Core of Conviction : My Story (9781101563571) by Bachmann Michele

Author:Bachmann, Michele
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin USA
Published: 2011-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Stillwater Activism

IT was the declining quality of education—ominously visible in Minnesota by the nineties, and in America as a whole—that proved the decisive factor in getting me into politics. There would be no stillness in my life in Stillwater.

As a kid back in Waterloo, I had always enjoyed taking the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. Every year, we would sharpen our number 2 pencils and hear the familiar instructions, always the same: Fill the oval, don’t mark outside the lines. I was proud that the famous tests, offered nationwide, were produced by the University of Iowa, located in, of all places, Iowa City. It was Iowa all the way! I instinctively believed that tests were a good idea, because some things should be measured. After all, if you want to improve something, you have to be able to measure its progress—to see whether or not it has really improved. Also, as a kid, I was always proud that Iowa placed first in the nation. So I would pull out my trusty pencil and happily start scratching away on the tests.

But if tests are a good thing, there’s still a danger in centralized testing. And in my lifetime, the benefits of testing have often been lost, especially when the testing—and the judging and the controlling—are administered by a distant bureaucracy. We should all seek to measure and improve ourselves, but at the same time, we should rightly fear the power of one-size-fits-all “improvers.” When Marcus and I were raising our children, we wanted to know exactly how well they were doing. But we didn’t need the federal government to test our children; we would test them ourselves.

Happily, my husband and I were to various degrees able to homeschool our five biological kids—the boys for longer periods of time, and the girls until they were proficient in reading. And then we sent them to Christian schools. Marcus and I believed that if we taught the kids to read, they would be able to succeed in school, and they have. But at the same time, we could see that other parents might not be so fortunate. Indeed, it was both a shame and a waste that while governments at all levels were spending increasing amounts of money on the public schools, the federal government’s regulatory burden, piled on top of the schools, increased much faster than federal aid. These “unfunded mandates,” as they are called, proved to be an enormous weight on local schools. We knew plenty of motivated teachers and administrators, and yet the educational bureaucracy was grinding them down into defeatism and fatalism.

During this same time, in the early nineties, a new idea, charter schools, came onto the scene. Charter schools are a sort of public-private educational hybrid in which the charter school—run, perhaps, by a motivated group of experts, activists, and parents—could contract with the government to run a school independently of the traditional public school system. I have always believed that parents should be able to

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