Education Week - September 21, 2016 - 24

COMMENTARY

ELECTION 2016

Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images

Melina Mara/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Truth, Education,
And the American Voter

Missing: A Conservative
Education Agenda

By Frederick M. Hess & Max Eden
fter 16 years of relentless
Bush-Obama education
expansionism, Washington
sorely needs principled
conservative leadership.
Unfortunately, no conservative is running this
year. Hillary Clinton is promising to bring
the Affordable Care Act to higher education
and to extend K-12 down to 4-year-olds,
while Donald Trump's clown-car campaign
careens between bombastic promises and
insult theater.
During his big "education week," Trump
forgot about education and wound up in
Mexico talking immigration. When he has
issued proposals, there's little evidence
that they're serious or that he's serious
about them. Trump promises to "end" the
common core, but it's entirely unclear what
that even means. He calls for spending $20
billion a year for school choice, but without saying a word about where the money
would come from or how the idea would actually work.
Trump will occasionally utter conservative-sounding phrases, but he's no conservative-he shows no taste for limited
government, no respect for federalism, and
no faith in local institutions. For instance,
Trump promised earlier this year, "I will get
rid of gun-free zones on schools, you have
to. ... My first day, it gets signed, OK? My
first day. There's no more gun-free zones."
While conservatives do typically support

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gun rights, this isn't even remotely a conservative proposal. Actually, it's a lesson in
the value of conservative governance.
Given that 4 in 10 Americans think arming teachers would make schools safer,
Trump can insist that school safety is too
important to leave to the whims of local
officials who may put their own interests
over what's best for the kids. After all,
Trump's stance would be entirely consistent with the Obama administration's "pen
and phone" approach to teacher evaluation,
Elementary and Secondary Education Act
waivers, school discipline, campus sexual
assault, supplement-not-supplant, and
much else. The logic is always: The federal
government has a duty to ensure that local
officials and educators are doing what's
right for kids.
One problem? Reasonable people can
disagree about whether a given policy (like
arming teachers) is "right for the kids."
Even if the policy has merit, good schools
are the product of countless daily decisions
made and culture shaped by educators. It's
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FREDERICK M. HESS is the director of education
policy studies at the American Enterprise
Institute and the author of Education Week's Rick
Hess Straight Up opinion blog. MAX EDEN is a
senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. They
are editors of the forthcoming book The Every
Student Succeeds Act: What It Means for Schools,
Systems, and States (Harvard Education Press).

MAYORS HAVE A
ROLE IN IMPROVING
EDUCATION

24 | EDUCATION WEEK | September 21, 2016 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

By Marc S. Tucker

ike so many others, I am
watching the presidential
campaign unfold with a gathering sense of dread. Thomas
Jefferson famously told us
that "if a nation expects to be
ignorant and free in a state of
civilization, it expects what never was and
never will be." For more than two centuries,
we have pinned our hopes on our faith that
an educated citizenry will, more often than
not, do the right thing.
But now it appears that on the order of
40 percent of the citizenry is not interested
in the facts or expert analysis based on the
facts, and it is eager to elect to the highest
office in the land a man whose contempt
for the facts, for reasoning, and for the U.S.
Constitution is obvious. How did this happen in a country that practically invented
mass education?
I have argued in my Education Week blog,
Top Performers, that this is due, in part,
to the policies of experts, which have profoundly hurt poorly educated people who
can no longer compete in what has become
a global market for labor-or against intelligent machines doing the same work, only
now faster and cheaper. They are understandably angry with both the experts and
their facts. But now it seems that these voters' distrust of expertise, the facts, and even
reasoning itself was intentionally fueled.
In July, the New York Times journalist
James Poniewozik argued in "Roger Ailes

WHY PUBLIC SCHOOLS
NEED MORE MALE
PRINCIPALS OF COLOR

Fused TV With Politics, Changing Both"
that Donald Trump's rise was made possible by a very deliberate and sophisticated
effort to produce exactly that result in a
propaganda campaign designed to make
the Fox News Channel very rich and Ailes
the Republican kingmaker. And, in the
process, to subvert the kind of democracy
Thomas Jefferson had in mind.
Before Ailes' reign over Fox News, the
general tone for TV news had been set by
the likes of Edward R. Murrow and Walter
Cronkite-sober, objective, fact-based, analytical, middle-of-the-road, and responsible. Ailes threw out the rules. The other
news outlets were declared to be leftleaning and biased. Fox would introduce
"balance" by presenting only conservative
voices. Fox News was designed to gain an
audience by nurturing "resentment politics," crafted for an audience of people who
grew to feel that they were being left behind by the elites.
To make this model work, Poniewozik
explains, the sense of grievance that was
key to the model had to be constantly
stoked: Whatever the viewer once held
that made him or her "great"-religion,
race, values, work-was being hijacked
by "them." Only Fox knew what was going
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MARC S. TUCKER is the president and CEO of the
National Center on Education and the Economy. He
pens the Education Week opinion blog Top Performers.

LETTERS TO
THE EDITOR

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Education Week - September 21, 2016

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