Posted on 09/10/2011 9:08:18 AM PDT by smoothsailing
September 19, 2011, Vol. 17, No. 01
If you want a glimpse of the way Rick Perry operates as an executive and a politician, consider the issue of higher education reform in Texas, which no one in Texas knew was an issue until Perry decided to make it one.
In his 30-year public career, Perry—how to put this delicately?—has shown no sign of being tortured by a gnawing intellectual curiosity. “He’s not the sort of person you’ll find reading The Wealth of Nations for the seventh time,” said Brooke Rollins, formerly Perry’s policy director and now president of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a free-market research group closely allied with Perry. At Texas A&M he majored in animal science and escaped with a grade point average a bit over 2.0. (Perry’s A&M transcript was leaked last month to the left-wing blog Huffington Post by “a source in Texas,” presumably not his mom. How his GPA compares with Barack Obama’s is unknown, since no one in higher education has thought to leak Obama’s transcript to a right-wing blog.)
Perry expends his considerable intelligence instead on using political power and, what amounts to the same thing, picking fights with his political adversaries. When Rollins came to Perry in 2007 with a radical and comprehensive proposal to overhaul higher education in the state, Rollins says the governor quickly understood the potential of the issue, not only politically but on its merits. The state operates more than 100 colleges, universities, technical schools, and two-year community colleges, organized into six separate systems. As in other states, public higher education in Texas is scattered, expensive, poorly monitored, and top heavy with administrators, even as it subjects students to often large annual tuition increases without a compensatory increase in educational quality.
Perry’s first poke at this sclerotic establishment came early in his first term. He suggested converting the money that the state gives to public colleges and universities into individual grants handed straight to students. Money is power, and Perry’s idea was to place the power in the hands of “consumers,” as he put it, rather than the administrators, to increase competition among schools and thereby lower costs and increase quality. “Young fertile minds [should be] empowered,” he said at the time, “to pursue their dreams regardless of family income, the color of their skin, or the sound of their last name.”
The higher ed establishment, led by regents of the University of Texas system, rebelled, and the legislature, well-wired with the system’s allies, agreed, and the proposal died. But Perry continued to poke. College graduation rates in Texas are unusually low, and the gaps among whites, blacks, and Hispanics are unusually high. Nationwide 38 percent of American adults (age 25-64) have a post-secondary degree; in Texas the figure is 31 percent. So Perry proposed “Outcomes-based Funding,” tying the amount of aid a school receives to the number of students it graduates. To keep a school from lowering its standards to increase its graduation rates, he suggested giving an exit exam to all students receiving a B.A. Students wouldn’t have to pass the exam to get their degree, but the information yielded by such a test—how much learning is going on around here?—would be useful, mostly to reformers. The proposal was seen, correctly, as a threat to the status quo, which has so far successfully fought it off.
The proposals Rollins brought to Perry in 2007 turned on the same themes of—apologizing in advance for the buzzwords—accountability and transparency: collecting information about how much students learn and how well schools function, and holding the schools responsible for the results. “His priority has been putting students back into the driver’s seat,” Rollins said. Perry said he hoped to apply the cost-benefit logic of business to public higher education. He incorporated Rollins’s ideas into a package of reforms and called a “higher education summit” to build support.
The reforms attacked the establishment from multiple angles. They would require schools to expand their websites to make vast amounts of new information available to students. For the first time, professors would be required to post course syllabi online. To suss out slackers among the faculty, schools would post every teacher’s salary and benefits along with the average number of students and course hours they taught every year. A summary of student evaluations would be posted too, and the average number of As and Bs professors handed out, to guard against grade inflation. Before choosing a particular school or enrolling in a major, students would be given a list of the specific skills or knowledge that they could expect to learn, as well as the average starting salaries of students who had graduated from a similar course of study.
Perry also suggested separating teaching budgets from research budgets, as a way of encouraging teachers to teach and researchers to do research. Tenure would be granted only to teachers who spent a large majority of their time teaching; a defined percentage of tenure jobs would go to researchers, who would concentrate on pure research. A system of cash awards and other incentives would compensate professors who successfully taught a large number of students.
Any businessman in a profit-seeking enterprise would see ideas like “pay for performance” as unremarkable, but they overwhelm the delicate sensibilities of people who have spent their professional lives on campus, where the word “nonprofit” is meant to act as a firewall against the unpleasantness of commercial life. “Texas Governor Treats Colleges Like Businesses,” headlined the Chronicle of Higher Education—a sentence sure to induce aneurysms in faculty lounges from El Paso to Galveston. The outrage was deafening, especially when university regents began acting on the recommendations. The Texas A&M system, for example, which includes a dozen schools, posted a spreadsheet on its website evaluating teacher performance on a cost-benefit basis.
“Very simplistic and potentially very dangerous,” an official of the American Association of University Professors said. “This is . . . simplistic,” said the dean of faculties at A&M. “Simplistic,” said the Houston Chronicle. A group of former regents and wealthy school boosters organized a pressure group to oppose -Perry’s reforms. The group hired Karen Hughes, a close aide to the second President Bush, as press spokesman. The rage at Perry from within the establishment has taken many forms: You think it’s easy stealing someone’s college transcript?
The protests might have been more effective except that Perry, for the last decade, has been seeding Texas higher education with like-minded reformers (cronies too). By 2009 he had appointed every regent in the state. The chancellor of A&M who issued the cost-benefit report, for example, was a former chief of staff of the governor. At least three campus presidents have been pressured to resign in recent years, to make way for Perry appointees—all Republican businessmen. A particularly popular (and vocal) vice president of student affairs at the University of Texas was removed and replaced by . . . a retired Marine Corps general.
The appointees weren’t as pliant as Perry might have wished. The implementation of the reforms has been difficult and at times dilatory. Perry barrels on. In his state of the state address this spring, he urged administrators to develop a four-year bachelor’s degree that would cost less than $10,000 “including textbooks.” The discount degree, he said, would be a “bold, Texas-style solution” to the problem of rapidly rising tuition. (The average in-state cost of a four-year degree in Texas, including books, is roughly $30,000.) After the goal was declared impossible by Perry’s critics, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board published a plan to lower costs dramatically: greater use of online classes and “open-source” course materials, accelerated or staggered student schedules, fuller integration of four- and two-year colleges, and more.
Perry’s admirers praise his sure-footedness—his ability to sense cultural trends before others do and turn them to his political advantage. He was the first national politician to ally himself to the Tea Party movement in 2009, a move that’s just now paying off. He caught the mounting anxiety among middle-income parents about college costs early on. Most American parents now say that a college degree will be essential for their children’s future success; at the same time, according to a new Pew Foundation poll, only 22 percent of Americans believe that most people can afford to send their kids to college. And 57 percent describe the quality of American higher education as “only fair” or “poor.” To address this anxiety Perry’s opponents offer more government subsidies, which in turn provide an incentive for schools to raise their prices—an attempt to douse the fire with gasoline. Perry’s ideas are cheaper, more comprehensive, more imaginative, and more likely to work.
And they have a good chance of being put into action. In late August, Perry scored another significant, if partial, victory. The University of Texas regents approved an “action plan” proposed by the system’s chancellor, who isn’t a Perry appointee. The plan is a compromise, but it incorporates many of Perry’s ideas, including some of the most radical, such as “pay for performance” and “learning contracts” between schools and their students. Amazingly, the plan has won support from both the right (Brooke Rollins’s Texas Public Policy Foundation) and left (Karen Hughes’s group).
Reforms like these would have been unthinkable 10 years ago, before Perry picked up his stick and started poking the system until it had to respond. It’s been a remarkable display of political entrepreneurship: Create an issue, define it on your terms, cultivate public support, and your opponents, who never saw it coming, will have to go along, even if only partway—at first.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and the author, most recently, of Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College.
LOL! Important to someone I hope. Hopefully we all are! :)
It is FR etiquette to ping someone when you’re talking about them.
Disclosure: I disagree with Perry on some issues, but I am skeptical about all the GOP characters, including Palin.
It’s ironic that that the media caricatures Perry as an ignorant yahoo (as in Gulliver’s Travel’s). The transition from paper books to electronic books is as natural and inevitable as the transition from books hand written by teams of scribes to the printing press. And if academics try to protect their paper textbook business, so much for their image as “enlightened.”
I’d agree with that.
I think I am in love.
Rubio is a good choice.I also saw Perry/Martinez 2012
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/perry-martinez_591498.html
He is doing good in NH.
http://www.wbur.org/2011/08/15/perry-nh
Rick Perry’s fans like his straight-talking style
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/09/09/MN0A1L2G7G.DTL
Good article. Certainly give lie to the charge that Perry is just and establishment pol who won’t make wavw.
The post says I wrote it for Bill Simon. I'm not claiming to be some big time player, I merely sent it to him as a suggestion. I'd met the guy a couple of times early on and attended one party function just before he won the GOP nomination for governor of California. That's it. Simon is a SOCON, and a far cry from either Romney or Ron Paul. So if that's your standard for paranoid projections masquerading as conclusions, it says a lot more about the reasoning ability of Perry's backers or, more accurately, the lack thereof. Nor was I "stalking" Perry threads. I saw an interesting title on the sidebar and read it, and what did I find but the usual Perry cheerleaders. Sadly, I had to teach them that good criticism too often masks bad remedial policy. It wouldn't be the first time that was true.
Maybe is just an audition and we are just practice.
Please, I have a lot more to do than to seek work in political activism. This crew is hardly worth the effort. When the full-time on-the-party-payroll drum beaters like FairOpinion (since banned) get here, it looks to be quite the battle a brewing. As to spamming and shilling, I haven't even picked a candidate yet. OTOH, having a record of the bogus character assassination, characteristic of Perry's backers, of a long time FReeper who actually posts original material is rather handy for future reference should I choose to become a committed opponent. Nor did one of you ever show how the policy Perry proposes is superior to what I offered with which to contrast Perry's ideas with a less centralized and more free-enterprise and customer-oriented approach.
But hear this and hear it thoroughly: If a candidate proposes a bad idea I will call it as much, and I don't care who it is. As far as I am concerned, State testing in universities is moving in the wrong direction compared to removing the barriers to free-enterprise validation services and its analogy to No Child Left Behind is hardly vague. So, if you choose to back a candidate who later shows to be far less than he or she appeared or claimed to be, I will hold you accountable for your support until you repudiate it as there are a number of FReepers who will tell you.
This is a primary in an election against a destructive Marxist for whom there is little possibility of winning against any conservative in the race (with the possible exception of Palin who, AFAIAC, has poisoned her own well with her unwillingness to make substantive proposals instead of mindless cheer-leading). Best we select the person who most firmly represents conservative principles, "he can win" be damned. That's how we got Reagan. The compromise "he can win" principle got us Nixon, Schwarzenegger, and both Bushes. Yet it has been the disastrous consequences of electing "moderates" that got us Zero in the first place.
Perry talks a good game, but it is obvious that there is less to what he says than there first appears to be. It is in the details that we learn how the man plans to govern. In that regard I am not totally discouraged with him, but neither am I pleased (particularly as regards illegal aliens). There are others in the race who better exemplify conservative free-enterprise principles.
The behavior of a candidates backers also reveals much. In that regard, you have all done much to damage your cause.
“The behavior of a candidates backers also reveals much. In that regard, you have all done much to damage your cause. “
That could be their intentions too. Look at what campaign manager Ed Rollins has “done for” the candidates he’s been hired by or, rather, assigned to.
There are many avenues for the Statists to travel to guarantee they remain in control of who is running, and the assigning of asswipes to troll sites such as this is quite in keeping with their goals. Heck, the early Libertarian Party was almost immediately assigned nuts from both the Dems and the Pubbies that pretty much guaranteed they be the great powerhouse they are today /s
Why the heck would I need to ping you, trish? All that talking about trish is only in your head.
After all the Perry Derangement trash from you guys all the etiquette has been aborted.
Well, I guess I've been around here as long as you have and I've seen alot of this foodfighting over candidates.
You're right, it does give insight into the type of person a particular supporter may be.
For that reason I apologize if I offended you.
I'm not involved in any cause, Perry is a candidate I'm interested in, and one I believe may be able to garner the funds necessary to take on Obama and appeal to a broad base.
Personally, I don't much like or trust politicians. I'm a basic kind of person. I want a President who loves my country and will defend it, will promote it here and around the world, will get and keep government off our backs, and make sure the military is properly manned and funded. I think Perry can handle that.
That's about it.
That's the kind of thing that cowards do.
Last time I was intimidated I was 150 yards up a rockslide armed with camera and met Mother Blackbear a second after meeting Baby Blackbear.
Only way any human is going to intimidate me is to roll up in a Bradley.
I hope you are a very nice person, meaning well. Now go on and find somebody stupid who thinks you are important or relevant.
"She" is a he but you were characteristically too lazy to check.
The posting "etiquette" on this forum are the preferences of its OWNER. You are either ignorant or undeserving of Constitutional respect for yours. Take your pick; the evidence indicates the former.
If behavior of candidates backers reveals much. I’d say the rabid Palin backers that claim they will write in her name no matter what and if it means more Obama, so be it. And the utter nonsense that they are rightfully vetting=bashing Perry because Palin was vetted is utter nonsense. Why was Bachmann trashed and called a RINO by Palin Bots? Do they want every formidable candidate destroyed and alinskyized because Palin was?As far as the argument that all other candidates supporters are bots.Name one formidable candidate that’s supporters say if they’re candidate does not make it they are writing in their name even if it means an Obama win.Only Palin Bots do this. Do they want every formidable candidate destroyed and alinskyized because Palin was?Palin has humility and a servants heart they have: attack all competition with vengeful hearts.
I don’t think carrieokie is anyone’s bot LOL I don’t think carrieokie likes anyone not even Santa Clause LOL ( I am only kidding carrieokie) that is why I applauded the busy body comment.
I am pinging polybius to reference the ‘will write in Palin’s name even if it means Obama wins,’comment as he witnessed it first hand.
DISCLAIMER:I am a tea party supporter.Perry,Bachmann,Palin,West,Cain.There is a difference in being a Palin supporter (of which I am) and a Palin bot.The bots here outnumber all with bully mob rule,quite sadly... The Palin bots play self appointed campaign manager guessing dates acting all cliquey and bully like children;that I have seen even try to get Perry supporters banned by pinging JimRob.(In which they were told by Mister Robinson to get thicker skin) are sometimes confused with those wanting earnest questions answered about a candidate.I think carrieokie is one but it is a rarity.
I have one goal,to get Obama unelected.
??? dust was just saying you could do well and did not need a busy body piping in the middle of the argument of which I don’t even know what the original argument was.
If this is the way you respond to someone who is no threat to you, I can't imagine how hysterical you would be if you met up with a bear.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.