Oral Testimony of Governor Mitt Romney House Committee on Education and the Workforce

05-17-2005

There are many reasons to reform and improve education. Let me mention two in particular.

1) Urban schools are failing and disproportionately, minority students are being left behind. Calling this the achievement gap is a polite way of saying that minority kids are getting an inferior education. They will therefore get inferior jobs, if they can get jobs at all. Inferior education in our urban schools is the civil rights issue of our generation.

2) America’s schools generally are failing to keep up with schools from around the world. That means that America’s youth will not be competitive, that they cannot expect to be qualified for the best jobs of tomorrow. Beyond the sad consequences for them as individuals are the alarming implications of that for our nation.

When I was in high school, a very fortunate thing happened to America. Sputnik was launched. It woke up America’s leaders. President Kennedy called the nation to boost science and math education, to produce more engineers, to put a man on the moon—all these calculated to motivate and educate America’s youth, to keep America from falling hopelessly behind.

Our generation has not had a Sputnik moment…yet. But our Sputnik is on its way. It is coming from Asia. One of the great developments of our time is the economic emergence of China, India, and other nations of Asia. Their poverty is thankfully being reduced. And new opportunities for our employers are opening, but so are new challenges. Asia is not content with making our Christmas tree ornaments: they want to build commercial jets and MRI machines, create software and breakthrough drugs. They are planning for the innovation and technical capital of the world to move from America to Asia.

And it is on its way. Corporate investment in Asia is exploding. CEO’s in my high tech state tell me they plan to transfer major operations there, not for the low cost, but because of the highly educated, highly motivated and plentiful workforce. Bill Gates reports that Microsoft’s new ideas come increasingly from Beijing.

We take comfort in the fact that we spend many times as much as Asian nations on R&D but don’t forget that our engineers cost about ten times as much as theirs.

Two decades ago, American citizens and Asian citizens were awarded about the same number of Ph.D.s annually in physical science and engineering—about 5,000. Today, 4,400 US citizens receive those Ph.D.s compared with 24,900 Asian citizens.

America and America’s youth are less and less competitive. Yes, fixing our schools is a social responsibility. It is also a national economic and national security necessity.

As you know, Massachusetts has some of the highest student scores in the country. Our kids regularly rank at or near the top on virtually all national exams. We have had an equivalent to No Child Left Behind in Massachusetts for several years. We also require our high school students to pass a state exam in order to graduate. Here are some things we have learned.

Most of our urban schools are doing far worse than the state average. But not all of them. In fact, there are huge disparities between schools in the same district, even where the student demographics and ethnic make-up are the same.

We have researched at length why some schools are failing our students and others are succeeding. Classroom size and funding are not the reasons.

Here are the reasons for the disparity and related recommendations:

1) First and foremost, teachers make the difference. Highly qualified, committed, motivated and skilled teaching professionals are the most important factor in education. They are professionals. But increasingly, the teachers union insists that they be treated like interchangeable, indistinguishable factory workers, turning out widgets. If we want to improve education, we have to make teaching a profession again – it’s what the teachers want and it’s what our children need.

2) The best schools have good principals and superintendents. Leadership does matter. Principals need to be regularly evaluated: promote the best, demote or remove the worst.

3) Our teachers and principals need good information about the progress of their students. You can’t improve something you don’t measure. Test kids, regularly, to see where we’re failing them.

4) Parental involvement. Poor schools have poor levels of parental involvement. I’ve proposed mandatory parental preparation courses in our failing school districts.

My guess is that these reasons sound familiar. They are cited time and again by virtually every group that studies education. Of course, they may be disputed by groups that have a financial stake in a certain outcome. But in Massachusetts, unbiased task forces and researchers have reached entirely consistent conclusions. National studies have as well.

The answers are actually quite clear. The question is not what we should do to improve education; it’s whether we have the political will to do it.

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