Bush Gets ‘A’ on Education

George W. Bush has pulled two surprises this year. He’s talking about issues early in the presidential campaign, and he’s already moved toward the center. The latter doesn’t usually happen until late in the race.

In his recent speech to a Latino business group in Los Angeles, Bush grasped the education reform nettle. Instead of innocuous platitudes, he laid out a thoughtful and persuasive education reform strategy, including, mirabile visu, a vigorous Republican role for Uncle Sam: high standards for all, local control, restoring Head Start, putting starch in Title 1 (the national program to help disadvantaged students).

In one sense, Bush has moved to the right. Not to the GOP right, but toward the right wing of the Democratic Party, which supports these issues. For too long, the Democrats have enjoyed an exclusive as the education party. Occupying the moral high ground, Democrats struck responsive chords with the electorate. Their embrace of more money (and warm and fuzzy programs) reduced the Republicans to quixotic proposals to eliminate the Department of Education.

However, neither the public nor Congress cares a whit about eliminating the Department of Education. More to the point, the public wants better schools and supports a federal role. Traditional Republican education rhetoric (“money doesn’t make a difference”) is a thundering nonstarter. For better or worse, a federal role in education is here to stay.

Although public school failure is apparent in many of our great cities, Americans in small and medium-sized towns have given their schools high marks for more than a quarter of a century. The annual Gallup Poll of public attitudes toward public education reveals a marvelous irony: Suburbanites, “natural” Republicans, give their public schools A’s and Bs, while city dwellers, the poor and dispossessed, particularly African Americans and Latinos, give their public schools low marks. The city residents, “natural” Democrats, are also natural voucher supporters.

It is Bush’s insight to appreciate this fact. Instead of imposing vouchers from on high, his program is permissive and targeted to poor children. Schools that continue to fail--as measured by state-selected tests--three years running would lose their federal money. It would go to the kids, who could take it with them to other public or private schools. Even Democrats would find it hard to argue that failing schools should be permitted to hold their students hostage.

What Bush has not done is opt for a voucher-only strategy. He is convinced that what may make sense in the seminar room does not necessarily make sense in the real world. The American public is eager to see schools improve, but is in favor of incremental, not revolutionary, change. Americans of all walks of life want the same thing from their schools: a safe environment and high academic standards for all. Bush knows whereof he speaks--he has delivered in Texas. There, education reform is bearing fruit, and the minority-majority achievement gap is closing rapidly.

Bush has not fallen for right-wing entreaties to privatize education; neither has he succumbed to the “blob,” as former Education Secretary William Bennett once described the education establishment. With good reason, Bush is neither prepared to throw himself on the voucher sword nor is he yielding to appeals to pour money into public education without tough accountability provisions. Vouchers will come to pass not because a politician pushes them, but because the public demands them. And the public will demand them when it has lost faith in the capacity of the public sector to deliver good education.

Today, only one anti-voucher arrow remains in the public school quiver: education quality. It is to Bush’s credit that he understands this. If the public schools perform and satisfy their constituents, voucher supporters can huff and puff until they are weak in the knees. If the public schools fail to measure up, they will lose their constituency.