TimisBecause Ideas Have Consequences

Hillsdale College Hillsdale, Michigan 49242Volume 14, No . 4

April, 198 5

HOW TO PUT OUR SCHOOLSON THE ROAD TO RENEWA LB~ George C . Roche

Editor's Preview : After a long decline spanning mostof this century, punctuated by teachers inciting theirclasses to violence and seven last-place finishes for th eU.S. in recent rankings of various countries' educationa lperformance, America's schools finally seem ready t oclimb back toward literacy, character, and excellence .

George Roche, historian, president of Hillsdale Col-lege and the Shavano Institute, and an education advise rto the Reagan Administration, maps the road to renewa lin this keynote address to a February 1985 seminar on th esubject at Hillsdale . A dozen other education experts tookpart, including those identified with boldface in Dr .Roche's text .

He calls for fundamental curriculum reform to recove rnot only the 3 R 's but the 3 M's, mystery, myth, and im-agination, and to restore the moral dimension i nAmerican education. The grassroots movement for ex-cellence must be sustained over the delaying tactics an dexcuses of an entrenched educationist profession, if rea lchange is to occur .

Incentives for teachers and market competition amon gschools will be part of the answer, the author says . Buthe warns that voucher plans and tuition tax credits mus tnot become a pretext for letting the camel's nose o fgovernment control into the tent of private K-1 2education .

America first achieved greatness through the values o ftradition, self-reliance, family, property, and competi-tion, George Roche reminds us . The country at large i sthriving thanks to their reassertion in the 1980s . Don'tthey belong back in the classroom as well ?

Something has gone wrong, gone gravely wrong, withour children's education and their cause for hope .

In a book written not all that long ago, a humanescholar wrote, "Our civilization is going through a sever ecrisis . . . . Most people think that the crisis is due to the wa rbut they are wrong. The war, with everything connected

to it, is only a phenomenon of the condition of unciviliza-tion in which we find ourselves . "

Despite what you might be tempted to believe, the wa rwas not Vietnam. It was World War I, and the autho rwas Dr . Albert Schweitzer . His remark is evidence thatthe alienation which grips our students, the uselessnes swhich infests their curricula, and the lack of skills whic hmay plague them forever, have taken decades to arrive .

Raymond English, vice president of the Ethics andPublic Policy Center in Washington, offers this reminis-cence of the Vietnam era :

One summer day in 1968 I was teaching a group o fhigh school teachers, including a militant black woma nfrom an inner-city school . She announced bluntly thatshe advised her students to break the law—to join in riot sand looting—as a protest against the unjust society the ylived in .

How will you feel, I asked, when some of you rstudents are shot, and others get a lifelong prison record

Imprimis is the journal of Hillsdale's two outreach programs seeking to foster clear thinking on the problems of our time : the Center for Constructiv eAlternatives in Michigan and the Shavano Institute for National Leadership in Colorado . Pronounced with a long "eye" in the middle, the name mean s"in the first place" from Latin . Established 1972 ; current circulation 110,000 worldwide . A subscription is free on request .

as a result of your advice? She shrugged and remarke dthat it was not her responsibility .

At another session, another teacher (a white woman )told us that she refused to teach her students to respec tproperty . You see, she said, I ' ve no right to impose m yvalues on anyone else . I asked her if everything in theclassroom was nailed down .

These stories were anything but aberrations 20 yearsago, yet today, you would find far fewer proponents o fmoral relativism, and fewer still for violence and theft .

Only a few years ago, the educational debate in this na -tion was whether testing was not, even in its mildes tforms, racist and culturally unfair . Today, educator srealize that such a debate is a luxury .

Twenty years ago, the proponents of traditional value scould have held a national convention in a cedar closet .Today, not only do nearly all educators recognize theproblem, but we recognize that the path to rectitude lie sthrough teaching skills and values .

Coming in Las tNonetheless, the problems are frankly daunting . Seven

times, in recent comparisons between American studentsand those from other industrialized nations, our young-sters finished in last place .

Among our minority youth, who need the skills forsuccess more than any others, some 40 percent may beilliterate and hence condemned to a life without oppor-tunity .

About George C . Roche

George Roche became the eleventh president o fHillsdale College in 1971, establishing the Center fo rConstructive Alternatives and Imprimis the sameyear. Other elements of Hillsdale's national leader-ship outreach were put in place in the 1970s as Dr .Roche led the College's long fight for independenc efrom federal control and in the 1980s with his found-ing of the Shavano Institute and the Counterpoin ttelevision series .

The Colorado native holds a B .A . degree fro mRegis College and an M .A . and Ph .D . from theUniversity of Colorado . He has been a Marine of-ficer, a teacher in a country high school, a collegeprofessor, director of seminars at the Foundation fo rEconomic Education, a Senate candidate and na-tionally known speaker, a widely published autho rand historian of liberty .

Since 1982 George Roche has held a President ap -pointment as chairman of the National Council o nEducational Research, a policy-setting body of th eU .S. Department of Education .

In physics and chemistry, English and spelling, scores

fall as the number and proportion of superior student s

decline .

If you have three hours to spend, ask a college pro-fessor what she thinks of today's freshmen, and you'l l

be lucky to escape after only three hours . She may tel lyou that two out of every five 17-year-olds cannot drawan inference from written material, only three in ten canwrite a persuasive essay, or that only three in ten cansolve a math problem requiring several steps . She ma yalso explain that this accounts for her gray hair .

You might talk to a recruiting officer in any one o fAmerica's companies . Students who can't write per -suasive essays find themselves unwelcome in marketin gor advertising divisions . Those who can't calculate fin dno home in sales or accounting . Those who can't drawinferences from written materials can be offered littlehope except 40 years of lifting heavy boxes .

Today, we find no shortage of sorry statistics and ,thankfully, no shortage of agreement, but even so wemust not let ourselves be misled by numbers . The prob-lem is not teaching 10 million youngsters the handful o frules for expository writing, nor merely the simple step sof algebra . Today's problems go back to the root of ou rcurriculum .

J . Allen Smith, patron saint of the 20th century's in-tellectual climate and precursor to theorists like Charle sBeard, wrote, "The trouble with us reformers is tha twe've made reform a crusade against all standards . Well ,we've smashed them all, and now neither we nor anybodyelse have anything left . "

Three R's and Three M' s

As grim as his analysis sounds, he forgot one option .We can include again, in our schools, some of the crucialvalues and insights of Western civilization . We can goback and retrieve a few of the babies thrown out withyesterday's bath water .

Yes, we have garbage curricula in our high schools andcolleges—classes in making pesto sauce for kids who hav enever read Macbeth, classes in astrology for kids whodon't know an inclined plane from a quadratic equation .But we have yet to face the fact that the garbage startson day one .

Diane Ravitch, professor of history and education atthe Teachers College of Columbia University, asks, •"How can our children be motivated to read if what the yare reading is not worth the time it takes to decipher? Di danyone ever love a basal reader? Did anyone ever takea flashlight to bed to read a basal reader under thecovers?"

Her question leads her to the answer J . Allen Smith didnot consider :

It is certainly true that history cannot be taught i nelementary schools as it is taught in junior high or high

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school, but young people are fascinated and challenge dby the incredible but true stories of human history . . . .History provides the framework within which th eelementary teacher can use myths, legends and fair ytales . Why shouldn't children read the fabulous Gree kmyths while learning about Greek history, culture an dsociety? Education is debased when the curriculum i s

stripped of its content and when skills, free of an ycultural, literary or historical context, are all that i s

taught .

No wonder research shows that elementary schools ar enot the problem . On standarized tests of skills, th estudents are apparently doing fine . It is only later thattheir teachers report how they falter when it comes t omaking inferences or deductions . But it is not onlyhigher-order skills that they lack. They are culturally il -literate . They can read the words put in front of them ,but they have no "furniture" in their minds, n ovocabulary of historical persons or events, no referenc eto ordinary literary images that fifth graders once imbib -ed in every common school in the nation .

Like Mr . English's acquaintance, who refused to im-pose her values on anyone else, today's curriculum offer sno judgment or direction with only a shallow relevance .If people ran restaurants as they run schools, there woul dbe no more chefs and menus . We would be led to the kit-chen and left to fend for ourselves among the ingredients .It would not be surprising to find some poor souls ,unable to cook, eating oregano out of the bottle or gnaw-ing on a raw potato .

The "3 R 's, " reading, writing and arithmetic, don't allstart with "r" so I don't mind advocating a return to th e"3 M's, " mystery, myth and imagination, the basis fo rliterature and the transmission of truth so well explain-ed by Burke and Coleridge, and understood by everyon efrom Homer to C . S . Lewis .

Perhaps the trouble with some educators is that the yspend too much time with teachers and too little tim ewith children . Your average American 7-year-old, boy o rgirl, is not particularly interested in Dick or Jane or Spo tunless one of them gets blasted by a UFO . On their ow ntime, they revel in Conan the Barbarian, so how abou tUlysses and the Cyclops, or Jason and the Argonauts ?

The reason these far more interesting tales were banish-ed, years ago, is that they were judgmental and moral ,not morally relativistic .

Teachers, fearful of propagandizing their students ,stopped giving them any focal point from which to vie wthe world . Without perspective they could no longe rchoose between openness and bigotry, between the Unite dStates and the Soviet Union, between sense and nonsense ,any more than a person stripped of taste buds could dif-ferentiate between Perrier and paraquat .

Values RediscoveredThe modern crusade against relativism is anything bu t

partisan. Pick up a paper and read conservative scholar s

like Annette Kirk of the President ' s Commission on Ex -

cellence in Education . Or read Albert Shanker, presiden tof the American Federation of Teachers, saying essential-ly the same thing.

"The pendulum has swung too far," Mr. Shankerwrote recently . "Absolutism distorts reality, but so doesthe kind of relativism by which we train kids to make n ovalue judgments at all . . . indeed, to have no values . "

This is not an issue of religious rights or the right t ofreedom from imposed religion . The fact that it is wrongto steal or murder, the fact that it is right to respect you rparents and be polite to those you meet, are propertie sof all religions and simple mainstays of our civilization .A return to moral education need not be partisan an ymore than our pluralistic society is partisan .

Last year, the State of Maryland published a report ,four years in the making, from the Governor's Commis-sion on Values Education, a name and a concept unthink-able only a decade before .

The Commission noted that one-third of all America nfamilies are touched by crime in a given year, that crim eand delinquency cost us $125 billion annually . They citeda Gallup poll in which parents named discipline as on eof their greatest concerns for public schools . Theypointed out that our most damaging social problems—corruption, delinquency, alcoholism and drug abuse ,domestic instability and violence—"make imperative theteaching of character and citizenship values . "

Starting with a list of values—integrity and duty, com-passion and respect for property, discipline and th ecourage of convictions, patriotism and civic education —the Commission went to work . In 1983 they publishedtheir findings .

• "Most of the recommendations," they wrote, "re-quire action at the local level rather than relying on direc-tives of the state . "

• School boards, they discovered, could provide ne wincentives for teachers, and strengthen discipline by codi-fying rights and responsibilities . For school administra-tors, they found that strong leadership makes stron gschools . They recommended that some should be reward-ed, others educated, and some removed or transferredfrom leadership roles .

• Teachers, said the Commission, need greater sup -port . They need rewards for excellence, and they need t obe supported when they face physical or legal threats .

• Guidance counselors also need more direct exposureto the students, but parents are perhaps most importan tof all . The Commission encouraged parental involvemen tat all levels, and suggested drafting a code of parenta lresponsibilities and rights .

• Finally, the Commission made recommendations fo ra new curriculum . "First and foremost, schools mus thave strong programs in history, government, literatureand the arts ." Textbooks must include "the richness o f

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e humanities ." Students should learn teamwor ktrough extra-curricular activities, study the world' sligions, be familiar with current affairs and civicsponsibilities .

Vill the Profession Swallow the Reformers ?Across America, from states like Maryland down t o

ur smallest villages, we are beginning to question ou rurriculum and rebuild toward a better vision .

Chester Finn, professor of education and public polic yt Vanderbilt, describes the drive for educational ex-ellence as a grassroots movement, a movement unboun dy prejudice or doctrine . The proponents are willing t o. y almost anything that shows promise of success . He'rites :

Because the educational forest was so dry and th ewinds were already blowing in the right direction spark signited a reform blaze that spread like wildfire . But pro-fessional educators are wary, suspicious and a bit resent-ful . The excellence movement was not their idea . . . if theeducation profession turns its wariness and jealousy in -to massive resistance, the excellence movement will no tachieve much . In time, the commissions will stop report-ing, the newspapers will stop watching closely, the gover-nors and legislators will turn to prison reform or ground-water supplies, and the business leaders will return t otheir companies .

Real educational change, Finn warns, remains at theercy of the professionals, a situation that should give

s pause . Consigning cheerleading and drivers' educatio nafter-school hours invites feuds that are anathema t o

ze manager . Suggesting new proposals which might fai l; equally distasteful . Managers, habitually loath to stepi and suggest curricula, are especially reticent in theumanities .

There are other bugaboos . Educational professional s;ar that increased excellence means decreased equality .

But if that were true, now could we account for th etct that in the State of Michigan, year after year, to pJucational awards are won by the school on Beaver;land, a desolate little place stuck in the middle of Lak elichigan. Some big schools spill more at lunch than thi s:hool spends in a semester, yet their students are the to ploices at the best colleges in the state . The secret is notLoney or financial equality, for nobody on Beaver Islan drich. The secret is a traditional curriculum, an in -

Tested and active faculty, and effective discipline .

My own education began in a one-room Colorad o:hoolhouse . I now head a small and vigorously indepen -ent college in Michigan . Neither Gas Creek School no r[illsdale College could ever be accused of being rich, bu toth have afforded quality education and the opportunit y)r excellence . A very genuine equality of opportunity i sften most strongly present when real standards ar e-►forced .

Chester Finn also debunks a favorite excuse of schoo liministrators that he wryly calls the "Gee, Officer

Krupke" alibi :

"Schools are powerless," goes the argument . "Gee ,there's nuclear war, divorce, drug abuse and close danc-ing going on out there; what can we do?" The woefu lsituation allegedly deflects work and responsibility .However, while nobody believes that schoolteachers ar ethe cause of the world's problems, there is nothin goutlandish in expecting educators to educate . Whether wesuffer from teacher failure or a misguided system, it i sfair to expect the help of teachers and administrators incorrecting the situation .

Incentives for Teacher Excellenc eIn rallying educators and administrators behind th e

banner of excellence, most of the problems are bureau-cratic, and my use of the word contains no critical under -tones . Indeed, the same administrative factors are at pla yin educational management as in government or any ofour larger corporations . The solution, however, lies in themagic word "incentives . "

If you don't mind, I'll take a brief moment to railabout hypocrisy . I believe it fair to say that mostAmericans cherish our free-enterprise system . Aseconomists and everyone else worry about foreign com-petition, "incentives" are frequently advanced as a solu-tion . Tax cuts boost incentives and provide jobs . Produc-tivity pay boosts output on the assembly lines . From ourrichest to our poorest, we 're happy to tell people to com-pete . But we've forgotten incentives for one of the mos timportant groups of all—the teachers who must train ouryoung to believe in competition, excellence and, yes ,incentives .

Right now, we treat good teachers exactly the same a sbad teachers . Is it any wonder that some get discourag-ed while others never try ?

The good ones deserve formal recognition, applaus efrom students, parents and peers, and, for lack of a betterword, cash .

Schools need career ladders of the sort most college salready have, with increasing pay, increasing responsibili-ty, and most important, increasing respect . This is theparticular genius of the Master Teacher program, passe dinto law by the State of Tennessee under the direction ofGovernor Lamar Alexander .

Some have complained that this system does little butreward a few. That's a mistaken notion . We must vieweducation as a dynamic rather than a static process . Asthere can be no finite limits to excellence, there can be nofinite limit to awards . Once teachers realize that thei rhard work will be rewarded, expect to find more an dmore hard-working teachers and more and more excel-lence .

As teaching becomes more lucrative, as well as mor eappreciated, count on more of our brightest young peopl echoosing teaching as their profession .

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Any successful businessman can tell you that any prob-lem can be overcome with the right incentive . Ten year sfrom now, expect any school administrator to tell youthat the problems of school management, the problem sin selling excellence to a bureaucracy, were overcome i nthe same way : by incentives .

Political Monopoly or Market Competition ?There is one more educational problem I have yet to

mention : politics .

Politics rears its ugly head at several points in th eeducational debate . We all know there is no shortage o fpropaganda in America . All we have to do is switch onthe television to see someone selling some ideology oranother . The problem comes when such stuff is peddle din the classroom .

The nuclear freeze movement, for example, has give nus the spectacle of a large number of teachers inculcatin gfear and using that fear to direct the political attitude sof their students. President Reagan received baskets o fletters from grade schoolers, imploring him not to blo wup the world .

Parenthetically, one such letter, from a small boy, sai dhe supported the President anyway, but was only writingthe letter because his teacher told him he had to .

While some good can be done by administrators an dactive parents, commitment cannot always work . Wheth-er for political or religious reasons, or simply as a mat -ter of taste in curriculum, there has to be another option ,provided by free enterprise .

We are seeing that competition and incentive build bet -ter teachers, so it follows that they also build bette rschools . Today, millions of students receive private edu-cations, whether for children especially talented or dis-abled, for religious preference, or simply for somethingdifferent and often better than is thought to be availableat the government school up the road .

The role of private schools as a significant part of ou reducational structure raises the question of vouchers .Here I must bring up the name of Albert Shanker again .Unfortunately, the president of the American Federatio nof Teachers is not as enlightened on vouchers as he is onreturning to values . "The greater the free choice grantedby a voucher plan," he has predicted, "the more will theeducational interests of the poor, black, and difficul tchildren suffer . "

Now this is a worthy concern, but the reasoning isbackward . John McLaughry, a former Reagan Whit eHouse aide, puts it more accurately in a Reason magazinearticle, pointing out that under the present quasi -monopoly it is precisely those disadvantaged children wh o"are ordinarily the ones with the least possibility of af-fording private alternatives to inferior governmen tschools . "

Vouchers would begin to change that, Mr . McLaughry5

notes, and he cites a major public opinion poll in 198 3that showed a majority of Americans anxious to tryvouchers . "Most politicians," he says, "remain skittish . "

They also remain skittish on tuition tax credits, remov -ing private school parents from double jeopardy—payingtuition once in taxes and again in tuition payments .Critics charge that tax credits would strip assets from in-ferior schools, but would they? A $500 tax credit mean sone less student in school, and one less for the schoo lboard to educate . The remainder of his tax money stil lgoes to the government school . If anything, it wouldenrich the poorer schools .

Critics also complain that both vouchers and credit swould take the bright children out of the state-runclassrooms . But one can easily make the argument tha tonly something that important will stir parents to action ,demanding increased quality from their governmen tschools .

Let me add this strong word of caution, however . Bothof these proposed reforms—tax credits for the tuition aparent would pay to a private school, and choice -widening vouchers that a parent could spend at publi cand private schools alike—are schemes for channelin ggovernment funds into the private sector of America nelementary and secondary education . Anyone who doubtsthat government control would accompany those govern-ment dollars has missed the point of the long, sad stor yof public encroachment upon private higher education inour country during the past two decades . It is a story thatwe at Hillsdale know all too well, and it has become eve nmore dangerous with the "once a tax dollar, always a taxdollar" doctrine of indirect aid handed down by theSupreme Court in last year's Grove City case and no wpossibly headed for the statute books under several bill spending in Congress .

So while we should welcome the voucher and tuitio ntax credit debate as a way of focusing attention on theneed for freer choice and a more open market in K-1 2education, we should be extremely wary of letting th ecamel of state control use this device to get its nose int othe tent of our independent, non-government schools .

The Road to Renewa lIt is striking, when we step back and look at the coun-

try as a whole, to realize that what we find as trouble i nthe schools is what we have found as trouble in much o fAmerica .

Our economy, staggering under brutal taxes andregulatory mismanagement, has suffered from the sam elack of incentives our teachers suffer from today.

Our society, plagued with rootlessness and self-doubt ,turned from a more traditional America and lost its belie fin excellence because we lost our ability to judge ex-cellence . Today, we are beginning to recover as our coun -try grows again more sure of itself, more wisely patrioticand more strong . Meanwhile our schools wander on, lost

in the same woods most of our nation is now leaving .

As consumers, as producers, we have come again t oknow the fruits of competition, but we are unpreparedto face genuine competition in our schools .

In caring for our needy, we have come to realize tha tfreewheeling giveaways do not work, and that assistanc emust be coupled with training for self-reliance. Yet tim eand time again, we hear the cry that educational reforms ,educational management, and educational spending mustcome from Washington .

In our discussion of reform in our schools we hav eneglected our first lesson, the lesson of life in America .

We will not return to literacy or excellence until w eapply those immutable rules of life to the classroom . Thevalues of tradition, of property and of family which, bycommon accord, made America prosper can again mak eour schools seats of learning and not mere way stationsbetween childhood and unemployment .

We have tried all the instant powders, drugs and quac kcures before . We've tried massive injections of taxdollars, raids on private institutions, regulations and

rhetoric . It is time to try something we haven't trie dbefore—excellence .

If we can afford excellent incentives for our industries ,we can afford them for our schools . If we can afford ex-cellent freedom for our consumers, we can afford tha tsame freedom for parents and students choosing a school .If we can afford to return to common values in the coun-try at large, then we cannot live without those values inthe classroom . And we can't afford to wait much longer .

Further reading on education reform from th eHillsdale College Press: George Roche's books Educationin America, The Balancing Act : Quota Hiring in Highe rEducation, and America by the Throat : The Strangleholdof Federal Bureaucracy ; the Essential Imprimis anthologyentitled Rescuing American Education, with essays byRoche and ten other authors; and videocassettes o rtranscript of "The Federal Role in Quality Education, "a debate in the PBS-TV Counterpoint series featuringRoche, current Education Secretary William Bennett, an dCarter's Education Secretary, Shirley Hufstedler . Toorder, write or call the Hillsdale College Press, Hillsdale ,MI 49242, (517) 437-7341 .

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Founder & President, George C . Roche III . Editor, John K . Andrews, Jr . Managing Editor, Peter C . McCarty . Assis-tant, Patricia A . DuBois . The opinions expressed in Imprimis may be, but are not necessarily, the views of HillsdaleCollege and its outreach divisions . Copyright ©1985 . Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, pro -vided the following credit line is used verbatim: "Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, the monthly journal of Hillsdal eCollege, featuring presentations at Hillsdale's Center for Constructive Alternatives and at its Shavano Institute for Na -tional Leadership ." ISSN 0277-8432 .