I want to follow-up on my last post about the importance of local government to the principles that we conservatives and Republicans hold dear, and to return to the issue of education reform as an example of the challenges we face at the local government level.
To set the stage for this discussion, let’s establish some context. Remember that our Founders stated in the Declaration of Independence that government should be grounded “on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” Madison then described the proper allocation of governmental power to create such a government in Federalist Paper No. 45:
The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State government are numerous and indefinite. … The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.
The leader of the modern Republican Party and conservative movement, Ronald Reagan, made Madison’s allocation of governmental power the centerpiece of his plan for a New Republican Party. In his 1977 speeches about this New Republican Party, Reagan referenced the 1976 GOP Platform as being “the major source from which a Declaration of principles can be created and offered to the American People.” Within the 1976 Platform is a proposal that would commit the New Republican Party to actively apply Madison’s governmental structure to address real issues facing Americans:
A National Urban Strategy
The decay and decline of communities in this country is not just a physical and economic crisis, but is traceable to the decline of a real “sense of community” in our society. Community development cannot be achieved merely by throwing dollars and mortar at our community problems; what must be developed is a new sense of mutual concern and responsibility among all members of a community for its improvement.
We recognize the family, the neighborhood and the private volunteer sector to be the most basic and vital units within our communities and we recognize their central role in revitalizing our communities. We propose a strategy for urban revitalization that both treats our urban areas as social organisms and recognizes that the family is the basic building block in these organisms.
…This policy must be based on the principle that the levels of government closest to the cities’ problems are best able to respond. …
As I have argued since 2009, and especially in my posts last year, the proper education of our children is one of the most important actions that any community can take to “effect their Safety and Happiness;” and from the Northwest Ordinances, to the Texas Declaration of Independence, to the Texas Constitution, our forefathers recognized that providing a proper education to our children was a critical responsibility of state and local governments—those governments closest to our problems. Viewed in this context, our schools are the most important and fundamental local governmental institutions that exist within the Madisonian structure of government to which our party re-committed itself over 3 decades ago.
The irony is that, although the local school is the one governmental institution that each of us is guaranteed to come in contact with during our lifetimes (either as students, parents or taxpayers) and we champion the local control of our schools, we know so little about our school system, we often misunderstand it because we judge it based on our understanding of national politics and government, and we have tried to find too many quick fixes to specific problems rather than address the needs of the system as a whole. As a result many of us don’t effectively participate in the governance of our schools, and we have tended to create deeper systemic problems over the last 30 years as we’ve tried to implement quick fixes.
There are essentially four steps to providing a public education system:
- Identifying the knowledge that we want our children to have an opportunity to learn before they become adults, and delivering that knowledge to each student;
- Creating and implementing the standards and measurements by which we assess the adequacy of and accountability for the delivery of that knowledge at each grade level, and at each level of the educational system from the classroom to schools to the districts to the state agencies to the Legislature;
- Developing and implementing the process by which the knowledge is created and delivered; the system is assessed; and the facilities, labor, administration, and governance are provided throughout the system; and
- Developing the budgets for, and raising the revenue to finance, the system.
Under our State constitution, our State government has the primary responsibility for providing this system and for making sure that it functions properly to deliver knowledge to more than 4.3 million children every school year—an aggregate student body second in size only to California. The State Constitution and the Legislature have allocated the responsibility for these four tasks primarily among the Texas Education Agency, the State Board of Education, and over 1,000 school districts across the state. The primary responsibility of each School Board is to make sure that its district is providing the facilities, labor and administration needed to meet the knowledge, delivery and assessment requirements set by the State, and to raise the revenue needed to meet its responsibilities. Collectively, the State’s role is to provide the requirements for knowledge, delivery, assessment, and processes, and to supplement the revenue each district needs to meet these requirements so that each child in Texas has a roughly equal opportunity to obtain the knowledge to be delivered. On top of all of this, is layered the Federal Government’s mandates that impact the State’s requirements and the School District’s responsibilities and costs.
Over the last 30 years, our State government has tried to separately address problems with each of the four steps described above. In fact, during the present Legislative Session, there are at least 9 bills on file in each chamber addressing public education. In addition to legislative and regulatory initiatives, our State Supreme Court on at least three occasions has found the methods used to finance the educational system to be either inadequate or unconstitutional, and we will soon face another round of litigation later this year over the same issue. The result of all of these initiatives has been a mixed bag, with some positive initiatives and some wholly ineffective initiatives, and this mixed bag really presents an complicated, unfocused and inconsistent system statewide that actually leaves so many of our students undereducated. For example, I challenge anybody to sit down and study how the “Robin Hood” financing system actually works, and then try to explain it to someone else without that person pleading for mercy—it is ridiculously Byzantine.
Complicating this system further has been the nature of population growth in Texas and its impact on public schools. Over the last 20 years, Texas has grown enormously from child births, migration, and immigration, and the metropolitan school districts in and around the major cities have borne the heaviest burden of this growth, as well as the additional burden from the internal migration of people from rural areas to these metropolitan areas where over 75{997ab4c1e65fa660c64e6dfea23d436a73c89d6254ad3ae72f887cf583448986} of Texans now live. This growth not only has changed the overall number of students these districts have to educate, but also has changed the type of student they have to educate by increasing the number of students with special needs and/or for whom English is a second language. Many metropolitan school districts, especially those covering the outer rings of these communities that have experienced such explosive growth, were ill-prepared to absorb these new students.
Unfortunately, none of the bills being considered now in Austin will come close to fixing this mess. Almost all of the bills address only certain components of the second and third steps—standards, measurements, and process. Being creative with these components is essential if we are to fix the system, but it is irrelevant if we don’t try to fix the entire system.
We have not stepped back and looked at the system as a whole for many, many decades—if ever. As I started to write about last fall, a serious systemic review must start with the first step—defining the knowledge we must teach and determining how best to deliver it to our students—and move to each step until we have a coherent system prepared to meet the foreseeable educational challenges over the next two generations; and then we must dedicate the proper resources and time to make the system work and last over several decades. I have been waiting to resume those posts until we have a written order from the trial court in Austin. But, frankly, unless we use that order as an opportunity to conduct a systemic review and reform (including adjusting and better coordinating some of the specific reforms that have been adopted over the last few sessions), the financing system won’t be adequately fixed, no matter what the Supreme Court eventually says, because we won’t really know how much money a properly functioning system will need.
So, where does all of this lead a Republican worried about the local school? We must work on three fronts simultaneously:
- Support our Republican Congressmen and Senators in Washington to continue to fight any further attempts by the federal government to involve itself in the operation of our schools, and to reduce the current level of involvement whenever possible, in order to reduce the burden and inefficiencies caused by federal mandates;
- Call for a systemic reform of all four steps of the educational system, starting with curriculum review, teacher qualifications, and classroom dynamics, and then tailoring the standards and measurements to this new foundation; moving to a Sunset review of all state agencies and school districts in order to allow for the re-organization of the process of educational regulation, administration and governance; and ending with the abolition of “Robin Hood” as part of a complete overhaul of how we finance education across the State; and
- Engage in the actual life of our local schools and the operation of our local districts.
As for this final step, we must look at our school boards as they are—not as a local reflection of all the problems we see in Washington or Austin, but as the governing body charged primarily with managing the process and local financing of the State’s educational system in our communities—and then judge their actions accordingly. In this light, we need to understand the special dynamics facing each community and the students each school district must educate. Then, we must challenge our school boards to cost-effectively provide the process and revenues to address those dynamics—opposing them when they are wrong, but (just as importantly) supporting them when they are right. Eventually, we will need to help these boards implement the reforms we will ask the State to adopt.
Most importantly, our school districts need us on school boards—not just protesting from the outside looking in. Although there have been, and continue to be many good Republicans on many of the 24 school districts covering all or part of Harris County, they need our help. Too often, because few people engage in the school board or school bond election process, we end up with board candidates and trustees who are there to promote their own narrow, fleeting agendas, or to promote the special interests of unions, contractors, or advocacy groups connected with school system in some way. So, we get the school board we deserve by our inaction.
What happened to the Republican bankers, doctors, lawyers, philanthropists, civic and religious leaders, and local businesspeople, who used to come forward with their education and experience to serve on these boards? We need fellow Republicans to re-engage in the communities in which they live and to run and serve on these boards in greater numbers. So much of the misunderstanding and misinformation about the state of our school districts could be fixed, and our efforts focused on the real systemic problems in our educational system, if we would just serve on these boards rather than complain about them.
Finally, we need to be there to implement the systemic reforms we want Austin to adopt.
Sally Belladonna Baggins Stricklett says
Ed, you never cease to amaze me. Well said.
Don Sumners says
Ed:
Your commentaries are getting so long that you need to add a “Takeaways” paragraph at the end.
In my opinion you missed one “front” that is sorely needed. A State required system of ISD self-reporting to the public of benchmark data. ISD’s are like any other government; they are resistant to accountability and transparency. ISD’s, in particular, act as if they are independent from the State except when they are claiming that the State is obligated to fund their operations.
An example of what I am suggesting; if the Legislature hadn’t required annual “truth-in-taxation” calculations and disclosure by the taxing units, we would know very little about local government’s property taxation actions.
Jeff Shadwick says
Well done. All of this is why I got into school board politics 20 years ago. We must have conservatives who understand government function get involved in local school boards. By the way, I have developed a 4-5 sentence explanation of Robin Hood that works pretty well!