Riley: America depends on quality teachers and schools

Former South Carolina Governor Dick Riley is one of the handful of elder statesmen who can be called "education governors," alongside former North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt.

In fact, Riley is one of only two South Carolinians to serve in a presidential Cabinet in the twentieth century; he served as education secretary for former President Bill Clinton, and former Governor Jimmy Byrnes served as secretary of state for former President Harry S. Truman.

So when Dick Riley speaks -- especially on the topic of public education -- it behooves reasonable people in his home state to listen.

Today, Riley published a column co-written with Arthur Levine, former president of Teachers College at Columbia University, and now president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

Their topic? Addressing the need to improve America's public schools by addressing the needs of their teachers.

The latest national teacher survey brings tough news.

Previous research shows that a good teacher is the single most important in-school factor in improving student achievement, but this latest report reveals that the teaching profession in the United States is deeply troubled.

According to the bellwether MetLife Survey of the American Teacher released last week, teacher job satisfaction has dropped from 59 percent to 44 percent just in the last two years, to the lowest level in more than two decades.

Why might that be? Perhaps the well-funded public relations campaign waged against traditional public schools by education deformers -- thanks to Diane Ravitch for that term -- has something to do with it. Perhaps it's the well-orchestrated effort to undermine respect for one of the nation's noblest professions. Perhaps it's seeing your life's work denigrated by elected leaders at the local, state and federal levels. And perhaps it's seeing every challenge and difficulty in society and our economy laid at the feet of overworked, underpaid and highly-stressed educators.

Or, maybe, the architects of "No Child Left Behind" have finally achieved their goal, and teachers are collectively reaching their breaking points.

At the same time, the number of teachers who say they are planning to leave the profession has doubled in the past three years; three out of 10 public school teachers are now looking to take their talents elsewhere.

And why not, when private contractors are sucking every spare dime out of public education budgets, and lawmakers with their hands out for campaign cash know where the bread is buttered.

We are not alarmists, but we believe the combination of decreasing satisfaction and indications of increasing turnover raises serious concerns about the future of the teaching profession. These data suggest that we are actually losing ground on recruiting and retaining top teaching talent.

It's not Governor Nikki Haley and Superintendent Mick Zais who should be reading this column; they're already hopelessly wedded to their ideology. Instead, it's the next wave of lawmakers -- the ones who will run and begin serving during the next decade -- who need to take this expertise to heart. They're the ones who will have to clean up after the devastation of "No Child Left Behind" and the blind obedience to lucrative high-stakes testing regimes.

The root of the problem is the convergence of two powerful forces. The first is that many of the nation's fastest-growing job categories require more education and more advanced skills and knowledge than ever before. So it is essential that our schools perform at higher levels than have ever been expected of them in the past. Graduation rates and student achievement must rise dramatically.

The second force is the economic recession, which is requiring states to make substantial budget cuts. Since education is such a major portion of their spending, it cannot be exempt. Connecting the budget and dissatisfaction dots of the survey data, it's clear that teachers are bearing the brunt of these cuts.

The result is that at precisely the moment we expect and need more from our schools, they are being subjected to deep and debilitating cuts, producing declines in teacher staffing, down-scaled programs, loss of services, increasing class sizes and fewer opportunities to update teacher skills. In other words, schools are being asked to perform at new heights using resources that are at new lows. It's no wonder that teachers are frustrated with the profession.

God bless Dick Riley. Is there any real reason why he shouldn't run for re-election as governor in 2014? Jim Hunt served four terms in North Carolina; can't we afford Riley three?

And if not him, where do we find another like him?

So what do we do?

Let's start with improving teaching and recruiting the best candidates. A September 2010 report from consulting giant McKinsey & Company shows that top-performing countries such as Finland, South Korea, and Singapore have no trouble attracting their nation's top college graduates into teaching jobs. All of their teachers come from the top third of their graduating classes, compared to 23 percent of teachers in the United States who do so.

The long-overdue focus on robust professional development and quality evaluation must continue, but that's only part of the solution. To bring in the talent we need, we must also upgrade teacher preparation and induction programs to make them worthy of high achievers. That means supporting scholarship programs targeted at attracting the best students to teaching, raising the quality of teacher education at the nation's universities, creating more high-quality clinical experiences and residencies, extending and enhancing student-teaching experiences with the kinds of students they will teach, building in mentorships with master teachers for the first three years, and placing teachers in schools with strong instructional leadership.

That way, when the nation's economic growth kicks into higher gear and funding returns to the nation's schools, we'll have high-quality, highly trained teachers both in the classroom and in the pipeline, ready to maximize resources and leverage their upgraded expertise.

All this will cost money, but it will also save money: Using estimates from the Department of Labor that attrition costs an employer 30 percent of the leaving employee's salary, a 2004 analysis by the Alliance for Excellent Education calculated that the nationwide cost of teacher turnover, not including retirements, at least $4.9 billion every year.

We also need to spend our education funding more effectively. For example, the 2010 McKinsey report says that the United States could more than double the proportion of top graduates who teach without raising pay by subsidizing teacher-preparation tuition, creating more effective administration and training opportunities in high-need schools, improving working conditions and providing performance bonuses.

The MetLife survey results are a warning bell. The future of our country is dependent on the quality of our schools and our teachers. As a nation, we acknowledge this rhetorically, but our education policies and practices too often move us in the opposite direction. We need to change this if we want the economic prosperity that rises with the quality of our education. We need to stop pretending that it somehow doesn't matter who teaches our children and start investing wisely in a new generation of teaching excellence.

Is there anyone who will take up Dick Riley's charge?

Anyone?

Haley snubs President of the United States, ditches banquet

What a sweet scoop from The Times of India, a property of the Times Group family (which includes, among other hot properties, the Pune Mirror, the Bangalore Mirror, the Ahmedabad Mirror, the Mumbai Mirror, and Indiatimes).

South Carolina's Indian-American Republican Governor Nikki Haley criticised President Barack Obama's "failure to handle America", but said "personal plans" kept her and husband Michael from attending Sunday's White House dinner.

Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama host the dinner annually for the governors to coincide with the National Governors Association conference in Washington.

"We were meeting with friends," Haley told reporters Monday, following a press conference organised by the Republican Governors Association (RGA).

Haley said she and her husband "were honoured" to attend the White House dinner last year -- her first as governor -- but wanted to see friends Sunday night.

Haley attended Monday morning's meeting with Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, where the president stressed the importance of education policy.

Haley later joined fellow Republican governors, Indian-American Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Bob McDonnell of Virginia, at the RGA press conference to blast Obama's policies and urge the election of a Republican president.

In addition to stressing the Republican message on business and education issues, Haley, who has endorsed Republican Mitt Romney, said Obama was coming in the way of development in her state.

"In South Carolina, we can't even pass our own bills without him getting in the way," she said. "We pass illegal immigration reform, he stops it. We pass voter ID, he stops it. We get Boeing, he stops it."

"I mean, I'd just like to be a governor and be able to take care of my state. The president's trying to handle the entire country, and he's failing," Haley said.

Personal plans. With friends.

Our classy governor, who spent last year's visit to the White House famously checking email and tapping out her memoir on an iPad, traveled to Washington for the annual governors' conference at the White House but ditched the annual governors' banquet, hosted by the President and First Lady of the United States, to visit friends.

Cyberspace sources today suggest that Haley's friends were the sort who write checks to demonstrate their friendship, that she snubbed the President and First Lady of the United States to attend a fundraiser. No corroboration yet, but the quarterly filing to the Federal Election Commission will tell that tale soon enough.

I wonder: Would Haley have similarly insulted former President and First Lady George W. and Laura Bush, and blown off a banquet hosted by them for governors, had she served during their regime? I suspect not; I suspect she'd have figured out a way to drag an extra chair up to the head table so she could be photographed munching quesadillas with Dubya.

Mmm. Cheesy.

And to see this glowingly published in The Times of India is all very exciting. It calls to mind the comments offered by former Senator Fritz Hollings to the Sunday Times of London, referring to former President George W. Bush as "half a bubble off plumb," or the time that former Governor Dick Riley told the Agence-Presse of Paris that former President Ronald Reagan was "ready for the home." It really warms the heart to see sitting South Carolina statesmen ridiculing our chief executive officer in the foreign press.

Of course, only one of these three instances ever occurred. Hollings and Riley, statesmen of the first order, would not have resorted to petty personal jibes at the President of the United States, in the foreign or domestic media.

Our present state regent appears unconstrained by such scruples.

And it clearly wins her favor among the Indian people, who regard her as a "star," as reported by the Indian ambassador to the United States.

The ambassador is coincidentally in South Carolina this week, observing Haley's subjects in their native habitat and expressing her hopes that Haley will lead a trade mission to her parents' native land soon.

India's recently-appointed ambassador to the United States, Nirupama Rao, was visiting the State Ports Authority Tuesday in Charleston as part of a three-day visit to South Carolina.

Rao said that she's looking forward to meeting with Gov. Nikki Haley, the daughter of Indian immigrants, and she hopes that Haley will consider leading a trade mission to India.

"She's a star there, naturally," said Rao. "I think all of India just adores her, and we are proud of her achievements."

Rao began her three-day visit to the Palmetto State at the SPA offices in downtown Charleston, where she also planned to visit the College of Charleston. The ambassador, who is visiting South Carolina for the first time, is scheduled to meet with Haley on Wednesday in Columbia, where she will also address the Columbia World Affairs Council luncheon.

On Thursday Rao and her entourage will be in the upstate area, touring the BMW auto plant near Greenville.

Where our governor is also regarded a star, no doubt.

Haley: Our job is to train employees for manufacturers

I can't make this stuff up.

Spend a little time reading about the history of education, public and otherwise, in the South and, after a long hard slog through a lot of ugly history, you'll happen upon what occurred in 1959 in North Carolina.

In truth, North Carolina's public education history was much like ours up to that year, subject to demagoguery and political whims through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But while South Carolina continued on that course like a mule in its row, North Carolina jumped its track and charted a new course.

In the 1950s, North Carolina was home to a deteriorating economic base rooted in tobacco, furniture manufacturing, small-scale farming and textiles, and had the second-lowest per capita income in the nation. The state’s economic future was uncertain.

But in 1959, a group of the state’s brightest political, business and academic leaders created a new future for North Carolina. Together, they worked to create a more sustainable economic base that would carry North Carolina into the 21st century. Drawing upon the strengths and synergies between North Carolina’s academic, government and industry base they created RTP as a place to attract and grow research and development (R&D) operations.

The vision was to provide a ready physical infrastructure that would attract research oriented companies. The advantage of locating in RTP would be that companies could employ the highly-educated local work force and be proximate to the research being conducted by the state’s research universities.

Today, there are more than 170 companies in RTP. The original parcel of land that made up RTP in 1959 consisted of 4,400 acres. Through the years, the Foundation acquired more land, surpassing 5,500 acres by 1979 and totaling nearly 7,000 acres presently. In the same period, the Park’s developed space has increased from only 200,000 square feet in 1960 to more than 22.5 million square feet currently.

More than 38,000 full-time equivalent employees work in RTP with an estimated 10,000 contract workers.

Look at the words: "sustainable economic base," "strengths and synergies," "academic, government and industry base," "attract and grow research and development," "vision," "research-oriented companies," and "highly-educated local work force."

Thanks to the commitment of several visionaries -- Luther Hodges, Terry Sanford and others -- and the steadfast maintenance of that commitment over two generations by Jim Hunt, Jim Martin and Beverly Perdue, North Carolina slipped the shackles of ignorance and has grown amazingly into a state with consistently high ratings for business and industry, education and quality of life.

The key, as these men and women saw it, was education and investment. They foresaw that the old paradigms of cheap labor and manufacturing would keep their state locked in competition with neighboring states, like crabs in a barrel, for the lowest of low-wage jobs -- a perpetual race to the bottom -- with corporate heads always in the catbird seat. So they made the hard choices, made the necessary investment, made the case for high-quality public education, and charted their new course.

Of course, South Carolina took a different tack. We doubled down. We sneered at our too-big-for-their-britches cousins to the North, frowned at their airs and ambitions, pitied their waste of so many dollars to educate their ignorant. To his credit, Governor Dick Riley in the 1970s saw what North Carolina was accomplishing, and without envy, wanted South Carolina to enjoy the same fruits. Riley strained mightily to pull us out of our traces, and he accomplished an amazing legacy.

But as he passed from office, so did the bone-deep commitment to education and investment. Governor Carroll Campbell's efforts illustrated that, like Riley, he wanted the fruits of economic development, and Campbell benefited from the foundation Riley had laid in public education.

It is only polite to skip David Beasley without reference. Since Riley, only Governor Jim Hodges has evinced the deep advocacy for public education as the taproot of South Carolina's growth and prosperity. Serving only one term, Hodges was a tremendous voice for education but was cut short by Mark Sanford's rise. Sanford, of course, and his legislative allies starved public schools, sought to privatize as much as possible, and propped up proposal after proposal as alternatives to public education.

Which brings us to Haley. In her way, Haley is upholding a long and storied heritage of keeping the mass of South Carolinians uneducated and inexpensive.

Plato, founder of the first university in western civilization, used his famous "allegory of the cave" to illustrate the human condition. In "The Republic," Plato said that Man, in his natural state, is chained to a wall at the end of a cave, whose entrance is around a bend and cannot be seen directly. Light enters the mouth of the cave only several hours a day, according to the sun's track across the sky. Chained Man sees shadows upon the cave wall and must interpret those shadows as best he can, based on incomplete knowledge and errant awareness. He lives and dies in ignorance of reality, without ever having seen the source of light through his own eyes, for the full day.

It is the role of the professor, Plato said, to enter the cave, round the bend, unchain Man from his wall and lead him out into light and life.

Plato used the word "professor," but a new word arose in late Middle English, from the Latin verb "educere," meaning "to lead out": educator.

Educators, therefore, share a noble calling: To lead chained intellects out of their darkness and into light. The Apostle Paul understood the sentiment, and perhaps knew of Plato's allegory, when he wrote his first letter to the church at Corinth:

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face...

It is the mark of compassionate and progressive civilization that when we know better, we do better.

But, as I am reminded hourly in our fair land, we live in South Carolina. Our heritage despises compassion and progress -- and civilization, for that matter. What was good for North Carolina and every other state is blocked at our borders. As centuries of our history have proven, we want the fruits for ourselves without cultivating the earth with our own hands.

Thus, our governor spoke last week to the state Automotive Council's Manufacturing Summit at Clemson University and doubled down again, emphasizing the need for training, not education.

The difference is not semantic. Dogs, dolphins and even fleas are trained. Saplings are trained. Hair is trained. Toddlers are trained to control their bodily functions. But adult human beings, treated as adult human beings, are worthy of education in every state but ours, in all the developed nations of the world.

GREENVILLE — Gov. Nikki Haley welcomed the 2012 S.C. Automotive Council’s Manufacturing Summit to the Clemson University International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR) Thursday and stressed the importance of education to one of the state’s key industrial sectors.

South Carolina is at the heart of manufacturing in the U.S., Haley said. Companies are looking to invest in South Carolina because the state has great things to sell: the cost of doing business is low and South Carolina is a very business-friendly state, she said.

But the state must ensure it has a trained workforce for these manufacturers, and people looking for jobs need to know what certifications they need and how to get certified.

“Companies coming here need to know there is a trained workforce ready to go,” Haley said. “And we must ensure these companies have a trained workforce to help attract them to South Carolina.”

Monkeys, pigeons and rose bushes all share a capacity to accept training.

In South Carolina, it appears, so do adult human beings. According to our governor, it is, in fact, our responsibility as citizens to raise up and train our children to be prepared, compliant, obedient and sufficient workers for their corporate owners.

Who can be our Plato and Dick Riley, and can lead us out of our collective darkness?

Today's The State: "Education was the main thing" to Riley

A chill ran up my spine this morning when I read the headline in The State: "'Education was the main thing,' Integrity, tenacity served Riley as S.C. governor and U.S. education chief." After a week of high-profile obituaries, I feared the worst; when was the last time that a major South Carolina newspaper led with an education-positive headline and praised Dick Riley, arguably the most important pro-education governor in our history?

The great news is this: Happily for all of us, this was no obituary, and I sincerely hope that Dick Riley is with us for another 50 years.

The sad note running through the item, however, was the whole tone of past tense, starting with the headline itself: "Education WAS the main thing." Today, education seems to be the albatross that the legislative majority would like to kill and discard.

What was it like in South Carolina when "education was the main thing"?

The State tells us:

As a state legislator and then as governor from 1979-87, Riley placed education concerns at the center of his agenda, even as the state dealt with economic development, tight budgets, public-health needs and nuclear-waste storage policies.

To Riley, society’s problems were inseparable from an education system that desperately needed improvement. Strengthen education, he proselytized, and other challenges could be made manageable. The cost for improving education can be high, Riley acknowledged, but the cost of retreating is greater.

“Education was the main thing for me, and it should be the main thing for the current governor,” Riley says. “You still have people out there fighting for education just as much as anybody ever did. But when you get off track talking about vouchers and tax credits, when that gets to be the main concern instead of talking about more rigor and improvement in what you provide kids, it really is a diversion. ...

How did we get so far away from that way of thinking? Riley was governor only 25 years ago. Less than a generation after he led not only a movement to change the constitution to allow himself to run and serve a second term, but he convinced voters to approve a new state tax to support public education.

In his most moderate and cogent remarks, Mark Sanford never left anyone imagining that he might support public education in South Carolina. And nothing that Nikki Haley has said or done to date suggests that she has anything but contempt for public schools and the professionals giving public service in them. What happened? To both Sanford and Haley, the answer to every question regarding public schools was some variation on a single theme: "Government-run schools are an evil that should and can be eradicated with market-based principles represented by defunding public schools and redirecting funds to private schools through vouchers and tuition tax credits, and by undermining traditional public schools by allowing more charter schools to be opened, even in communities where local leaders do not want them."

Today, public schools are under attack by the state's highest leaders, including the constitutional officer whose job is to be their chief advocate, Superintendent Mick Zais. And the club used to beat them? The state can't afford them.

Riley dismissed that canard:

“Obviously, I don’t like deficits and debt. But when you get down into the weeds of what do leaders support and how they are for education, I tell people they cannot be for education unless they are willing to hurt for education. That’s the test, and you have to take some licks for it.”

Riley, captain of his high-school football team in Greenville, took plenty of licks in 1983 in battling for what ultimately was approved as South Carolina’s Education Improvement Act — a sweeping reform package that included a state sales tax increase to cover the act’s costs.

Legislative wrangling stretched from days to weeks to months, and daily debates often raged deep into the evening and early morning. While Riley and his allies coaxed members of the Legislature to their position, Riley’s wife, Tunky, sat in the State House balcony to show her support, even as she recovered from chemotherapy treatments.

That's a leader.

And what has this giant among statesmen been doing recently?

He also has been called upon for advice by leaders working to establish a public school system in earthquake-ravaged Haiti.

Unbelievable. A third-world nation suffers the most catastrophic disaster imaginable, and to rebuild itself, it works to establish a system of public schools. Here in South Carolina, leaders see no place for public education in their vision for the future -- which looks an awful lot like their vision for the distant past.

Unfortunately, I think that's why Riley's not more visible in South Carolina than he is -- and why he has time to help rebuild and educate Haiti: The present leadership has no regard for the institution of public education, and little respect for South Carolina's greatest statesman since Governor Jimmy Byrnes. In what other state would lawmakers not consult their first two-term governor, and two-term U.S. Secretary of Education, on a regular basis and use his wisdom and insight in the crafting of their plans?

Only in South Carolina.

Riley continues to be concerned about the impact of partisan battles on public education and what he sees as an antagonism among some Americans toward highly educated people, including ill will directed at public-school teachers.

He continues to prescribe a formula for improving education that includes setting high expectations for children, early childhood education, more rigorous instruction in science and math and programs to demand and develop quality teachers. Increasingly, he says, education must be more than a utilitarian outcome and must embrace school programs that involve the entire community, that enable students to learn in team settings where creativity, communication and problem-solving are required.

“Education is an alive issue. It never gets done,” Riley says. “You just cannot quit. You go and you go and you go. I never see anything as defeated. It might be slowed down a little, but never defeated. You can’t defeat something that is the right thing to do.

“There might be all kinds of interferences along the way, and they aren’t all bad, but people will ultimately move in the right direction.

“And then the right thing happens.”

I hope you're right, Governor Riley. Thanks for what you're doing.