ConservativeHome's The Republican

What They're Saying: New Republican governors join the campaign to reform teacher tenure

Natalie Gonnella

This week, amid a myriad of criticism from teachers' unions and education professionals, newly elected Republicans Brian Sandoval and Bill Haslam joined fellow GOP governors like Chris Christie and Butch Otter, in taking on teacher pay schemes (ConservativeHome's original post on the recent statements of Republican Governors on teacher tenure can be viewed here.)

Despite the fact that they have been in office for less than a month, Sandoval and Haslam note that they are keen to get to work on serious changes to state education systems. Below is what they had to say about changing teacher tenure:

Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval: In his State of the State address last night, Governor Sandoval outlined six key goals he sees as imperative to improving Nevada schools.  First up - “end teacher tenure," which he calls:

An important first step is to eliminate the protection of seniority when decisions about force reductions must be made

Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam: During an interview with staff at The Tennessean, Governor Haslam called tenure a laughable concept:

None of us give tenure to our doctors or our lawyers, and we would laugh at the concept…I'm just not sure that for a profession, the idea of lifetime tenure being decided after three years, is something we do in any other profession.

Haslam went on to also suggest that Tennessee make it more difficult for teachers to receive tenure while at the same creating an evaluation process for tenured teachers

In addition to Sandoval and Haslam, a number of GOP state lawmakers are also pushing for reforms to teacher pay schemes.

On Monday Missouri "Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, a group of House Republicans and two Democrats called for changes in the evaluation of [teachers]" and Wyoming legislators are slated to begin discussions on the future of teacher tenure this week.

New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez heads to the principal's office in an attempt to cut $30 million from state education costs

Natalie Gonnella

A prelude to her "State of the State" address, New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez yesterday proposed cuts to school administration costs (i.e. principals) in her attempt to reduce education spending by $30 million.

New Mexico is facing a state deficit of $450 million and Martinez has promised to tackle the state's budget challenges without increasing taxes or cutting teacher's take-home pay. 

Currently (according to Martinez) in New Mexico, only 61 cents of every dollar for education goes directly to classrooms. In remarks at a press conference at Yearout Mechanical Inc, the governor targeted this type of "bureaucracy" in schools: 

[The bureaucracy] refers to people who are not in the classroom teaching everyday. I want to make sure to secure the funding that goes into the classroom, teachers, and teacher aides. We want to make sure that funding does not get decreased.

Although citing specific concerns with Albuquerque Public Schools during the news conference, Martinez also commented that to eliminate wasteful spending and improve education systems, all school districts have excess "fat" to trim:

I can’t imagine that any school district doesn’t have a 1.5 percent cut that can take place in the bureaucracy, and that is all it will take for us to be able to cut those $30 million from the bureaucracy.

Governor Martinez's "State of the State" address will start at 12:30 MST today and can be viewed here.

Republicans are the modernizers: evidence from three education reform governors

(L-R: Rick Scott of Florida, Mitch Daniels of IN, and Chris Christie of New Jersey)

Ryan Streeter

Republicans are the modernizing party. They should talk more about that.

These days, so-called “progressives” defend a status quo that runs against the grain of life most of us have grown accustomed to: lots of choices about what we consume, and lots of control over the information-gathering process needed to make those choices.  We don’t like government-appointed elites – or any elites for that matter – telling us which choices to make or what to do. The best conservative ideas today are based on these new realities.

Nowhere is this more evident than in states with enterprising approaches to education reform.  Here are three important ideas percolating out there in the “laboratories of democracy” that contain lessons for GOP lawmakers - in education and beyond.

Rick Scott (Florida) - Turn funding formulas upside down: give families rather than schools money to decide where and how their children are educated.  Rather than giving education reform as an issue to Jeb Bush, arguably the best education reform governor in America, and finding something else to focus on, Scott is proposing to take the reforms further in a radical way. This new governor wants to create “education savings accounts” that would allow parents to use a large portion of the funds that would be spent on their child in the public schools system to purchase education elsewhere. If he takes this a step further in a way that Rick Hess has envisioned and Reihan Salam promoted, it could be one of the most important domestic reforms of the new decade.

Mitch Daniels (Indiana) - Move beyond “choice” to “choices.” Daniels wants to combine three key elements to give parents with the power of competition to improve the quality of their children’s education: (1) give students who finish school in 11 years the dollar value of their 12^th year for higher education, (2) take advantage of the state’s new allowance for parents to send their children across district lines; and (3) rapidly expand charters and fund them on the same schedule and with the same standards as other schools.  The idea here is open up attractive options by scrambling the public sector’s usual way of working. The Daniels model creates options by changing multiple incentive frameworks to work for the benefit of families.

Chris Christie (New Jersey) –  Challenge the institutionalized love affair with teacher discretion.  Christie wants to make ending teacher tenure a “national conversation.” And he wants to achieve it in his state.  Empowering teachers to do what they do with very little concern about the effects of what they do is looking more criminal every day.  While other governors are also advocating an end to tenure, as Natalie pointed out yesterday, Christie’s sincerity in standing up to the unions in an effort to achieve it cannot be questioned. While ending tenure will be an uphill climb for him, Christie’s effort is important because it continues his highly public challenge to the idea that public employees get to play by rules – and enjoy levels of compensation – that many of the rest of us don’t. And it does it in a way that is especially poignant for parents.

There are two main principles inherent in these reforms are relevant beyond education. They are:

• Expanding options for consumers is a public good that contains costs and improves outcomes.
• Institutionalizing a right to public employment with little consequence is usually the same thing as institutionalizing a right to underperform.

Governors Scott, Daniels and Christie have based what they’re doing on a fundamental grasp of these principles. The world has changed under the feet of the unions and protectors of the bureaucratic establishment. These three governors, along with others, are exploiting this reality to propose new policies and expand political constituencies.

As lawmakers gather in Washington this week to start the 112^th in earnest, they should follow the example our nation's enterprising governors are taking: talk about these principles, convert them into values, and start proposing a host of good things on their basis.

The obvious place to start? Well, health care of course. We’ll see a vote to repeal Obamacare this week, the outcome of which everyone knows. Republicans should be proposing alternatives at the same time. And, fortunately, conservatives have health care policy ideas that are just as modernizing as the governors’ education ideas. We should hear more about those ideas – a lot more – in coming weeks.

What They're Saying: GOP governors take on teacher tenure

Natalie Gonnella

This week, in pursuit of improvements to state education systems, three Republican governors announced their aims to eradicate teacher tenure.

In "State of the State" addresses in New Jersey and Idaho, and at the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce's economic summit in Florida, Governors Chris Christie, Butch Otter, and Rick Scott called for serious changes to teacher pay systems.

This controversial topic is always, one way or another, at the center of the debate over education reform. If Florida, Idaho and New Jersey go forward with the governors' proposals on tenure, they "will join more than a dozen states that have recently changed their teacher evaluation and dismissal systems or are considering such moves."

With support and criticism from both sides of the political aisle on this issue, here's what the governors had to say about ending teacher tenure:

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie:

The time for a national conversation on tenure is long past due. Teaching can no longer be the only profession where you have no rewards for excellence and no consequences for failure to perform. Let New Jersey lead the way again. The time to eliminate teacher tenure is now.

Idaho Governor Butch Otter:

We need to refocus from how much we are spending to how much our children are learning - learning in large measure due to responsible parenting and the excellence and sustained efforts of our fine public school teachers.

That excellence should be rewarded – which is why Superintendent Luna and I are committed to establishing a pay system for teachers that emphasizes their performance, not their tenure.

You make sure you measure the effectiveness of teachers

Florida Governor Rick Scott:

You make sure you measure the effectiveness of teachers and you make sure the teachers who are most effective are paid the most so they continue to teach.

Next, you get rid of tenure. All tenure does is prevent principals from letting teachers who can't or don't do a good job anymore.

Mitch Daniels puts education reform in a global perspective

Ryan Streeter

Indiana Governor and potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate, Mitch Daniels, gave his State of the State address tonight. He has promised to make education reform a major priority of his final 2 years in office.

I thought his characterization of the global challenge to our educational institutions was very good, something a, well, presidential candidate should be saying. 

Some seek change in education on economic grounds, and they are right. To win and hold a family-supporting job, our kids will need to know much more than their parents did. 

I have seen the future competition, every time I go abroad in search of new jobs for our state, in the young people of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, China. Let me tell you—those kids are good. They ought to be.  They are in school, not 180 days a year like here, but 210, 220, 230 days a year. By the end of high school, they have benefited from two or three years more education than Hoosier students.  Along the way, they have taken harder classes.  It won’t be easy to win jobs away from them.

It’s not just tomorrow’s jobs that are at stake.  The quality of Indiana education matters right now.  When we are courting a new business, right behind taxes, the cost of energy, reasonable regulation, and transportation facilities comes schools. “What kind of school will my children, and our workers’ children attend?” is a question we’re always asked.  Sometimes, in some places, it costs us jobs today.  There is no time to wait.

In 1999, Indiana passed a law that said schools must either improve their results or be taken over by new management.  The little ones who entered first grade then, full of hope and promise, are eighteen now.  In the worst of our districts, half of them will not be graduating.  God bless and keep them, wherever they are and whatever life now holds for them.  For those children, we waited too long.

He followed this up with a program of teacher quality, choice, and accountability. He praised the nature of competition in education. He, along with Jeb Bush, are the two best articulators of what education reform should look like at the state level. It would be good if either or both were running for President.

David Brooks, Kevin Hassett, Gary Andres, Nick Schulz and Ross Douthat on what the GOP can do to improve the prospects of the middle class

Ryan Streeter

Demographer and futurist Joel Kotkin observed Monday on ConservativeHome that the “huge, mainly suburban working, middle and upper-middle class” are politically up for grabs. He says:

These include managers, store owners, lone entrepreneurs and skilled laborers in the private sector. Neither party focuses on presenting a positive vision for growth and improvement of quality of life for this segment. So people in this group shift back and forth, making havoc of the best laid plans of both parties.

This is the shifting middle of America. And many families in this group are facing grave economic stagnation compounded by social breakdown. I have talked about this problem here and here.  

The GOP does not yet have a coherent framework – rhetorically, politically, or in terms of policy – to restore middle class confidence. Or, in Kotkin’s terms, to present the middle class with a positive vision for growth.

Today, to get the discussion going, we feature a mini-symposium of some bright minds on the right, providing an answer in just a few lines apiece to the question: what should the GOP do to improve the prospects of the middle class?

The mini-symposium participants are: David Brooks, Kevin Hassett, Gary Andres, Nick Schulz, and Ross Douthat.

David Brooks

Columnist, New York Times

The most fundamental threat to the middle class is the stagnation of human capital. Graduation rates from college have been flat for a generation. Single parenthood is skyrocketing, among all races and ethnic groups. Social trust is breaking down.

There's no one solution. Building human capital is like nutrition. You have to do it in different ways every day. It starts with better early childhood education, the single most effective investment. It shouldn't be state run, but where applicable it should be state funded. Then there are mentorship programs to support students through college. Job training programs should be turned into voucher programs. Perhaps no job training programs work in the end, but the workers themselves should at least be in control. There should also be social entrepreneurship funds - locally-controlled pots of money to support secular and faith-based groups. 

Basically, people have to grow up in dense communities, with a thousand influences pointing them in the right direction, from conception onward.

Kevin Hassett

Director of Economic Studies, American Enterprise Institute

The most important thing that the GOP can do to help the middle class is cut the corporate tax rate. When Japan cuts its rate next year, we will stand out as the highest corporate tax country on earth. That encourages firms to locate plants in lower tax countries, and depresses jobs here at home. The impact of tax minimization by multinationals is so dramatic that there is a clear Laffer curve in the international corporate tax data. Higher tax rates depress revenue because it is so easy to transfer price profits into low tax jurisdictions.

This tax game has a terrible impact on blue collar workers.  My colleague Aparna Mathur and I studied many years of data, and found a very strong link between corporate tax rates and wages.  Low tax countries attract capital, and that capital increases the productivity of workers and their take home pay.

Earth to Washington: If you want to see higher job creation, cut what is soon to be the highest tax on earth.

Gary Andres

The Weekly Standard & Dutko Worldwide

Middle class Americans suffer due to a federal government that can’t take its hands off the wheel of power.  When Washington gets too big and demanding, it squelches creativity, burdens entrepreneurs – and disadvantages workers.

Education and training programs are a great example.  Republicans could champion the middle class by providing governors more flexibility to use Pell grants for shorter-term vocational programs.  Current rules are too rigid, aimed more at providing educational institutions money, not middle class job skills.

Giving states the authority to experiment with health insurance alternatives is another example. Obamacare’s one size fits all approach will ultimately hurt the middle class.

Finally, promoting pro-growth policies like lower taxes on business and more free trade agreements will create an environment where middle class job creation can flourish.

The best way to help the middle class is through a smaller, more flexible federal government – one that creates an environment for opportunity, not a Washington-based scheme to get there.

Nick Schulz

Editor-in-Chief, The American

The middle class needs two things -- rising economic growth and stable families. There is little policy can do to help the weakness of the family in the short run. How about growth? New firm formation is indispensible to economic growth. To get more of it, the GOP should make young firms exempt from payroll taxes.

We featured an interview last month with New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, in which he addressed the issue of how to strengthen the middle class. With his permission, we summarize his remarks here:

First, a reform of the health care reform that moves us in a more market-friendly direction than Obamacare, but also creates some kind of a tax credit/deduction for people who don't get insurance
through their employer and can't afford it on the individual market. This is something the Republican leadership hasn't been willing to embrace, but it's a necessity to make the health care system fair and equitable.

Second, a comprehensive tax reform along the lines that Ramesh Ponnuru and Robert Stein have proposed, which lowers rates and curbs deductions (something most conservatives favor) but also makes the tax code more family friendly, through a larger child tax credit (something some conservatives are still skeptical of).

Finally, a broad move toward greater competition in the public education system, both in the context of K-12 education, and in public colleges and universities as well. Here's there's increasingly a bipartisan consensus on the value of choice and competition: What's needed is the political will to fight a long war of attrition to reform the public-school bureaucracy.