How Republicans can save education--and win votes.

Since volunteering for Bill Clinton's first Presidential campaign as a high school senior, I have wavered back and forth between competing political ideologies. Over the last five years, though, there has been one issue that has swung me safely toward the Grand Old Party for the foreseeable future--the woeful state of our schools.

When I began teaching in 1998 in the South Bronx as a Teach For America corps member, I was placed in a large public elementary school. This school certainly had the potential to deliver a decent education to its young charges; we had plenty of money, supplies, and more than enough well-paid teachers. As I quickly found out, though, we were located in District 9--one of New York City's most notorious districts for corruption and political patronage. Bureaucrats at the city and district levels seemed intent on making us teach inane curricula that were not giving students the basic math and English skills they so desperately needed. The school itself, disorganized and chaotic, did not show the sense of urgency needed to work with a population of inner-city kids.

Over the last few years, I have spoken to centrists, Democrats, even a former Naderite, whose only common agreement seems to be that they consider themselves "conservative" on education. Many of them are parents who are simply fed up with popular fads like whole language and fuzzy math. Others prefer Republican ideas that focus on market approaches to education reform, like school vouchers and charter schools. Many Americans, disgusted by what they read of corruption among education bureaucrats and teachers unions, are convinced that the Democratic Party does not have the will to shake up a structure that supports it.

Two obstacles hold the Republicans back from achieving dominance on education. One is the traditional American suspicion of a powerful federal government. Practically since the birth of the United States, local communities have fiercely guarded their schools and fought attempts to transfer educational decision making to the national level. For conservative enclaves of the West and South that back school prayer and repudiate sex education, this local independence is considered crucial.

The other main problem has to do with financing: The Democratic Party has proved masterful at shaming state legislatures into lavishing more and more money on schools with virtually no accountability. In order not to be labeled stingy, Republicans often assume the defensive posture and join in the spending game.

The irony is that for decades, liberal ideology has destroyed the learning environments of our public schools. Whole language, whereby children were expected to learn to read by teaching themselves, has largely been discredited. But, thanks to whole language, millions of schoolchildren in the 1990s never learned to read adequately. Republicans should be banging the drum about issues like this one. And the GOP should follow President Bush's lead by pushing for an overhaul of the research methods that produce so many of our schools' disastrous classroom policies.

It is impossible to view these theories outside of their political bent. Left-wing pedagogical theorists, who have been so influential since the Sixties, take a relativist view to all sorts of school rules: If a student regularly disturbs class by talking out of turn, he's just exhibiting a cultural trait that is no worse than anything else--just different. Consider the attempt to encourage speaking Ebonics in schools in Oakland, California. This well-known instance is but the tip of an iceberg that eschews realistic modes of learning for a dangerous "anything goes" political agenda.