[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 41 (Monday, March 2, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1251-S1252]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  REFORMING EDUCATION THE AMERICAN WAY: STATE BY STATE, COMMUNITY BY 
                               COMMUNITY

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, last week Templeton Press published an 
important new book, ``How to Educate an American: The Conservative 
Vision for Tomorrow's Schools.''edited by the Fordham Institute's 
Michael J. Petrilli and Chester E. Finn, Jr., and published by 
Templeton Press. I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record 
the preface I wrote for the book.
  There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

  Reforming Education the American Way: State by State, Community by 
                               Community

       I was participating in a humdrum educators' roundtable in 
     Buffalo, New York, in 1988 when ``Monk'' Malloy, president of 
     the University of Notre Dame, asked this question: ``What is 
     the purpose of a public school?''
       There was a long silence until finally Albert Shanker, 
     president of the American Federation of Teachers, proposed 
     this answer: ``The public school was created for the purpose 
     of teaching immigrant children reading, writing, and 
     arithmetic and what it means to be an American with the hope 
     that they would then go home and teach their parents.'' The 
     reason to read this book is to judge for yourself whether the 
     twenty-two conservative luminaries who wrote its chapters 
     have produced a better answer today to Malloy's question than 
     Albert Shanker did thirty years ago.
       Shanker was a patriot--an old-fashioned, anticommunist, 
     Hubert Humphrey--liberal Democrat union organizer whose 
     parents had immigrated from Poland. So he and this book's 
     conservative writers agreed on one thing: In coeditor Chester 
     Finn's words, ``Schools should inculcate a solid 
     understanding of and appreciation for why America exists and 
     what it stands for, to transmit history and civics and, yes, 
     a positive attitude toward its strengths as well as a 
     reasoned commitment to addressing its weakness.'' Or, in 
     Shanker's words, ``Public schools played a big role in 
     holding our nation together. They brought together children 
     of different races, languages, religions, and cultures and 
     gave them a common language and a sense of common purpose. We 
     have not outgrown our need for this; far from it.''
       Today, there is elite disdain for such Americanism. But 
     this is not a popular attitude. Most audiences applaud and 
     some come to their feet when I say, ``We should teach more 
     United States history in our schools so our children can grow 
     up knowing what it means to be an American.'' There is 
     bipartisan support for this sentiment. After September 11, 
     2001, George W. Bush and Al Gore both reminded the nation 
     that principles create the American character--not 
     considerations of race, religion, or national origin. In my 
     first address to the US Senate, I introduced a bill to create 
     summer academies for outstanding students and teachers of 
     U.S. history. Within a day, Senator Ted Kennedy had rounded 
     up nearly twenty Democratic cosponsors without my asking. 
     Especially in today's internet democracy, an era Peggy Noonan 
     calls ``The Great Estrangement,'' Americans are hungry for 
     institutions that unite. I suspect that most would agree that 
     it would be a good idea to begin each school day with a 
     student leading the Pledge of Allegiance and then giving his 
     or her version of what it means to be an American.
       According to education historian Patricia Graham, ``Schools 
     in America have danced to different drummers through their 
     long history''--and schools have a very long history. Hunter-
     gatherer ``play schools'' helped children learn to survive. 
     Sumerian schools taught scribes to help a culture survive. 
     During the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, schools 
     taught youngsters to work and got them out from under their 
     parents' feet. Sociologist James Coleman said that in early 
     America, schools helped parents do what parents could not do 
     as well. That was especially true for teaching literacy. 
     Graham says, ``Now the drumbeat demands that all children 
     achieve academically at a high level and the measure of that 
     achievement is tests.''
       This book's conservative writers would temper that drumbeat 
     with a second great conservative goal--in the coeditors' 
     words, ``to restore character, virtue, and morality to the 
     head of the education table where they belong.'' This is no 
     new thought. Plato said schools should create good men who 
     act nobly. Thomas Jefferson believed that a democracy 
     granting broad liberties needed institutions instilling moral 
     restraint. But Yuval Levin's essay suggests why character 
     education does not rise so easily on a liberal

[[Page S1252]]

     list of priorities: progressive education wants to liberate 
     the student to be himself or herself, Levin writes, while 
     conservative education wants to form the student to be better 
     suited to the responsibilities of citizenship.
       After embracing citizenship and character, the book's 
     authors diverge in their emphases. Several show a healthy 
     respect for school choice but also for its limits. There is a 
     shout-out for career and technical education. To me, Bill 
     Bennett's chapter is the most persuasive. He argues that 
     content must be at the center of any conservative consensus 
     on education. He reminds us that in the 1980s and 1990s, 
     conservatives were leading a content crusade with E.D. Hirsch 
     and Governors John Engler, Tommy Thompson, and Jeb Bush as 
     well as Bennett himself as chief architects. This movement 
     was called (shall we whisper it?) ``Common Core.'' This 
     state-by-state reformation of school standards and curricula 
     was well underway when the Obama administration tried to push 
     it faster by making Common Core a quasi-federal mandate. 
     Republicans imagined black helicopters flying. What 
     conservatives had invented, many Republican legislators had 
     voted into state law, and hundreds of thousands of classroom 
     teachers in forty-five states expected they'd be teaching was 
     suddenly condemned and abandoned . . . by conservatives.
       This abandonment was less complete than it would appear. 
     Last year, our daughter's family lived with us in Tennessee 
     while her home was being remodeled. She placed two sons in a 
     nearby mountain elementary school. When the boys returned 
     home to their Westchester County, New York, public school, I 
     asked, ``Did they have trouble adjusting?'' ``Nope,'' she 
     said. ``Common Core here. Common Core there.'' Many states 
     simply renamed Common Core to avoid political flak and 
     charged ahead. One advocate told me, ``We won. But we're not 
     allowed to say so.'' The backlash to Common Core brings me to 
     the most obvious mission missing from this volume's 
     conservative agenda: local control of schools. America was 
     created community by community. The initiative for American 
     public schools was entirely at the local level, Marc Tucker 
     has written. He termed this an ``accident of localism.''
       I have spent much of my public life trying to preserve this 
     localism. To begin with, federalism--the dispersal of central 
     authority--is a crucial tenet of American liberty. Our 
     revolution, after all was mostly about distaste for a king. 
     As a practical matter, my experience is that those governing 
     education from a distance have good intentions but limited 
     capacity and that schools can be only as good as parents, 
     teachers, and citizens in a community want them to be. The 
     saga of Common Core is the greatest proof of this pudding. 
     Here was a conservative crusade--new rigor in what students 
     needed to know--blown up by conservatives' fear that 
     Washington D.C., was forcing them to do it. The Common Core 
     federal directive was piled on top of other dictates from 
     Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama on 
     how to define standards, teaching, tests, curricula, and 
     remedies for low-performing schools. Almost everyone in 
     public schools became sick of Washington telling them what to 
     do. So, in 2015, teacher unions and governors united to help 
     Congress enact the ``Every Student Succeeds Act,'' which the 
     Wall Street Journal said was ``the largest devolution of 
     federal control to the states in a quarter century.''
       Now, after the rise and fall of a national school board, 
     our one hundred thousand public schools have about the same 
     balance between federal leadership and state and local 
     autonomy that existed during the George H. W. Bush 
     administration. Once again, we have it about right. Thirty 
     years ago, President Bush and the governors set the nation's 
     first national education goals and then launched an ``America 
     2000'' initiative to help states meet those goals by creating 
     voluntary standards, voluntary tests, and start-from-scratch 
     schools. This was done the hard way, state by state and 
     community by community--not by federal mandates. Today's 
     environment is ripe for a revival of a content-based 
     conservative consensus, or in Bill Bennett's words ``a great 
     relearning,'' as the best way for our public schools to help 
     our country get where we want it to go. But this time, let's 
     avoid the lure of federal mandates and do the job the 
     American Way: state by state, community by community.

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