A Proposed Educational Revolution for the GOP

The Problem

In Meredith Wilson's The Music Man, the con man, Harold Hill, convinces the residents of River City, Iowa, that he has developed a new method for learning music, called the "think system". Hill’s theory is that if a musician uses the "think system" properly, he or she does not need to rely on written music. Instead, the musician only needs to think about the song long enough and hard enough, and he or she will be able to play it flawlessly. By the end of the play, the townspeople know they have been conned because it is obvious that the "think system" doesn't work, but Hill is saved by the local music teacher. It's a delightful story, but real life doesn't end that way.

As the noted educator, E.D. Hirsch, Jr., has tried to tell us for a generation, the American people have been conned since the 1930s with a version of the "think system", but there has been no happy ending. Hirsch’s central premise is that the decline in educational performance in our schools is directly related to a conscious decision by professional educators to abandon the use of a content-based curriculum in our public schools. Instead of a content-based curriculum, the education establishment has promoted a “child-centered” method of teaching that leaves each child to discover knowledge on their own.

As Hirsch makes clear in his most recent work, The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools, this trade-out has produced societal illiteracy, because it led to a systemic failure to pass on the basic knowledge of language, history, and culture every American needs in order to function as a productive member of our society.

The illiteracy has led to a social nightmare in many communities, where up to 50% of students who start school will never graduate from high school, and 87% will never graduate from college. We are under-educating too many people, thereby condemning them, their families and their neighborhoods to chronic crime, deviancy, underemployment and poverty. Merely giving parents the choice to move their children to other schools that use the same teaching methods, or raising school and teacher performance criteria without addressing classroom content, will not fix this problem. Instead, the source of the problem—the content of our schools’ curricula—must be squarely addressed.

Let’s look at a practical example of how this problem plays out in our classrooms. When children enter pre-school or kindergarten, at some point they realize that there is a clock on the wall, but they do no yet know what it means, why it is there, and what you do with it. This information has to be taught and reinforced so the student will process it in many diverse contexts over years. So, in these early classes when students are introduced to reading a clock, their science instruction should be coordinated to teach about the rotation of the earth; math instruction should give equations and story problems that introduce real problems related to calculating and managing time that are age-appropriate; vocabulary lessons should introduce time-related words (e.g., minute, hour, day, night, month, season, year, and annual); grammar lessons should use these words in context; and short stories should be read that discuss time and seasons in context. Provided with this foundation, the child can begin to manage and understand time, but also will possess some of the linguistic and conceptual tools needed to later understand: the stories of Nathanial Hawthorne and poems of Robert Frost in which the setting in a specific season is critical to the meaning of their works; the relationship of time to the cadence and meaning of a Poe story or poem; why Washington’s army had to camp at Valley Forge, and why his winter crossing of the Delaware River was so dramatic; the importance of annual floods along the Nile to the building of the Egyptian empire; and much more.

If contextual facts are not taught early and incrementally, the student will find it hard to progress in school. Simply learning critical-thinking skills and how to apply them, without being taught contextual facts (and then learning to build on them with more contextual facts in diverse contexts), will impair a student's ability to continue to learn. Take a child who has lived in a home and neighborhood in Houston where many adults don’t have regular jobs, or where adults don’t functionally interact with their children. In the context of the previous example, have those children seen the seasons change enough to comprehend it? Have they seen a rhythm to their parent's daily routine, or heard people discuss deadlines and time commitments, enough to understand the concept and importance of time? If not, how will they discover the facts needed to critically think about these ideas?

By not teaching incremental, age-appropriate, comprehensive factual content--or core knowledge--cognitive science tells us that these students, who have no where else to “discover” such factual content, will fail. And guess what...students from these neighborhoods have failed and dropped-out of school in alarming numbers, while never having discovered the knowledge of language, history and culture they actually needed to succeed. It's like we've been asking our children to hum a tune they've never heard, or play a song on an instrument without learning the notes of the song or how to play the instrument--we've asked them to do something that can't be done, except by pure accident. We should never have left something so important, and so expensive, for our society to pure accident.

As Hirsch points out, we know how to fix this problem—we need to address the content of what we are teaching our children. If we fix this problem, it will be much easier to fix the structural tax and spending issues related to delivering education. If we don't fix this problem, no amount of tinkering with salaries, standards, taxes or budgets will improve the education of our children.

The GOP Solution

The GOP at all levels must address this problem as part of our effort to reconnect with the American public. Remember that the only institution in American life, which has involved, at some time and in some way, every individual, every family, every neighborhood, and every level of government, is our local school, and its problems affect us all—now and into the future. Recently, I stated during a candidates’ forum that I believe a central mission of a revitalized GOP must be to rebuild not just our commitment to liberty, but also the obligations that come with liberty, in order to defeat the Democratic Party’s embrace of statism. I call this commitment an effort to “Renew the American Community.” As part of this renewal of our sense of community with our neighbors, we must fix our schools.

What has been lost from our education is an understanding and appreciation by our children of the “American Story”: the cumulative wisdom of Western thought, together with the core principles and contexts underlying the structure and operation of American society. While our politics—both liberal and conservative—has focused almost exclusively on improving the process of delivering education, it has ignored the loss of this content from our classrooms. As a result, as many as 87% of our children in certain neighborhoods in Harris County do not possess the tools they will need to succeed in today’s economic environment, and virtually no one is being educated to succeed as a citizen—unless by accident, or outside of the public school system.

This American Story should become the context in which the student’s exposure to every other academic discipline is processed, and in which he or she would then process a lifetime of learning after leaving school. This story, properly taught, should instill the student with the means of understanding not only the physical world they inhabit, and the political and economic system of our country, and of other countries; but also with the ethical means to make the right decisions as a member of the community. Once we decide on this course of action, textbooks must be developed in every discipline to mutually support this curriculum, and a modern and efficient delivery system must be developed at the state and local levels to provide this education.

The American Story should never be used to promote an ideology, religion or political party in any classroom or discipline. Instead, it refers to the contextual knowledge every child needs to possess in order to fully comprehend and use the language, mathematics, science, art, literature, history, economics, law, and culture of our society. The American Story provides a frame of reference to each child that is consistent with the great philosophical and political traditions championed by both the Republican and Democratic Parties, and with the theology of all the major religious traditions observed in this country, but without indoctrinating any child with a specific point of view. This story gives them the tools to function as adult citizens who will contribute positively to their families and neighborhoods.

As the party that prides itself on being the custodian of our society’s basic principles, and on preserving local control of our schools, the GOP must work to end the current social fraud caused by our educational "think system". The Republican Party at all levels must fight to improve the content of the education we provide to all our children, so that they, and their future families and neighborhoods, flourish. For if they flourish, they will be more inclined to embrace the individual obligations that come with the gift of liberty, which, in turn, will help us "Renew the American Community" without embracing an ever-growing government. As part of this fight, the HCRP should champion reform of the content of the curriculum in our local schools by supporting educators, school board candidates, and legislators who will address this issue.

We Saw the Opposition on September 3—Are We Ready for the Battle Ahead?

On the evening of Thursday, September 3rd, I put on a red T-shirt that said “Vote Republican” and joined the crowd outside City Hall in Downtown Houston.

The focus of the event was the health-care issue. Liberal interest groups held a “protest” rally for Obamacare, while others of us lodged a counter-protest off to one side of the steps and reflecting pool. I spent much of my time watching, listening, and talking to fellow counter-protesters. I want to share with you what I learned.

First, I want to congratulate John Faulk, Eric Story, Josh Parker and the Texas Tea Party Society of Houston, and the several “right to life” and religious organizations, who came together on short notice to coordinate the counter-protest. I also want to commend Roy Morales and Chris Daniel for coming and participating. Although we were out-numbered, the size and energy of the counter-protest successfully drained some of the time and attention of the speakers away from what they had planned to be a love-fest for Obamacare.

However, what I saw concerned me greatly, and underscored one of the many reasons why I am running for HCRP Chair: the GOP is still not ready to fight the ground battle against the Obama machine.

Although the polls show that public support for the Democratic takeover of the health-care industry is plummeting, only the Democratic Party and its close allies appear ready for this fight. The sponsors of the rally were Organizing for America (an official affiliate of the Democratic National Committee), ACORN, and several unions. Their participants were bused to the rally and signed-in, their signs were pre-printed and professional, and the media was pre-positioned to record the rally from a position that exaggerated the strength of their numbers.

Meanwhile, the courageous individuals who showed-up to form a counter-protest were denied a permit to use a microphone or bullhorn, and were physically relegated to one area off to the side opposite of where the media was stationed. Except for the Texas Tea Party Banner, and a few pre-printed signs and cards, the signs held by the counter-protesters were hand-made and hard to see from a distance. This ad hoc assembly was no match for the Democratic coordination.

The GOP needs a functioning party apparatus at all levels—local, state, and national—that is ready to go toe-to-toe with the Obama machine that the Democratic Party is operating. We won’t assemble this apparatus by co-opting the name and email lists of the Tea Party and other new organizations for use by our party leaders (nor will we get very far when our current chair sends an email out that correctly notifies the base about Al-Jazeera's inexplicable presence in our County Jail, but then threatens public safety by mistakenly asking people to call and clog an emergency phone line). A party takeover of these new organizations, especially by the Keystone Cops operation now in control of Richmond Avenue, is not the answer.

This is not a top-down war—it must be fought from the grassroots, by the grassroots. Rather than takeover or co-opt the new organizations, the party needs to invite these new activists—both the leaders and the members of these new separate organizations—into the party, invite them into empty precinct chairs and other positions, and invite them into our affiliated clubs and organizations (or encourage them to affiliate their new clubs with the GOP). Then, we need to support their energy and innovation by helping to mobilize them into a force to rival Organizing for America.

If we don’t take these steps this fall, and channel the energy of these individuals into our primary and to help elect our candidates in 2010, we may look back on this time as the greatest wasted opportunity the GOP ever had.

If we are brave enough to open the party to this new opportunity, and act boldly now, I am confident we will re-take what we lost in Harris County, preserve what we have in Austin, and eventually re-take Washington.

A Plan for Future Coordination: The HCRP and the TFRW clubs in Harris County

Recently, I had the privilege of speaking to the Bay Area Republican Women's Club ("BARWC"), an affiliated member of the Texas Federation of Republican Women ("TFRW"). As anyone who has ever been involved with the party knows, the secret to the GOP’s electoral success is the hard work and dedication of its women—as volunteers, as organizers, as fundraisers, and as candidates. The indispensable vehicle for mobilizing our women has been our Republican Women’s Clubs. Unfortunately, what I observed as a candidate during the last election cycle was a disconnection between many of the TFRW clubs in Harris County and the operation of the HCRP during the last election cycle.

The analogy I’ve used to describe this disconnection is to an old pocket watch. For a pocket watch to work, the gears must not only turn, they must engage each other. During the last election cycle, our clubs and party organization functioned like a watch in which the gears are all moving, but none of them engage each other. The outcome was predictable. Now, the gears need to be re-engaged for us to re-capture Harris County for the GOP.

Therefore, during my recent speech I outlined my proposal to restore the historic role of our women’s clubs in the operation of the HCRP as part of my strategic plan. To restore that role, I’ve specifically proposed the following:

*Inclusion in the governance of the HCRP. I intend to revise the structure of the HCRP’s Advisory Board to dedicate 4 of the 15 seats on the board to representatives of the TFRW Clubs located in Harris County. The proposal is that each of the four seats will be assigned to clubs located in each of the county commissioners’ precincts, and the seats themselves will rotate among the clubs in each precinct on an annual basis. Therefore, no club or region will be allowed to dominate involvement on the board, or be left out of involvement on the board. I promise that the final design of this plan will be decided after consultation with the President of the Greater Houston Council of the TFRW.

*Providing the core of our volunteer staff. As part of the effort to get local chapters of all of the affiliated clubs working with the HCRP again, I will ask the TFRW clubs to establish a volunteer staff to provide for continuous, open operation of the headquarters office, and any and all satellite offices in the county, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week throughout the year. During the 60 days leading up to and including the early vote and Election Day, the operation of these offices should be staffed at least 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. As part of this effort, I will ask the TFRW to work with the HCRP to design and implement local programs, like after-school activities, adult education classes and citizenship classes, which can be conducted in future satellite offices.

*Direct involvement in the GOTV effort. In consultation with the President of the Greater Houston Council of the TFRW, and the presidents of the TFRW clubs throughout Harris County, the new Vice Chair (Director) of Campaign Support will work with the clubs to coordinate volunteer participation with campaigns and the party’s mobilization and get-out-the-vote efforts.

*Inclusion in the communication loop within the party organization. As affiliated organizations develop online, the HCRP will link the TFRW club websites and social networking sites into the secure intranet to be developed for the party, in order to facilitate communication and coordination among campaigns, precinct chairs and club members in preparation for, and during the 13-day get-out-the-vote effort. These links will create “virtual” satellite offices that are linked into the full menu of online party communications and organizations.

*Cooperation to expand our outreach through electronic technology. The HCRP will work with our affiliated clubs, including the TFRW clubs, to promote the creation of new online “virtual” clubs as part of an effort to embrace younger voters. Many people under 35 years of age spend hours socializing and networking with others online in ways that mimic the ways we and our parents used our Republican clubs and community service organizations. We need to try and harness this energy and socialization to our advantage by learning to incorporate these new networking methods into the culture of our historic club-based organizational structure.

*Inclusion in the training process. The HCRP will develop and implement a Candidate Training Seminar and a Consultant Training Seminar, with the help of affiliated clubs, including the TFRW clubs. These seminars should provide consistent training in campaign technology, marketing and get-out-the-vote activities to all prospective candidates and their consultants. Access to this seminar should then be provided on a quarterly basis in the future.

*Coordination of candidate forums. The HCRP will include the TFRW clubs in the scheduling of formal candidate forums during the primary season.

*Involvement in the creation of a sustaining-donor fundraising campaign. The HCRP will ask the clubs to coordinate an annual fundraising drive for the party during the spring of each year to augment our development of a sustaining base of small and medium-size contributors for the party.

*Providing staff for our "war room" to respond to media stories. The HCRP will develop an online virtual “war-room” through the new interactive website. The purpose of the war-room will be to serve as a fast-paced clearinghouse of information that would provide precinct chairs and activists with quick responses to negative stories about Republican candidates and policies after the stories appear in local media and on liberal blogs. Our activists can then use this information to rebut these stories when talking with our voters, and to send rebuttals to the media and blogs. We will ask members of our TFRW clubs to help staff this war room, and to mentor young, computer-savvy volunteers who we also will recruit.

*Involvement in the public promotion of the party and its principles. The HCRP will develop a media plan to re-educate voters about our principles and to promote our message. This plan will include the creation of short spots on local media and the Internet, including radio and TV stations that service our Target Outreach Communities, in which noted spokespersons and party officials discuss the application of our principles to real issues. We will ask our TFRW clubs to provide volunteers to help prepare, produce and participate in these spots.

*Involvement in the process of meeting and registering new voters. When schools start in August of each year, the HCRP needs to have representatives on those campuses talking to the new incoming students. When new housing developments start to sell homes, or when occupancy permits are issued, we should be there with a welcome basket of sorts (including voter-registration forms). When a new business opens, we should greet the new entrepreneur with our message and our best wishes. I will work with the President of the Greater Houston Council of the TFRW clubs, and the presidents of the local TFRW clubs in Harris County to provide volunteers to staff this project.

*Support for GOTV in cross-county races. Finally, as part of a new coordination effort with adjacent counties with which we share overlapping congressional, legislative and judicial districts, the new Vice Chair (Director) of Campaign Support will work with the President of the Greater Houston Council of the TFRW clubs, and the presidents of the local TFRW clubs in those affected districts, to help with joint, cross-county mobilization and get-out-the-vote efforts.

In addition to these proposed steps, I and the members of the new leadership team will include the President of the Greater Houston Council of the TFRW in our consultations as we develop and implement our reform agenda for the HCRP. I am confident that if we work together, we will restore the prominence of the GOP in Harris County. I look forward to that effort.