Swift & Change Able

In an interview on PBS last Friday, President Bill Clinton suggested that those voting for Barack Obama for President in 2008 would be “rolling the dice".

Bill Clinton knows something about playing high-stakes games, particularly when it comes to education policy.

During his Presidency, Clinton advanced a number of policies that on their face sounded good but in their details were rigged against the interests of poor and minority children.

One of Clinton’s biggest initiatives as President was to hire 100,000 teachers in order to reduce class size in the early grades. Hillary Clinton recently claimed this was a team effort. In running down a litany of accomplishments, she said, referring to her husband’s Presidency: “We worked hard to create a program for 100,000 federally funded teachers.”

Hillary Clinton is absolutely right. In 1998, the Clintons sold the hiring of 100,000 teachers as an effort to reduce class size in the early grades. A study done in Tennessee had shown that reducing class size in the early grades with qualified teachers boosted student achievement. Teachers like smaller classes. Parents do too. Everybody wins.

The problem with the Clinton policy is that somewhere between Tennessee and the White House, the quality piece of class size reduction was dropped. The Tennessee study showed that class size reduction worked in the interest of children if, and only if, it was done with qualified teachers. But that little detail made teachers’ unions uncomfortable.

This was not an arcane point. A massive experiment on how to do class size reduction the wrong way was already underway when Clinton introduced his 100,000 teachers proposal.

At the time of the Clinton proposal, California, which sees itself as a leader in national policy, was attempting to reduce class size through the massive hiring of new teachers. The effort was the result of heavy lobbying by the California Teachers Association.

The problem was that the California policy had no real teacher quality stipulations. In order to implement class size reduction at the pace the union wanted, the state created a new class of teachers which it dubbed “emergency certified". “Emergency certified” was a misnomer. These “emergency” teachers did not have to have any qualifications - no education degree, no training, no support. When Clinton proposed his 100,000 teachers policy, there were 40,000 “emergency-certified” teachers in California. Worse yet, these teachers were concentrated in schools with high proportions of minority and economically disadvantaged students, i.e., those children most in need of quality instruction by experienced professionals.

As the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future had found in 1996, teacher quality is the single biggest factor in student achievement. Bigger than family income. Bigger than parent education. A policy pitched as one that would improve student achievement would actually do the opposite. In addition, it would worsen educational inequities between the rich and poor, between white and non-white, between native English speakers and new immigrants.

Clinton pushed ahead with the policy anyway. The 100,000 teachers provision was inserted in an appropriations bill - no debate, no amendments. Congressmen and Senators concerned about repeating the California debacle were assured by Clinton aides, and by then-Secretary of Education Richard Riley, that the 100,000 federally funded teachers would have to meet strict qualification standards.

This was not to be. The legislative language specified only that teachers hired under the new federal law would have to be “certified". The operative policy of the Clinton Administration, despite their promises, was that “emergency certified” teachers were just fine, the key word here being “certified” rather than “emergency".

When a bipartisan effort was launched the following year to require that teachers hired by the federal government be fully licensed and have completed a teacher training program, the Clinton Administration actively opposed it. And I mean actively. They unleashed an army of lobbyists on Capitol Hill - led by the National Education Association, whose affiliate, CTA, was primarily responsible for the regressive California policy.

When the amendment to prevent untrained teachers from being hired with federal funds came up for a vote in 1999, it was, long story short, effectively defeated. Dozens of Democrats who were initially willing to vote to correct the Clinton policy were beaten into submission.

Eight years later, Hillary and Bill Clinton are out on the stump touting the same “100,000 teachers” policy, under the mantle of their new theme of “change".

That doesn’t sound much like change. Instead it sounds like much more of the same. When voters head to the “big casino” in January, it will be interesting to see where they’re willing to place their bets.