Conform: Exposing the Truth About Common Core and Public Education

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To Michael O’Shea, who taught me to find a mentor—and then become one.

And to Robert Beath, my high school drama teacher, who instilled a love of learning and exploring the unknown.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

—ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Men are cast-iron; but children are wax.

—HORACE MANN

America was founded on the revolutionary belief that human beings receive their rights from God, not the government. With just a handful of well-chosen words, our Declaration of Independence effectively stood the entire history of human existence on its head.

Our Founders reaffirmed these self-evident truths in the Bill of Rights, including freedom of religion, speech, press, and assembly.

Freedom is so deeply ingrained in our national psyche that we wouldn’t think of letting the government tell us where to live, what kind of car to drive, or what to eat for dinner. But somewhere along the way, too many Americans bought into the idea that the government has the authority to tell us where we must send our children to school, based on nothing more than our zip code. Americans who were always taught to be mistrustful of government and power somehow agreed to entrust bureaucrats with the education of their children.

Many Americans go along with this zip code approach to education because, frankly, it works reasonably well for them. Their children attend a government-run school where most students seem to learn reading, writing, and math at an acceptable level. Sure, they might wish their local schools were better in some way, but all in all, the system works okay for them.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of American families having a completely different experience. They are not being well served by their zip code–assigned school. Not only are their children not learning much, but their very safety is in jeopardy because their school is so chaotic and dangerous.

It is fundamentally unfair and un-American to force certain children to attend a failing, dysfunctional school simply because their family can’t afford to move into the right school district. This is not freedom—and it goes against everything our Founders believed about how education should work.

Still, the teachers’ unions and their progressive friends in the media and the state legislatures—people we collectively refer to as controllists—defend zip code education and argue the only thing ailing government schools is a lack of funding.

Almost every day there are news stories about disputes between a teachers’ union and their local school board. These fights invariably revolve around the same issues: teacher pay and benefits, work rules and accountability. It’s gotten so absurd that some unions and school boards actually spend time negotiating over how the money from the teachers’ lounge vending machine is going to be spent and how much humidity is allowable in each classroom, or work site, as unions like to call them.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress reports, We spend more per pupil than any other country, but among industrialized nations, American students rank near the bottom in science and math. Only 13 percent of high school seniors know what high school seniors should know about American history. And remember, these results are based off government-determined standards of what they think our kids should know about science, math, and history. Our personal standards are likely much higher.

It’s time to stop the insanity. It’s time to focus on the students and their needs, instead of the adult employees and their unions. It’s time to make sure every classroom is staffed with an outstanding teacher, and every family has access to an outstanding classroom. It’s time to kick down the walls that are keeping children from reaching their full potential.

We can do better—much better—than the system the controllists have given us. But it’s not going to be easy. Those ivory towers are heavily reinforced and the people who reside in them have a lot of money and power. They control many of our school boards, state legislatures, teacher colleges, and government bureaucracies, and they’re not going to relinquish control without a vicious political fight.

The reality is that the controllists know their approach to education isn’t working. But instead of admitting that and allowing choice to reign, they’re pushing the Common Core national learning standards, which create stifling conformity among our schools. Even some conservatives are telling us that the way to fix our education system is by having all of our schools teach students the same concepts at the same time using the same methods.

Does anyone honestly believe the same people who got us into this mess really have a one-size-fits-all magical solution for fixing it?

Of course not. This is just about more power. More money. More conformity.

In my previous book in this series I ended my introductory note with this:

Information is power. Those without it have nothing. Those with it will always have CONTROL.

Most American slaves were uneducated and illiterate—not because they were incapable of learning, but because their owners forbid it. In some places, like South Carolina, it was actually against the law to teach a slave how to read or write. Why? Because an educated slave was a threat to the status quo.

The same premise applies to today’s system of education. The dumbing-down of America is good for one group and one group only: those who currently have all the power and control. By maintaining a failing system they are forcing a collapse that will have only one savior: the federal government. And that’s exactly how they want it.

We now stand at the precipice. On one side is the complete nationalization of education and complete loss of local and parental control. On the other side is a complete educational revolution—one that is rooted in individuality and that follows the principle of maximum freedom, maximum responsibility.

For the first time in decades we have a real opportunity to convince the country that this kind of revolution is long overdue. People are sick and tired of lower expectations, lower test scores, constant bickering between the schools and unions, and continued increases to their property tax bills to pay for it all.

It’s time to combine the incredible technology of the present with the incredible philosophical ideas on education from our past. It’s time to restore parents as the rightful leaders of their families and teachers of their children. And it’s time to once again put America on top of the world and usher in a new era of education unlike anything this country has ever seen before.

I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and fight for our kids. I hope you’re ready to join me.

Glenn Beck

Dallas, Texas

February 2014

PART ONE

THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION

1

YOU CAN’T CRITICIZE PUBLIC EDUCATION IF YOU HAVEN’T BEEN IN THE CLASSROOM

What madness has overtaken our nation? Why the push to hand innocent children and scarce public dollars to non-educators? How does ‘caring’ about education translate into the experience and knowledge needed to run a school?

—DIANE RAVITCH, Research Professor of Education, New York University

If you haven’t been in the classroom you have no business in the [school] board room.

—PATRICIA FOX, teacher in Orange County, Florida

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, an AFL-CIO affiliate with approximately 1.5 million members and more than three thousand local affiliate unions across the nation, has never served in the military, or as a foreign ambassador in the U.S. Department of State.

Given this lack of firsthand experience, she obviously had no right to criticize U.S. military action in Iraq. Everyone knows that if you’ve never been on the front lines, you have no business debating a war.

Weingarten has also never, to the best of my knowledge, performed a surgery. She’s never checked a patient for strep throat or an ear infection, and she’s never prescribed pills to treat an injury. Given this lack of real-world medical experience, she obviously had no business supporting Obamacare or discussing the specifics of our country’s health-care system.

Of course Weingarten would be quick to remind us that she and her fellow union members are U.S. citizens and taxpayers and that her union represents many thousands of health-care professionals. She’d very likely argue that she has every legal, moral, and professional right to speak her mind on any public policy topic she chooses.

And she’d be absolutely right.

It’s unfortunate that Weingarten and her fellow progressives seem to forget this lesson when it comes to education. While most of us have never stood in front of a classroom of students or graded a test, we are citizens and parents and taxpayers and we have the right to speak out about educational issues that affect our families and communities.

Public employees have no business telling the public to mind its own business. That’s not how things work in America (or at least it’s not how they’re supposed to work). It would be like Congress telling citizens to stay out of public policy debates because we’ve never been congressmen. The voters would quickly correct them in the next election cycle.

The same principle applies in the private sector. You don’t hear the owners of professional sports teams telling the fans to keep their thoughts to themselves because they’ve never owned an NFL team or taken a snap at quarterback. They know better than to say such things because the fans pay the bills.

Yet the education professionals expect us—the people who pay the bills—to keep our noses out of their business. Instead of following the golden rule of any other service business—the customer is always right, they say the customer should keep his mouth shut. It’s a ridiculous concept that should’ve been corrected long ago—but that hasn’t happened.

For all practical purposes, public education has been the exclusive realm of the teachers’ unions for the past five or six decades.

Sure, the unions demanded control, but we didn’t have to give it to them. Instead of standing up for our kids and fighting for a place at the table, we’ve allowed the unions to seize power through years of our foolish indifference.

We saw groups with warm and fuzzy names like the National Education Association running things, and we assumed that our schools were in the hands of loving educators who put kids first. We had no idea that the union bosses are political animals who have more interest in enhancing their own careers and bank accounts than our children.

The unions took full advantage of our carelessness. They moved quickly to elect union-friendly school board members who rewarded them with fat compensation packages that crippled school budgets and locked local taxpayers into decades of ever-increasing property taxes.

They started pumping millions of dollars into the campaigns of union-friendly political candidates in an effort to guarantee influence over policies and budgets.

They developed a closed system of collective bargaining, where they and their handpicked board members decided how to spend the money and run the schools while taxpayers were all but locked out of the room.

They fought bitterly against suggested reforms like performance pay for outstanding teachers and tougher evaluations for all teachers. They resisted any changes to tenure laws or seniority provisions that guarantee employment for all, regardless of qualifications.

They did everything in their power to maintain their guaranteed clientele of geographically trapped students by fighting anything that even had a whiff of choice to it, including the development of charter schools, online schools, home-schooling, and private school voucher programs.

The unions had successfully arranged things exactly the way they wanted them: Government spending on public education continued to rise; salaries and benefits continued to skyrocket; and jobs for compliant dues-payers were basically guaranteed for life.

Everyone else stood by and pretty much let it happen. We were lazy and naïve—and now we’re paying the price.

But a few years ago something remarkable happened: taxpayers began to wake up. Perhaps it was the recession or the insane tax bills or the constant bad news about America’s educational standing—but, whatever the reason, people started to pay attention again.

And they didn’t like what they were seeing.

Federal and state spending on public education has increased nearly 1,500 percent since 1970. Over $2 trillion (adjusted for inflation) has been spent by the federal government alone since 1965, and the total cost of a K–12 public education now stands at more than $151,000 per student. After adjusting for inflation, that’s almost 300 percent higher than what we spent on the graduating class of 1970.

Unfortunately, that investment hasn’t yielded much of a return. According to a study of government data performed by the Cato Institute and presented to a congressional committee in 2011, Math and Reading scores at the end of high school are unchanged over the past forty years, while Science scores suffered a slight decline through the year 1999, the last time that test was administered.

Our students also continue to fall behind their peers in other nations. According to 2012 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) test scores, American students rank 31st in math, 24th in science, and 21st in reading globally. Our students are outperformed by those in Vietnam, Iceland, Estonia, and Hungary.

It’s clear we haven’t been getting our money’s worth from our education system, and now more and more people are finally demanding change.

That brings me back to the overall argument we’re addressing in this chapter, which can pretty much be summed up as the controllists telling the rest of us to mind our own business.

The real reason that line is so dangerous is that it’s the one thing that guarantees the status quo will continue. Unions know that when we come to our senses and remember that we’re the owners and that they work for us, the charade will be over.

We shouldn’t be surprised by this reaction. In fact, we should expect it. The education professionals are simply reacting like teens would react if you left them at home with gobs of your money and no supervision for a year and then you returned and tried to restore law and order. They’d be upset because the party was over. They’d tell you everything was actually fine and beg you to go away again, to give them just a little more time. Teachers’ union leaders feel the same way. They’d much prefer we stay out of the house.

Their tactics will be familiar. They will attempt to mock, belittle, and intimidate us, all in the hope that we will once again defer to their superior intellect and let them handle our schools however they’d like.

But those days are over.

The time has come for us to form our own union: a group of concerned parents and taxpayers who believe that enough is enough. Our power will come through our common goals and unending focus on a simple yet effective strategy: to use our votes to elect responsible school board members and state officials who actually listen to the public. After all, politicians aren’t stupid. They like union money, but they like votes even more. If taxpayers tell them to fix our schools and then we follow up by bouncing a few who think we’re bluffing, we will get the kind of change we want—and we’ll get it fast.

So, to all of the status quo–loving bureaucrats, controllists, and union leaders, thanks for the tip—I think we will start minding our business.

2

CRITICS OF THE SYSTEM ARE JUST TEACHER BASHERS

When did teacher bashing become the new national pastime?

—SAM CHALTAIN, former national director of the Forum for Education and Democracy

America hates teachers because America hates learning. How can anyone who tries to instill ideas in the next generation stand a chance in this country that brought us Fox News and reality television?

—DAVID SIROONIAN, New York City history teacher

Since a teacher’s working conditions are a child’s learning conditions, attacking teachers is the same as attacking children.

—RANDY MOUSLEY, president of United Teachers of Wichita

Governor Romney and a number of folks try to politicize the issue and do a lot of teacher-bashing.

—BARACK OBAMA, U.S. president

Teachers’ union officials are the ultimate political animals. The NEA and AFT doled out a combined $19.4 million to the Democratic Party, its candidates, and allies, in 2012. In addition, they regularly deliver thousands of volunteers and votes to their anointed candidates at every level of government, and they can always be counted on to lob verbal bombs at Republicans.

They can dish it out with the best of them, but they can’t take it. When someone criticizes a teachers’ union, they often respond by invoking claims of teacher bashing.

The trouble is that the current teacher-bashing rhetoric plays right into the hands of conservative politicians who want to slash pay and benefits for teachers, wrote Ashley Lauren Samsa, a public school teacher in Illinois.

The rhetoric she was referring to included the idea that bad teachers can’t be fired because of union contracts. But that’s not rhetoric, it’s a fact—and it has absolutely nothing to do with cutting pay for teachers. In fact, most conservatives I know agree with me that good teachers should be paid more.

Still, the idea that attacking antiquated concepts, like granting tenure to third-grade public school teachers, is somehow equivalent to bashing teachers themselves is very effective. Most teachers are highly respected—even beloved—in their communities. A 2013 Gallup poll revealed that 73 percent of people have trust and confidence in public school teachers. That number rose to 78 percent when filtered to respondents under the age of forty.

A 2006 Harris poll found similar levels of admiration for public school teachers: 75 percent of respondents said teachers have very great or considerable prestige. A 2013 Pew Research Center poll revealed that 72 percent of people believe that teachers contribute a lot to society’s well-being.

Despite union leaders’ best efforts to conflate the two, teachers and their unions are far from the same thing. In fact, only a very small percentage of teachers take any interest in their union at all. In most states they become dues-paying union members because that is what’s required to get a job in a public school. Those dues are usually deducted involuntarily right from their paychecks.

What would happen if union membership were optional in more states? It’s hard to know for sure but it’s instructive to look at Wisconsin, the birthplace of progressivism, for some evidence. In 2011 the state adopted Act 10, a law that made union membership voluntary for public employees. The state’s largest teachers’ union quickly lost about 50 percent of its membership and had to send volunteers door-to-door to collect delinquent dues.

The problem is not the teachers; it’s the system they’ve been put into. Which brings me back to the quote by Ms. Samsa about the rhetoric over firing bad teachers, which she equates to teacher bashing. Samsa says that the key to saving American education is not getting rid of bad teachers; it is making the profession more attractive to the good teachers, thus making school more attractive to students.

I respectfully disagree. (I hope she doesn’t consider that teacher bashing.) The key to saving American education is doing both of those things. We absolutely must attract more good teachers, but we also have to clear the pond of those who lack the necessary skills or motivation. In what is arguably the most important industry in our country we tolerate failure and reward mediocrity far too often. We allow poor teachers to hang around and plague our schools until they choose to retire.

That’s not teacher bashing, because it’s not really even the bad teachers who are the problem—they should be expected—it’s the political forces that defend a system that is so clearly broken that is the problem. Blaming bad teachers for everything that ails us in public education is like blaming someone in line for food stamps for our national debt. That person isn’t responsible, they are only living within the rules that society has created.

If we are sometimes guilty of bashing bad teachers it’s because we haven’t been allowed to do anything about them. Sometimes good teachers do unfortunately get caught in the crossfire, but that’s the fault of the unions, not the public.

Union leaders insist on having all teachers compensated and treated the same way. They force us to lump the good ones in with the bad. That’s not fair to the hundreds of thousands of outstanding teachers across the nation, but that’s the way it is. For years reformers have been calling for changes—like merit bonuses and performance pay—that will allow the best teachers to be recognized and rewarded. But the unions won’t stand for it. They insist we take the good with the bad and treat them all the same.

The teachers’ union in East Baton Rouge, Louisiana, recently protested because the school board there took out a full-page ad in a local newspaper, naming and congratulating the teachers who had scored well in the state’s recently adopted teacher evaluation process. Carnell Washington, the union president, said that publishing their names was a breach of privacy as well as an insult to teachers not named. It’s not a contest to see how many highly effective teachers are in a school, he said. Publishing this data is unfair to all of the other teachers who may be doing a fantastic job in the classroom.

By demanding real transparency in the system and a real reward/punishment system, critics are not bashing teachers; we are bashing the unions that hold so many teachers back from reaching their full potential. The unions would serve everyone better if they embraced and promoted their outstanding members, rather than spending so much time defending their worst.

It’s difficult to talk about reforming education without talking about teacher quality. A lot of people try to walk on eggshells, not