Lamar Alexander on Educating America

by Benjamin Patch and Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Editor’s Note: Lamar Alexander is a former Governor of Tennessee, Secretary of Education and candidate for the Presidency of the United States. The conversation centered on the nature of American education, the area in which Alexander hopes to distinguish himself from his Republican counterparts.

TDR: You mentioned that your daughter goes to Brown. They’ve got quite an unconventional curriculum. How have you found that? Do you think, in general, that the present trend away from the Western tradition in undergraduate education is beneficial or productive?

Alexander: No. I would like to make certain that students in our universities are exposed to western civilization and the classical values. This is a country whose great distinction is that we’ve been able to take people of many different backgrounds and say that we are all Americans. And the principles that unite us come primarily from western civilization and those are principles and ideas like individual liberty and freedom and the rule of law that are available to Americans who came from anywhere in the world. It’s important for us to understand that that is what helped make this a great country. So it’s hard for me to imagine a complete college education without some understanding of Western civilization.

TDR: You’ve spoken at length about what you refer to as the contemporary crisis in American education at the elementary and secondary levels. What are the fundamental problems that are engendering this crisis?

Alexander: Well, number one: low standards. Number two: a lack of professionalism in teaching. And number three: a lack of choices for parents. The way to resolve them is higher standards, locally set — not by Washington. Number two, as far as teaching goes, we should pay good teachers a lot more. We should give teachers freedom from union rules and government regulations that insult their intelligence and give them freedom to create great schools. And we should change the teacher tenure law so we can dismiss incompetent teachers or reassign teachers who aren’t in the right place. And finally, we should give parents as many choices of schools as possible.

Every parent should have choice of a safe neighborhood school for their child. Home-schooling parents should have choices of courses in public schools. I would like to see the federal money we spend for schools spent the same way for colleges, which is to give it to low and middle income parents and let them spend it at the school they believe best fits the needs of their child.

TDR: So you’re talking about vouchers then?

Alexander: Sure. We’ve had a seventy year history with scholarships, vouchers, called the GI Bill, the Pell Grants. What a lot of people forget is that after World War II, Senator Dole’s generation, many of the veterans came back and they didn’t have a high school education.

So they took their federal vouchers and spent them at Catholic high schools all over America, hundreds of thousands, and the sky didn’t fall. So we’ve had plenty of experience with vouchers or scholarships that students could spend at any school.

TDR: You’ve spoken at length, as well, about the public and private failure to impress a fundamental sense of morality and ethics upon our children. Does it seem, then, a little shortsighted to pass the responsible for the public and ethical education of children on to private schools, schools with perhaps different agendas? The development of better public schools, with the charter school movement and the prominence of such innovators as Deborah Meier in New York, seems to have come a long way in the past decade. Doesn’t it then seem preferable, given the civic duty of the public schools, to concentrate, instead of vouchers, on public school reform?

Alexander: I think it’s very important that we reform the public school system in America. We have public schools for a reason in this country. And the reason is that we created the common school 150 years ago primarily to help immigrant children learn English and Math and learn what it means to be an American and then they would go home and teach their children to do that. It was a unifying aspect of our country and we still need that. So that’s why we revere public schools. So there’s no reason in the world why we can’t recharter our public schools one by one until all of them have high standards and master teachers and offer parents choices. And if we do that I think we’ll be better off then if we were to dismantle the public school system.

TDR: We take standardized tests to be accurate measures of student achievment, and any discussion of standards on a broad level presupposes a reliance on standardized tests. Standardized tests have come under, however, a series of criticisms for being poor judges of learning. Do those need to be reformed before we can develop a system of broad educational ‘standards’?

Alexander: Well, standardized tests like the SAT and the ACT and the Iowa Test are one indicator of educational success. I think one of the benefits of the abolition of affirmative action is that it will force college admissions offices to get back to doing what they should have been doing anyway, and that is looking at the whole student instead of whether they made 645 on the math side of their test. The most interesting student to admit might not be the student with 1346.

That’s a strong indicator of someone with an exceptional intellect but there are lots of other things to look for. And for one reason or another a great many of our universities have relied I think excessively on a few standardized tests. I think they should use them as one indicator and begin to look at the whole person as a student. I think the whole student body will be a lot more diverse. And it will ironically come as universities get away from wooden affirmative action programs.

TDR: You mentioned affirmative action. I know that during your administration in Tennessee you had a series of quabbles with the teacher’s unions over affirmative action in hiring teachers. Does affirmative action help or hinder the development of a talented corps of teachers?

Alexander: In Tennessee we were under court order to use affirmative action at the universities and in the schools in the 70s and 80s. I’d like to see us get away from those court orders. And the way to make sure there are more African American teachers is to pay good teachers more and offer more opportunities to talented students including black students at Dartmouth and the University of Tennessee so they’ll want to be teachers and they’ll want to go home and teach. It’s very difficult to expect an African-American student who’s very talented and highly recruited to want to go into a career where the top pay is $40,000 a year when he or she can make a lot more somewhere else. If we were to pay good teachers more, have master teachers, I think that would go a long way to including a lot more people in the pool of teaching applicants. That would be the best way.

TDR: What are your thoughts on teachers unions, specifically the NEA? Do you think they help students, or do you think they’re a detriment?

Alexander: Well, teachers in this country have a right to join a union. I think the National Education Association has too often been the obstacle to the kind of schools its members want for children. Their members want children who can learn and most teachers do. In order to have that we’ve got to have teachers with higher standards, that pay good teachers more, that are freer from union rules, that have different tenure laws, and parents have got to have more choices.

You’ve got to get rid of cross-town busing so parents can have choices of safe-neighborhood schools. You’ve got to bend over backwards to help home-schooling parents. And all those things the NEA is either against or in the way of. So that’s their position, but I think its important to notice that the fastest growing teachers organizations in the country are not the teachers unions. They’re the independent professional teaching associations, who are organizations of teachers that are a lot like the NEA was in the 50s and 60s before it became such a union. Georgia has more members of the Georgia Teachers Association, a professional teachers association, then of the teachers union.

TDR: I read an article the other day that called you the “uninspired third choice” for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2000 behind Bush and Forbes. How would you respond to that? Is there inspiration in your campaign? Where is the life coming from?

Alexander: Well my law school roommate Paul Tagliabue was third choice just before he got elected commissioner of the National Football League so it’s not always a bad place to be, this far out.

The presidential race starts in a year; the winner will be the Republican who challenges our country to be at its best and shows the people that he knows how to get things done once he gets there and we’ll just have to see who’s the most persuasive once we get there. If I’m a candidate I’ll be pointing to my experience and background and record and my ideas and trying to persuade the American people that I can do that better than the other competitors. It’s going to be a very interesting race, we have new leaders, new issues, it’s really wide open. When I started last time, five months after the race started Senator Dole was 54% and I was 3% and the margin of error was four and I had nearly caught him by New Hampshire. So to be in a position where all of us have between 10% and 20% of the vote in the key states means that we really have a dead heat starting out and it should be a good contest in which the American people can participate.