This essay is an expanded version of a lecture delivered on October 31, 1991, as part of the Ashbrook Center's "Major Issues Lecture Series" at Ashland University. The subject for the 1991-92 Major Issues Lecture series is "Striving Towards Excellence in Education." Because, as Governor George Voinovich has said, these lectures "cover topics that are innovative and substantive within the educational field," and because the "subject is of particular relevance considering the challenges facing our current educational system," the Ashbrook Center is publishing the lectures under the series "Excellence in Education." It is our hope that the wide circulation of these monographs, and the book to follow, will add to the much needed national dialogue on educational issues. Other speakers and authors in the series include: Denis P. Doyle, Rita Kramer, Chester Finn, Dinesh D'Souza, Lynne Cheney, and Lamar Alexander. The opinions expressed in these publications do not necessarily reflect the views of the John M. Ashbrook Center or its Board of Advisors. The Center is grateful to the John M. Olin Foundation for its generous support of the series.

      F. Clifton White
      Director
      Ashbrook Center

My grandmother's idea of rapid change was Orville and Wilbur Wright flying at Kitty Hawk when she was 14 years old, followed suddenly by Neil Armstrong walking on the moon when she was 80. "Too much change in one lifetime," she used to say. I doubt she could have handled the demise of Communism in just four days in August.

She wouldn't have been alone. Many of us have the feeling that events are screeching by us in fast forward, too quickly to grasp their significance and so at odds with what we have been told to expect that we cannot explain their occurrence. Consider:

• In Iraq the American military won a war Congressmen and commentators said we couldn't win.
• War came to the Middle East, and oil prices went down, not up.
• Congress enacted a highly touted deficit reduction program…and the deficit promptly doubled.
• And, of course, Communism collapsed after 70 years of western intellectuals from Jean Paul Sartre to John Kenneth Galbraith telling us it was the wave of the future.

So what on earth is going on? Well, some of it is easily explained as pre-game hype. Congressmen have no more idea whether a missile will work or an army battalion successfully storm a desert redoubt than whether the Redskins will win on Sunday. Columnists are paid to write interesting things, not to analyze price elasticity in a global petroleum market heavily influenced by a non-Western cartel.

Some is wishful thinking. Nobel prize winner Paul Samuelson praised the Soviet economy in 1985 as "a powerful engine for economic growth;" MIT's Lester Thurow piled on in 1989 noting the USSR's "remarkable performance." As your dad said: don't believe everything you read in the papers.

But there is something significant going on here: real time experience has taught us something over the past quarter century. In the '70s we tried a "national energy policy"; it brought us shortages and gas lines. We tried wage and price controls, which engendered inflation and economic sluggishness; higher taxes which brought slower growth and fewer jobs, and we tried "equity, not excellence" (so help me, it was the campaign slogan of a school board candidate in Brookline, Massachusetts in the '70s) in our education system, resulting in more than 20 years of declining ability of students to master basic skills.

It took us a while to catch on because the triumph of our common sense over the experts' IQ takes time. But in the '80s we finally got it right, and in the process Americans and the rest of the world learned something—in fact, three lessons:

First, the '80s conclusively documented the catastrophic failure of collectivism and central planning. By contrast, we learned that individualism and markets are enormously successful. The third lesson of the 1980s was the inability of so much of America's leadership to come to grips with the first two.

In the late 1980s, the showcase nation of central planning was shown to be a hollow shell: empty shelves in the markets, rotting food in the fields, less cars per capita than blacks in South Africa, a GNP smaller than that of Turkey and still falling—surely this could not be the wave of the future. For 70 years the world's largest army, most powerful and vicious secret police, and a vast pervasive bureaucracy beyond George Orwell's wildest dreams, gripped a nation in which there was no private property, no free press, no political opposition, where all the power was concentrated in their hands…and they couldn't make it work. Only at Harvard is there still hope and nostalgia for Marxism; the '80s proved to the rest of us that central planning and the ownership of the means of production by the state is a bankrupt idea.

On the other hand, in the rest of the world, in the 1980s we learned a very different lesson: when the individual is encouraged to excel in a marketplace of choices, prosperity will blossom. America's policies provided 79 consecutive months of economic growth, 20 million net new jobs, many of them high-skilled, productivity increases in manufacturing three times those of the 1970s, and our best peacetime economic performance since 1776.

States, too, demonstrated that market economics can dramatically improve the lives of virtually all their citizens. In Delaware, a vigorous program of tax rate reductions (the personal income tax rate is now 39% of what it was in 1978), constitutional spending restraints and deregulation of industry drove state revenues and employment opportunities dramatically up, welfare caseloads down to about half their previous level, and raised the quality of life for the vast majority of Delaware's people.

Nor was the opportunity provided by market economics confined to the United States. The World Bank's recent World Development Report revealed that over 20 years governments which regulate less and use markets more do better than those which do the reverse, concluding that "during the 1980s, the backwardness of the command economies contrasted sharply with the rapid technological advance in the market-oriented economies."

Perhaps Pope John Paul II put it best in his May encyclical: "The free market is the most efficient instrument for utilizing resources and effectively responding to needs."

It may not be unanimous—Cuba, China and New York City seem to have missed it—but it is certain that markets are the most successful means of creating individual opportunity.

The third remarkable lesson of the 1980s has been the inability of so much of America's leadership to understand the first two.

The Democratic Party's liberal left—Michael Dukakis, Tom Harkin, Jesse Jackson—still believes in the welfare state.

Congressman Rostenkowski, Chairman of the House of Representative's Ways and Means Committee, recently introduced a national, centrally planned health care proposal which fixes prices and expands regulation throughout the health care delivery system—a step away from, not towards, the market.

Quota advocates in the Congress want to centrally plan the racial composition of every school, business and legislative body in America.

The reregulators of the Bush administration, who under the guise of environmentalism, saddled $4 billion in costs on consumers to combat an acid rain problem which barely exists, are attempting to rule out of use of millions of acres of damp soil by classifying them as wetlands, and are about to impose staggering costs on small business with a host of environmental monitoring regulations.

Governors Florio and Cuomo and Budget Director Richard Darman believe higher taxes and higher spending are successful policies—never mind the experience of the past 20 years.

Harvard's Robert Reich clings to the fatal conceit that a few chosen people can mandate a national "industrial policy" that will be more effective in creating economic growth than the marketplace.

All have missed the point: markets work; price controls, quotas, higher taxes and decisions for the many made by an elite few do not.

One would hope that over time the lessons of the '80s would sink in, because the challenges of the '90s, the seemingly intractable problems we worry about, can only be solved through the use of market mechanisms.

Three issues currently dominate the domestic policy debate in the United States. One is the budget-deficit-taxes tangle, which is really an argument about how much of your own money you can spend, and how much the Congressional check-bouncers will spend for you. Here less is more—the less they spend the more you will invest—in houses, education, jobs—and the more the economy will grow. Individual choices maximize opportunity for everyone.

Another is education; the third is health care. Both of these provide clear examples of the failure of central planning and the inevitable need for market solutions if sound education and adequate health care are to be realistic options for American families.

For nearly a decade, since the alarm sounded by the 1983 report of the National Committee on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk, America has furiously hurled money at our education system. Virtually every state undertook some sort of education "reform": student testing, teacher testing, higher standards, more math and science or mandatory kindergarten. Teachers' salaries rose dramatically—in Delaware, for example, three times as fast as the salaries of others, until today the average stands at $35,200, 44% more than the salary of the average worker in our state. Across the country, per pupil expenditure has doubled in a decade, increasing more than twice the inflation rate.

So for all our time, for all our efforts, for all of this massive infusion of money, just what have we accomplished? Sadly, not very much.

You are familiar with the data: 29% of American students who enter the ninth grade fail to graduate from high school; of those who do, some 700,000 each year are functional illiterates. Half of our high school seniors cannot locate France on a map. The number of high school seniors scoring above 750 on the combined verbal and math section of the SAT's is 50% lower than it was 10 years ago. The Department of education's 1991 annual test results show that American students' achievement in science and reading has not improved in twenty years. In math, it has improved. How much? Well, about 18% of our eighth and twelfth graders are now competent, less than 3% can perform advanced mathematics work. That's a long way from world class. So it comes as no surprise that on international math and science tests, American students score twelfth best in the world. Indeed, the only educational indicator that is dramatically rising is spending. Clearly something is very, very wrong.

What? Well, come to think of it America's education system has much in common with the former USSR's economic system: they were both centrally planned and bureaucratically managed.

In the United States, the government decides where our children go to school, when our children go to school, who teaches them, what books they read, what tests they take, what results are to be achieved, and even what they eat for lunch. Education in America is a single system mandated by government.

But America did not come to grow and prosper through 200 years with the government providing "one best product." It is time to bring the proven American values of choice and competition into education.

Without choice, schools will not improve. Indeed, without choice and competition they not only have not improved in the past 30 years, they have, in fact, declined.

What makes choice such an important tool? First, it gives people a sense of shared ownership in whatever it is they have chosen.

Choice would end the stifling bureaucracy that has given us the twelfth best schools in the world. Not one of the 6,000 teachers in Milwaukee has been dismissed in five years for poor performance; not one of the 1,000 new teachers hired has been denied tenure. The 6,600 central office administrators in the New York City public school system are unlikely to perform themselves out of a job. Such centrally planned systems will never be reformed at the margins, as Gorbachev demonstrated in the Soviet Union.

Choice means fairness—giving all families access to the best schools now within the economic grasp of only the few. It is poor and middle class working families whose children are most often trapped in inferior schools; it is time they were given the power to do better for their children.

Choice means power—the power of every parent to choose the school best suited to each child—the power to choose our child's education as we choose our jobs, our houses, our churches and our leaders.

But most of all, choice forces all schools to improve to survive in the competitive marketplace and this raises the quality of education in every classroom in every school.

Further, we know choice works: in city parochial schools, American higher education, and the GI Bill.

City parochial schools—which parents have chosen for their children—have better discipline, higher graduation rates and college admissions, lower dropout rates and higher student achievement. James Coleman found students of comparable socioeconomic background gain one full grade level in just two years in city parochial schools compared with city public schools.

In contrast to elementary and secondary education, American higher education is the best in the world—it is a market choice system in which parents and students choose their college.

Finally, we know the GI Bill works—brilliantly. From World War II to Desert Storm, 18 million American men and women have gone to college or post-secondary schooling using its benefits. They have attended the public, private, or religious institutions of their choice—without constitutional controversy. So why not a GI Bill for kids--$2000 scholarships for each of them to attend the elementary or secondary school of their choice—a market solution to a challenge of the 1990s.

The challenges of the '90s are surely difficult; meeting them will be time-consuming, complex and frustrating. But knowing what to do is not complex, for the '80s have taught all we need to know: that markets work. All we need to do is use them.

As my grandmother used to say after I had done something particularly stupid, "There's nothing wrong with your head. You just need to use it."

Discussion

Question: Well, I don't really like to hear people saying that the teachers are getting paid too much, because that's a profession where you cannot charge what the market will bear.

Pete du Pont: I'm not putting down the teachers, ma'am. I'm suggesting to you that the teachers are vastly underpaid. And what we ought to do for the teachers is to let them bid their services among school districts, instead of paying all teachers the same amount of money—good, bad, or indifferent. If someone is a really good teacher, let the public school in the next town say, "Hey, instead of thirty-five thousand dollars, were going to offer you forty." Then that teacher says, "Well, I've now got something to sell. I'm a professional. I'm not a union member who's in a fixed price field." And the quality of the money paid to teachers will rapidly rise. Not to all teachers. Some will get paid less because some won't be so good.

I'd like to see the teachers running the school, instead of the educational bureaucracy. To give you an example, I talked about the 6600 bureaucrats in New York City. It costs $6000 a year to educate a pupil in the New York City public school system. How much of that is spent in the classroom? Two thousand dollars. Three thousand dollars go to the central bureaucracy, $1000 go to the district bureaucracy, and $2000 go to the teacher. Suppose you gave all $6000 to the teacher, or committee of teachers running the schools, and said, "Here, use it to teach. Raise your salary. Get a better chemistry lab." Things would change in an instant. We want to let the teachers teach, instead of having bureaucracies clogging up this system and stopping education from changing.

Question: Mr. Governor, welcome to Ohio, the state that has more bureaucrats in the educational apparatus than there are teachers. Engineers for Education, an organization that represents technical societies and four-and-a-half million scientists and engineers in this country, has recommended that we put an elementary science teacher in every elementary school in the United States. This is a supply-side solution that is addressing the basics of the supply of educational resources in the United States. Do you support a principle such as that, whether it be implemented at the local level or the national level, the principle of putting an elementary science teacher in every elementary school in the United States?

Pete du Pont: Well, I'm going to give you an answer you didn't expect by saying, "No". It doesn't make sense to add more able teachers to a system that's no good to start with. Why don't we let a group of teachers start a science curriculum elementary school, and let people that want to have some science education come to it?

President Bush, and Governor Castle in our state, and perhaps your officials as well, have signed onto this goal of increasing the graduation rate in American high schools to 90% by the year 2000. Pardon me for being just a little cynical, but why do you want to run more people through a system that's the twelfth best in the world? That might help a little bit, but why don't we get a system that's first best, that's run by those science teachers, let them do their thing and get the bureaucrats—and maybe I can update my statistics with Ohio's statistics—get them out of there? Stop them from siphoning the money off, and get a little educational excellence. I appreciate what you're saying, and yes better science instructors in the schools is a good goal, but I don't think there's any sense in adding them to a system that's already failing so many students.

Question: Mr. Governor, how would you anticipate a scholarship program such as the one that you've hypothesized becoming a reality? How would you suggest that it can work?

Pete du Pont: First, it would require legislative approval in every state. What you would propose, I think, is that the school districts who wanted to have a system like this would have a voter referendum. We'll let the people choose. School boards probably wouldn't vote for it because it would reduce their power. So let's let the people choose. If they chose yes, the next year, instead of the $6000 being spent on your son at the local public school, $2000 of that would be in a scholarship, and your son could take that scholarship to any school, public, private, parochial, whatever. And what happens to the other $4000? The states had to give your family $2000 in that scholarship. But there are $4000 left over, because that kid is no longer in [public] school. And so there are $4000 more in the school he left, to use on raising teacher salaries, or improving the chemistry lab, or whatever needs to be done. So what you'd simply do is say there's going to be a referendum. If your school district votes for it, next year your state aid will come in a scholarship to the student. Two thousand dollars worth, or four thousand dollars worth, or whatever you think the number ought to be, and then that money flows with the student. If he chooses the public school next door, the $2000 go to that school district. If your girl chooses the Catholic school, the $2000 go to that school. And then you have fairness, you have power, you have competition to get those $2000 scholarships, just like with the American higher education system. I think things would begin to get better.

Question: Would you care to comment on the tangential issues of family that also affect educational motivation and quality?

Pete du Pont: Well, we've got a lot of family problems in the country. We have too many families without fathers. We have too many families that don't have enough money to make the right kind of decisions for their children. I think educational scholarships would begin to address the money issue, because you'd be giving them real resources to make some choices they don't have today.

I also think it would begin to change the ethic in the family, because today when the government assigns your child to school, you have no impact. You can't change the way that school works. Even if you get elected to the school board, you can't change the school. If you had a chance to make the choice, you'd have ownership in the school. You'd care more, you'd pay more attention to what your children are doing there, because you are "paying for it." And I think some of the family motivation would return, and I think that would be a good thing, a by-product of the additional educational opportunity.

About the Author

Pete du Pont has served as a State Legislator, Congressman, Governor of Delaware, and, in 1988, was a candidate for the President of the United States. He currently is a director in the Washington law firm of Richards, Layton and Finger.

Also, following his presidential quest, Governor du Pont created an organization called Ideas for America's Future as a means for the continued development of the ideas that formed the basis for his presidential campaign.

In 1976, Governor du Pont won a landslide victory against Delaware's incumbent Democratic governor, and was re-elected to a second term with a record 71 percent of the vote.

Particularly during his second term, Governor du Pont made public education a top priority for his administration. He established an alternative curriculum called "Basics Plus," which stressed fundamental skills in reading, writing and mathematics for elementary and junior high school classes. He called for an upgrading of science and math requirements, including courses in the fundamentals of computer science.

A leader in the debate on how to improve education, in 1984, he served as Chairman of the Education Commission of the States, a national group whose charter is to make recommendations that deal with all facets of American education.

In 1985, Governor du Pont was named Chairman of the Hudson Institute, one of the nation's premier think tanks that focus on meeting the challenges of leadership in the future. He remains a member of its Board of Trustees.

After receiving a bachelor of science degree in engineering from Princeton University, he served as a lieutenant in the U. S. Navy before attaining a doctor of law degree from Harvard and joining the Du Pont Company at its Wilmington, DE, headquarters. He later was elected three times to Delaware's General Assembly and served six years in the U.S. House of Representatives.

He and his wife, Elise, are the parents of four children.