunity Scholarship Program] affected student achievement."
Romney claims that 90% of voucher students graduated from high
school, as compared to only 55% in the low-performing public schools of
DC. But here, he exaggerates. The federal evaluation of the program said
that 82% of the students receiving vouchers graduated from high school,
as compared to 70% of the students who applied to the voucher program
and were not accepted. This is a respectable gain, but nowhere near as
large as the numbers Romney cited. Because students who enter a lottery
tend to be more motivated than those who do not, reputable social
scientists usually compare the outcomes of those who won the lottery and
those who did not.
Paradoxically, Romney's campaign takes credit for the fact that
Massachusetts leads the nation in reading and mathematics on the federal
tests known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But
Romney was not responsible for the state's academic success, which owes
to reforms that are entirely different from the ones he is now proposing
for the country. Signed into law a full decade before Romney began his
tenure as governor in 2003, the Massachusetts Education Reform Act
involved a commitment by the state to double state funding of public
education from $1.3bn in 1993 to $2.6bn by 2000; to provide a minimum
foundation budget for every district to meet its needs; to develop
strong curricula for subjects such as science, history, the arts,
foreign languages, mathematics, and English; to implement a testing
program based on the curriculum (because of costs, the state tested only
reading and math); to expand professional development for teachers; and
to test would-be teachers. In the late 1990s, again before Romney
assumed office, the state added new funds for early childhood education.
Romney's plan, by contrast, is animated by a reverence for the
private sector. While little is said about improving or spending more on
public education, which is treated as a failed institution, a great
deal of enthusiasm is lavished on the innovation and progress that is
supposed to occur once parents can take their federal dollars to private
institutions or enroll their child in a for-profit online school.
Massachusetts attained success by raising standards for new teachers,
not by lowering them. Nor did Massachusetts eliminate teacher tenure –
that is, the right to a hearing for experienced teachers before they can
be fired.
Higher education, we are assured, will flourish when "innovation and
skill attainment" matter more than "time in classroom". Put in plain
English, the last sentence is claiming that higher education will become
more affordable when more students enroll in online universities, most
of which are low-cost and for-profit. Of course, online universities are
cheaper; they have no capital costs, no library, no facilities, and
minimal staff. Some are
under investigation for fraud because of their methods of recruiting students; they have fended off federal regulation by a heavy (and bipartisan)
investment in lobbying.
The Obama administration's
first response
to Romney's proposals was to scoff and say that Obama's K-12 policies
had the enthusiastic support of prominent conservative Republican
governors, such as Chris Christie of New Jersey and Susana Martinez of
New Mexico. Unfortunately, this is true. Apart from vouchers and the
slap at teacher certification, Obama's Race to the Top program for
schools promotes
virtually everything
Romney proposes – charters, competition, accountability, evaluating
teachers by student test scores. If anything, Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan has been as outspoken on behalf of charters and test-based
accountability as Mitt Romney. And, like Romney, Duncan has disdained
the issue of reducing the number of students per teacher.
Romney's proposal for private-school vouchers is red meat for the
rightwing base of the Republican party, especially evangelicals.
Vouchers have been the third rail of education politics since Milton
Friedman proposed them in 1955; they have been put before the voters in
several state referenda and have been consistently rejected. As a
general rule, the public does not want public money to support religious
schools. And many religious schools are wary about accepting public
money and the regulations that eventually are tied to it. But in the
past few years, vouchers have been revived by state legislatures in
Indiana, Wisconsin, and Louisiana without resorting to a popular vote.
The results are already troubling. In Louisiana, where Governor Bobby
Jindal's education reform legislation was enacted in mid April, the new
law declares that students in low-performing schools are eligible to
take their share of state funding to any accredited private or religious
school. About 400,000 students (more than half the students in the
state) are eligible, but only some 5,000 places are available in the
state's private and parochial schools. When the state posted the list of
participating schools, the one that registered to accept the largest
number of voucher students was the New Living Word School, which offered
to enroll 315 of them. But its current enrollment is 122, and it has
no facilities or teachers
for the new students, though it promises to erect a new building in
time for the beginning of the school year this fall. Most of its
instruction is delivered on DVDs.
Another school, the Eternity Christian Academy, which currently has
14 students, has agreed to take in 135 voucher students. According to a
recent
Reuters article:
"[Students] sit in cubicles for much of the day and move at their own
pace through Christian workbooks, such as a beginning science text that
explains 'what God made' on each of the six days of creation. They are
not exposed to the theory of evolution."
The pastor-turned-principal explained:
"We try to stay away from all those things that might confuse our children."
Some of the other schools that have been approved to receive
state-funded vouchers "use social studies texts warning that liberals
threaten global prosperity; Bible-based math books that don't cover
modern concepts such as set theory; and biology texts built around
refuting evolution".
The Reuters reporter described the Louisiana law as "the nation's
boldest experiment in privatizing public education, with the state
preparing to shift tens of millions in tax dollars out of the public
schools to pay private industry, businesses owners and church pastors to
educate children". Next year, all students in Louisiana will qualify
for a voucher to take courses from private vendors or corporations
offering courses or training. Expect a boom in new education businesses
in Louisiana.
What Governor Jindal is doing sounds like a template for the Romney
plan. With no increase in funding, all the money for vouchers and
private vendors and online charters will be deducted from the state's
public education budget. Governor Jindal and Mitt Romney should explain
how American education will be improved if taxpayer dollars are used to
send more students to sectarian schools and to take their courses from
profit-making businesses and online schools.
In the vision presented by Mitt Romney, public dollars would flow to
schools that teach creationism. Anyone could teach, without passing any
test of their knowledge and skills and without any professional
preparation. Teachers could be fired for any reason, without any
protection of their freedom to teach. In some states and regions,
teachers will be fearful of teaching evolution or global warming or any
controversial issues. Nor will they dare to teach books considered
offensive to anyone in their community, like Huckleberry Finn.
And candidate Romney should explain how privatizing the way we school
our children will further his goal of "restoring the promise of
American education". "Restore" suggests a return to the past. When in
American history did the for-profit sector run American schools? Which
state ever permitted it until the advent in our own time of for-profit
charter corporations and for-profit online corporations? Which founding
fathers ever railed against public education? John Adams, that crusty
conservative, said this:
"The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the
whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not
be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded
by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the
people themselves."
Restoring the promise of American education should mean rejuvenating public schools, not destroying them.
