[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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