Whoever Wins, Please Just Lift Up Our Ailing Schools

There is no more important issue in this presidential campaign than public education, and there may never have been, once skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic became the foundations upon which one built a career beyond that of the desperado or the talking work animal. Those seeking that seat in the Oval Office need to come to the table with some well thought out ways for our country to compete in the Information Age.

It is time to explore the invisible space that can reinterpret our “manifest destiny,” the imperial 19th century idea that the United States was “destined” to stretch from sea to shining sea. At this point, we don’t have to fight Mexicans and Native Americans into bloody messes in order to have our way. Defeating ignorance and low quality education will do.

Now our destiny must extend to high quality public education, to mining the resources of our children’s minds, those blank slates, those flesh-and-blood computers far superior to any presently in existence. In order to do so, we have to take seriously the question of elevating our public educational system. We must understand that if we do not, we will be in for some very heavy problems in the arena of international competition.

For example, we presently face a shortage of workers in our high-tech theaters of production and competition. Two congressmen from California, one a Republican and one a Democrat, have followed the Silicon Valley script so closely that they are proposing that immigration quotas be enlarged to fill the gap. Similarly, there are those corporate lame-brains who truly believe that cultivating our own crop of minds is not significant because we can import them, no publicly funded education required. Or we can just leave those brains where they are and use them long-distance. In some companies, if you call for help, a person answers the phone in India because labor is so much cheaper there.

That position is bunk. We cannot expect to prevail in the ongoing battle for international consumer markets by depending on immigrant brain power alone. The presidential candidates need to know that, and they also need to know that a sieve of an idea like vouchers will not carry the water necessary to replenish our public schools.

Vouchers is one of the ideas that has always amazed me in its longevity. That the Republicans, the supposed party of business, would keep trying to get us to listen to that one is truly amazing. They need to go back to some basic arithmetic. Even assume, for the sake of argument, that states are magically able to guarantee children who are now getting a substandard education a voucher worth $20,000 per year to attend school of choice--private, parochial, whatever. Where, pray tell, would they go? The parochial and private schools, as filled as they want to be, are already watching their waiting lists get longer and longer. So vouchers turn out to be nothing more than pink elephants walking through hills of horse feathers.

What we need from a presidential candidate is a revolutionary vision, but not one based on yet another of the endless theories that are always mucking up the education question. What we need is a candidate willing to use the very best business model, which is that those who are consistently excellent at producing and moving a high-quality product are the role models. If the ones who do a striking and exemplary job reveal a method in the process, that method is put into general practice. No theory is necessary.

There are public schools across this country that have figured out how to educate those once considered beyond the reach of education, bringing them so far up that they can compete with the best. Those schools are where the answers should be sought, nowhere else.

In his favor, George W. Bush’s state is one of three that have asked one of these schools, the South Bronx’s KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Academy, to help design their public school curricula and develop teaching methods. By demanding that its students put in 9 1/2-hour school days and do plenty of homework, the KIPP Academy has been the highest performing middle school--grades 5 to 8--in the Bronx for three years. It has maintained the highest margin of improvement every year for its test scores. Two-thirds of the kids read above the national average; 70% score above the national average in math. KIPP’s attendance record is the highest in New York state--96%. Children are accepted no matter their prior academic records.

The KIPP Academy is so important to a new vision because it proves just what can be done in high-poverty areas, where all of the obstacles to quality academics nest and breed. So if this school, which is getting more and more national attention, provides the kind of model a president can move to the front of the public school discussion, we can make an Information Age manifest destiny idea come into being. We can cultivate those immeasurable spaces of human minds and eventually move beyond the need for imported brains.

He who does that will truly be a leader beyond the tired categories of conservative and liberal.