Tom Whitehurst

Sunday, October 22, 2000

Because it's election time and chances are that your candidate wants to be the "education president," consider the following comments and see if this guy wins your vote:
   "If you leave the majority of your population uneducated, you will leave behind the majority of your population. Our K-through-12 system is broken. We are noncompetitive. Our college systems and universities are the best in the world, but that helps only the 25 percent of our students who graduate from college.
   "When you're 19th in math and 21st in science out of the top 25 countries, in this new global economy I'm talking about, you leave a majority of your children behind. And that is why I am so passionate about education.
   "This is not an issue about state's rights or national rights or local district control. It's an issue about our children's future. I have no real patience with politicians who get hung up on a political issue rather than doing what's right for our children.
   "I would try multiple approaches. I personally believe in choice regardless of income. Today only the rich have choice about private schools. I think that children, regardless of their income, should have multiple options. So I would try charter schools, vouchers and other forms of choice. Then let the ones that get the best results for our children prosper.
   "We've got to pay our teachers, but we've also got to pay on competency and ability to teach, not on seniority. I think most teachers want to do a better job and are just asking to make a decent living in the process. And we have to be willing to spend money, say, when voting on bond issues that help support schools. What we're doing now is unfair. While our parents invested in us, we're selfishly not investing in our children.
   "But when we invest, we have to make sure that we're getting results."
   He doesn't get a full vote of confidence from Sandra Lanier-Lerma, interim superintendent of the Corpus Christi Independent School District. She doesn't buy his assertion that the K-through-12 system is broken. Otherwise, how can we also have the world's best college system?
   "It's contradictory. Most who go to universities come from public schools. A small minority come from private schools."
   But she likes what he has to say about accountability and choice. For the record, she'd like to point out that there is a lot of choice within the public school system - administrative transfers to schools outside the student's attendance zone, and magnet schools such as Miller High School, with its broadcast studio, and Moody High School, with its health sciences program.
   "Most public school districts have choice and I don't think the public is aware of that."
   By the way, the guy doing the talking was interviewed not on "Hardball" or "Meet the Press," but in "Money" magazine's recent special issue called "Tech 2000."
   Chances are you already have voted for the interviewee, with your dollars. He is already a president. Of a company worth more than $400 billion. He is John Chambers of Cisco Systems.
   Whether you agree with his views on education or not, to him, the future of education and his company are not separate issues.
   "What worries Chambers most," wrote his interviewer, Ron Insana of "Money," "is not the pace or scope of the high-tech revolution but our ability to educate our children well enough to allow them to reap its benefits."
  
  

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