Senator Lamar Alexander
by Barry E. Stern, Ph.D.
Columnist EdNews.org
Senior Fellow, Haberman International Policy Institute in Education

1. Senator Alexander, you are the only U.S. Senator who has also been U.S. Secretary of Education. Has being in the Senate changed your beliefs about the federal role in education from when you were Secretary?

No! I've always been a skeptic about the federal role in education. I've been around so long that I've taken about every possible position, which means I've learned as I've gone. Generally speaking, I still believe that most of what can be done to improve schools has to be done first at home and second in the local school. There is a natural limit about what can be done from Washington to improve the quality of education locally, which is why I have always preferred the higher education model to the K-12 model for federal involvement in education. In higher education, we basically recognize the autonomy of individual institutions and give the money to the students and let it follow them to the institution of their choice. We give billions of research dollars not to individual professors to dish out but to competitive processes that are peer reviewed.

Having said that, the one thing I have learned in the last four years is that No Child Left Behind despite its problems had a real value, and that is putting a harsh spotlight on the inadequate education that some children, mostly minority children, were getting. That forced schools and citizens across the country to pay more attention to that. Requiring states to set their standards and to publish them has helped these children. The question for us now is where to go in the next five years.

2. Today's school districts seem to think all they have to do with No Child Left Behind is to get kids to pass tests without fundamentally changing how they organize themselves to get better results. Are critics of NCLB right when they say that the law narrows curricula and forces schools to continue with obsolete educational practices, like teaching to the test?

Teaching to the test isn't bad if it's the right test. Of course, NCLB only affects reading and math in Grades 3-8 at this time. At the very least schools should be teaching children in grades 3-8 to read and do math; that shouldn't be distorting the curriculum. The children in the 15% of the schools that seem to be chronically not achieving what we would like them to achieve will need a lot more help. Many of these schools and school districts are finding more success when they lengthen school days and school weeks, and when they bring in teachers with special skills at helping low income children achieve more. So, it requires a lot more effort to help these children. We are certainly finding that.

3. You mentioned that NCLB requires that we test children in Grades 3-8.How likely is it that the reauthorized law will test kids in high school?

Not now, I don't think it's likely. However, there is one high school test that was left over from pre-NCLB days.It is important to point out that one reason for all of the concern about "too much testing" since NCLB was enacted really came from two directions. One direction was 10-15 years of work by states to create standards, and with the standards came lots of tests. From another direction came the new federal requirements. So there was a "collision" of 15 years of state activity with the new federal requirements, and that produced some confusion and probably too many tests. Hopefully, we can sort that out with the reauthorization of NCLB, and I don't expect a successful effort this year to put NCLB in the high schools.

4. It seems as if every decade or so there is a new federal push to improve our K-12 public schools. First, we responded to the Soviet Sputnik in 1958 by passing the National Defense Education Act. Then there was the famous Nation at Risk study in 1983.In 1991, you worked with President George H.W. Bush and the Nation's governors to formulate America 2000 with its five ambitious national education goals. During the Clinton Administration we had the School to Work Opportunities Act. In 2001 No Child Left Behind came into being. In the aggregate, what have we learned about the impact of these federal reform efforts on the quality of our schools?

What I've learned is that sometimes they make a big difference. I was just in a hearing with five Nobel Prize winners from the United States. Almost all of them were beneficiaries of the Sputnik era when we increased scholarships and grants for researchers. They're home-grown talent. They didn't come from India or China or some other country. On the other hand, most of our efforts in K-12 have had at best mixed results. So what I've learned is that the higher education model we use which involves autonomy, competition, choice, innovation and marketplace is better than the command and control model we use for K-12 where we fund dozens of different programs and set standards. I know the two systems are different, but they are not that much different. I think we can learn a lot from the extensive federal involvement to help create the best system of colleges and universities in the world; and how different that model is from federal involvement in K-12.

It sounds like the GI Bill we had even before Sputnik, doesn't it?

Well, of course, the GI Bill is the example. Almost by accident we gave the dollars to the students, and we've given the research dollars to peer review, which is completely different than how we deal with K-12.

5. When you were Secretary of Education, you used to say that complacency is the Nation's chief educational problem. You stated further that even in well-to-do suburbs, our high school graduates could not compete with their peers in Western Europe, Japan, and the emerging economic "tigers" of Asia. Relative to when you were Secretary in 1992, how competitive are today's schools?

I think some of our schools are among the best in the world. For example, Maryville, the town where I grew up in Tennessee, had good public schools when I went there and has it today. They have high standards in every subject, high achievement scores, and students who have high aspirations and go to good colleges and universities. And Maryville is a middle income town. It's not a town of rich people. I think our danger in America is one of complacency, laziness and an attitude of taking for granted the fact that our brainpower advantage since World War II has created a situation where we create 30 percent of the world's wealth every year for 5 percent of the people, which is the percentage that live in the United States. We're overlooking the fact that the Chinese, Indians, Europeans, and peoples throughout the world have the same brains and have figured out how to make this a much more competitive world. It may not be Sputnik that mobilizes us but a decrease in our standard of living that mobilizes us.

6.

How does the America COMPETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science) Act that you are co-sponsoring fit with your long-term view of the direction of American education?

I'm delighted with the America COMPETES Act which just passed the Senate 88 to 8 after two and a half years of bi-partisan work. What was interesting about that was when we asked the National Academy of Sciences to tell us exactly what we need to do to keep our brainpower advantage and to put that in priority order, they put K-12 first. They put it ahead of funding early career researchers. They put it ahead of increasing funding for the Department of Energy's Office of Science and the National Science Foundation.What I like about it is that in math and science and the critical foreign languages it will inspire tens of thousands of people to come into teaching and help us retrain teachers who are there now. And it will hopefully inspire their students by using our national laboratories and universities in summer institutes and training programs to introduce them to the excitement of math and science. I can't think of anything more exciting for a student than to spend some time at Oak Ridge National Laboratory with a Nobel Laureate like the kind of people I met today at the hearing. So I like very much the recommendations of the National Academy of Sciences, and I am delighted that the Senate has enacted virtually all of their recommendations.

7. Study after study confirms the American business community is fed up with our public schools and they have been for a long time:

ü1 million kids drop out of school each year or roughly 5500 kids every day

ü1/3 who begin 9th grade will never receive a high school diploma or GED

üHalf of our African-American and Hispanic kids never make it to the 10th grade.

üReading scores among our 12th graders have deteriorated since 1992 despite getting higher grades and taking tougher courses.

ü Only 1/4 of today's 12th graders are proficient in math.

üHalf of community college entrants and a quarter of 4-year college entrants need remedial math or English.

üBusinesses contend they cannot find enough entry-level workers with decent basic skills and work habits.

Are business perceptions wrong about the schools? Are they justified in saying that our increasing investment in schools is just not paying off?

I think we have to listen to the marketplace. The marketplace for our graduates is the people who supply the jobs. Or we could listen to the community colleges where 40-50 percent of high school students who show up are not prepared to take community college courses. That should be just as much an alarm clock or yellow flag for us as the results we've seen over the last 3-4 years from No Child Left Behind (NCLB) for the earlier grades.

8. With the huge Baby Boom generation about to retire, does the American business community have a greater sense of urgency about where they will find qualified workers in the future? Or are they in the process of solving the problem by simply sending more of their operations overseas?

I'd have to say both. American businesses do have those options. If an American company needs 200 talented engineers and can't find them here, they can go to India or other parts of the world. But the U.S. is still the best place to do business. The market is here. One of my favorite statistics is 60 or 70 percent of the worldwide profits in the automotive business are made in the U.S.Most businesses in the world see great advantages by locating in the U.S. We need to make it easy for them by educating the workforce and providing talented people for them to hire.

9. The American high school with its assembly line schedule of six 50-minute periods a day hasn't changed in 80 years. Is the Congress considering legislation to addresses the issue of high school obsolescence and the development of a stronger entry-level workforce?

Legislation has been introduced this year by Senators Kennedy, Burr, Bingaman and others about the American high school.However, my hope is that we'll stand back here in Washington and let the enormous attention being given to reforming the American high school proceed. I think it proceeds best school district by school district, state by state, and I want to make sure that the things we do from Washington D.C. encourage innovation and don't stifle it. To be sure, the American high school needs to be dramatically reformed, yet most innovation doesn't come from Washington. I think we ought to watch this carefully and make sure we aid innovation and be careful not to stifle it.

10. When you were Secretary of Education, you were a great advocate for charter schools and school choice generally. Where do charter schools fit into today's debate about public schools?

I'm a great believer in charter schools. These are public schools in which parents have more choices and teachers and principals are free to use their common sense to help the children who come there. I would like to work to make it easier for charter schools to have facilities, which is usually the biggest stumbling block to new charter schools, and I would like to encourage more of them. I'm co-chair of the Charter School Caucus in the U.S. Senate with Mary Landrieu of Louisiana.

11. In some parts of the country career-technical education is making a comeback.Shiny new career-tech centers are opening every year and better ways are being discovered to merge academic and technical training. Career-tech is Governor Schwarznegger's only educational program to receive a budget increase. Yet the Bush administration following the lead of the Clinton administration wants to phase out the federal CTE program on the grounds that it has not been effective. Help us understand the differing views of the Congress and the Executive Branch on this issue.

I want to wait and see what the experience is in high schools that are experimenting with giving students many more opportunities to be involved in specific careers while they are still in high school. I know in Chattanooga, for example, the Carnegie Foundation has funded efforts that are proving to be very successful that divide the students into various career pathway groups. Although all groups take a core curriculum, one group might be moving ahead in health sciences, another in business, another in government, or some other technical training. I think we should review the career-tech program, and I'm going to keep an open mind about it.

Thank you, Senator Alexander, for taking the time to talk with us this afternoon.

America COMPETES (Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science)

Published May 7, 2007