How Things Really Work

Right when you think good sense is on permanent leave, along will come an example of such good leadership, good policy, and good timing that one is encouraged to settle back for another century or two of democracy. The example at hand is a way to make it easier for military veterans to become schoolteachers.

Congress has provided transition and retirement benefits for veterans who want to become teachers. Texas has provided the means to speed up teacher certification for those who qualify. The two actions match up the career needs of former military personnel caught in the reduction of America’s armed forces and the nation-wide shortage of qualified teachers in our public schools.

J. H. Hexter, professor emeritus of Yale and Washington universities, is a vocal champion of the concept of military veterans as public school teachers. Early on in the public dialogue Hexter advocated “some carefully coordinated jaw-boning” among federal, state and local governments to jump-start the process of matching the teacher shortage with a supply of highly trained people. He believes that “it is time for America to rev up the military-educational complex.”

Real problems face well-disciplined and highly trained military men and women who had thought to make the military their career, and who now–or soon may be–out of work.

Many of these veterans obviously are men of minority races– just the kind of role models we need in classrooms. They are trained leaders and disciplinarians. They are the kind of people who can help reduce the dropout rate. One fourth of our young people drop out before finishing high school.

So the stakes are high: livelihoods of former soldiers, wise use of scarce resources, and quality education. And it looks like some constructive jaw-boning just might save the day, or at least attract and train a number of exceptional new teachers from the ranks of the military and place them in classrooms in areas of critical need. The project is called Texas Military Initiative in Texas. Florida and South Carolina have similar programs. The Texas Military Initiative came about because of the vision of the chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, Representative Les Aspin (now Secretary of Defense), and Governor Ann Richards. The Texas commissioners of public and higher education, Lionel Meno and Kenneth Ashworth, co-operated to bring a program into being quickly.

The Army identified several thousand personnel interested in a second career in teaching and set up on-base transition career counseling and job opportunity networks. The Congress adopted a Senate proposal to assist separated active duty military to obtain teaching certificates via a stipend to school districts with whom they are ultimately employed. The Governor enthusiastically signed a Letter of Intent with the Army agreeing to utilize the state’s alternative teacher certification to further national education goals and to take full advantage of the “unique skills, knowledge, and instructional abilities of our nation’s soldiers.”

The leadership and top staff members of the state education agencies analyzed and brain-stormed, creating a user-friendly system of recruiting and training that maintains and promotes the highest standards of quality. The centers that provide the content and “hands-on” experience designed a specific, uniform alternative certification program.

When highly trained people are out of work, the nation suffers with them. When students drop out of school, they condemn themselves to stunted lives and we all pay the cost.

The Texas Military Initiative is a classic solution. Everybody wins.

Most Americans seem to think that mathematics is a monster to be feared and hated.

About 70 percent of the graduate students in engineering and 54 percent of the graduate students in mathematics are foreigners.

If the number of American students is small, the number of Hispanic and Afro-Americans is infinitesimal. In 1991, when about 1,000 PhD’s in math were awarded, two went to Afro-Americans and one to a Mexican-American.

Thus, it has become a new scientific frontier to prepare American students, particularly Hispanics and Afro-Americans, to face the math monster.

Fortunately, two of the most successful practitioners of this art are at Texas universities.

Philip Uri Treisman, a professor of mathematics at the University of Texas at Austin, was recently awarded a $285,000 MacArthur Fellowship for improving math education for minority and low-income students.

Richard Tapia, of the Department of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University, has been so successful in recruiting minority students that Rice has lead the nation in the number of mathematics graduate degrees granted to minority students. About one-third of the graduate students admitted last year to his program are Hispanic or Afro-American.

Their motivations and techniques differ. They share a high degree of creativity and commitment.

Treisman came to his work from a sense of outrage that mathematics, “which to us mathematicians is our art form and our life” was the tool used to screen people out of careers in such fields as medicine, business and architecture.

“It should be a vehicle to increase opportunity–a pump, not a filter,” he said.

Treisman, then at the University of California at Berkeley, started out by analyzing the differences between undergraduate students who did well in math–Chinese–and those who did not–Afro-American and Hispanic. He discovered that the Chinese students did not have, as most Americans suspect, a math gene.

And he discovered that minority students were not lacking in the factors often credited for failure–preparation, motivation and family support. The difference was that the Chinese students worked in groups, finding mistakes and constructing solutions, and they were more willing to seek help from teaching assistants.

Using that information, Treisman created the Emerging Scholars program which now exists at UT-Austin and about 100 university math departments. At UT, the program invites 24 students each year to join. Three-quarters are Afro-American or Hispanic, the rest white or Asian. Half are women.

The program successfully combats the dropout syndrome which is typical for all students who enter science or engineering. After three years of study, 86 percent of the emerging scholars are still in these majors compared to 45 percent of other students.

About 90 percent of the minority Emerging Scholars earn A’s or B’s in calculus, compared to fewer than one-third of other minority students.

In a large university where individual students can be overwhelmed, the Emerging Scholars are courted and supported. They have close and frequent contact with faculty and organized study groups.

Some of them go on to graduate work at Rice, where Richard Tapia is also looking for those who are overlooked.

A second-generation Mexican American from California, Tapia is acutely concerned with minority failures.

“We as a nation are producing unemployed people,” he said. “They have no jobs because they have no education, because they don’t buy into education. Every job requires some knowledge of computers. You either get a degree or you work at McDonald’s.”

So Tapia has developed programs to invite Hispanic and Afro-American youngsters into the math mainstream.

One–the Computational and Mathematical Sciences Awareness Program–educates teachers from schools with large minority populations on the latest techniques in mathematics and computer sciences.

Another–Spend a Summer With A Scientist–brings a minority high school student to Rice each year to work on a research project.

A third–the High School Summer Work Project–brings students not likely go to college to Rice to work as support staff. So far, 100 percent of the summer workers have opted for a college education.

Tapia, who last year became the first Mexican-American elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineers, recruits his minority graduate students from those who might not make an Ivy League roster.

“We talk to them, encourage them, nurture them toward success,” he said. “We let them take a longer time if necessary, strengthen their backgrounds. It may take six or seven years.”

But they persist. Most mathematic graduate departments have a 60 percent retention rate, he said. His department retains 90 percent.

For Tapia, his success is a key ingredient in national survival.

“The success of this nation was built on science and technology. We’re in danger of losing our first world status because we don’t learn science and math. It’s a national crisis,” he said.

It is also important for the future of the profession, Treisman said.

“In the past the individuals who worked on these, what were then seen as quasi-professional issues, did so as personal work, almost as hobbies: “You play golf, I work with the Black kids,” Treisman said in a lecture at the University of California at San Bernardino.

“The scale of the problem now is such that many mathematicians will need to engage in activities that are necessary for the future life of the profession.”

Those of us who love math are grateful to Treisman and Tapia. Those of us who love this country should be even more appreciative.

School finance reform in Texas is beginning to resemble a nineteenth century Russian novel. The story line runs across generations, the plot is complex, the prose is tedious, and everybody dies in the end.

Forty years after the enactment of the historic Gilmer-Aikin reforms, the Texas Supreme Court held in Edgewood Independent School District v. Kirby (1989) that current methods of financing public schools, relying extensively on local property taxes, were inefficient and violated the Texas Constitution. The problem is that the dollars spent on the education of each student largely depend on the property wealth of his or her school district. Poor districts tax at higher tax rates than affluent ones, only to raise fewer dollars for education. In order to correct this situation, the court held that there must be substantially equal access to resources; the system must be “fiscally neutral” in the sense that each penny of tax effort in a poor district should raise substantially what a penny raises in a more fortunate district.

In response to Edgewood I the Texas Legislature enacted Senate Bill 1 in 1990. The bill essentially provided that, by the year 1995, a penny of tax effort in even the poorest district must yield the same amount per student as it would for the student in the district at the 95th percentile of wealth. If a property tax of $1.00 per hundred dollars of assessed value produced $2500 per pupil in District A (a district at the 95th percentile of wealth), then it should yield $2500 in District B–even if District B has only a fraction of District A’s property wealth. This is accomplished by the state “guaranteeing the yield;” it makes up from state revenues the shortfall between what a poorer district can raise on its own and the specified guarantee at the 95th percentile.

In January 1991 the supreme court overturned Senate Bill 1 in the Edgewood II case, thereby corroborating Voltaire’s maxim that “the best is the enemy of the good.” At the 95th percentile reform was expensive but feasible without turning the educational system upside down. By requiring equalization at the tail end of the distribution–the equivalent of using Ross Perot’s income as the standard for wealth redistribution, the sums required become gargantuan unless serious structural reforms are undertaken. Nonetheless, the court held that the property wealth of the wealthiest districts may not be excluded from the state-wide tax base, and it suggested that the legislature consider tax base or even school district consolidation. The bigger the taxing entities, the less disparity in wealth among districts and the easier it is to accomplish fiscal neutrality.

Edgewood II arguably went well beyond what any other state supreme court had required in similar circumstances. But the story does not end there. Months later, in considering a motion for rehearing, the court affirmed its view of 60 years that the state may not “recapture” a portion of what is raised in the most affluent districts and redistribute it to the poorer districts. The net effect of this decision was to say that the legislature could achieve compliance with the Texas Constitution in only three ways: (1) the state must assume all or most of the responsibility for funding public education, presumably generating the needed revenue through a new state tax; (2) consolidate school taxing jurisdictions; or (3) consolidate school districts. The Legislature chose option 2 in Senate Bill 351, creating cumbersome county-wide education districts (and a few larger aggregations). These county districts were required to tax at a minimum of $.72 per hundred dollars of valuation, while the old school districts remained intact for purposes of supplementing that tax and governing local public schools. About two-thirds of the cost of reform was placed on local taxpayers.

The bill had the effect of increasing property taxes geometrically in the most affluent districts, significantly raising taxes in urban areas such as Dallas, Houston, and Austin, placing caps on educational spending in the highest spending districts, and dramatically reducing the expenditure gap between poor and rich districts. The latter equalization occurred because a portion of the funds collected by the counties in affluent school districts will be redistributed to other districts in the same county.

Senate Bill 351 came under attack from districts disadvantaged by the new plan, and many astute observers who attended the recent oral argument in the supreme court believe that the court will overturn the new law. The state constitution forbids a state-wide property tax, and the court may hold that the county districts are a disguised form of state property taxation. If this occurs, the effective choices for the Legislature will be reduced to genuine school district consolidation–a measure only marginally more popular in Texas than Saddam Hussein is in Israel–or a state income tax.

How did we end up in this fix? The core problem is the Edgewood II decision, and the court should overrule it. It is of trivial importance as to whether the property wealth of the richest districts is included within the system for financing public education. The focus should be on how to achieve fiscal neutrality in expenditures, not on whether it is efficient to under tax some property. Eschewing perfection and meaningless symmetry, the court should return to the “substantially equal” standard of Edgewood I and accept the basic conceptual framework of Senate Bill 1.

Senate Bill 1 is not the definitive answer, but it is the right starting point. Perhaps the level of equalization should be higher than the 95th percentile, perhaps we need better or fairer measures of equity, perhaps the phase-in period should be shorter, and perhaps the legislative promises in the out years need to be more concrete and specific. The point, however, is that, as things stand under Edgewood II, the combination of the quest for perfect equity and the gradual elimination of policy options by the court has resulted in a politically unstable situation. A taxpayer revolt is a real threat. Many legislators and state elected leaders are so traumatized by the first three rounds of Edgewood that they may refuse to enact any plan in response to an Edgewood IV, leaving it to the court to bring order to the apparent chaos. Even if political leaders wish to act, legislative stalemate may ensue. And the net result will be years of political and fiscal uncertainty without great promise of substantial gains in equity.

Most importantly, the court needs to speak with clarity. In the current crisis, it is not enough to declare what is unconstitutional; the court should say what is constitutional. Carl Parker, chairman of the Senate Education Committee, says that he wants to surrender to the court on the school finance issue. The problem is that the justices will not tell him where to turn himself in.

(Yudof is the dean of The University of Texas Law School. Hobby, a former lieutenant governor of Texas, has taught courses in school finance at The University of Texas at Austin and Rice University.)

Recent television and newspaper reports have called attention to a secret federal agency’s establishment of a questionable line of succession to the Presidency to assure continued government in the event of a devastating nuclear attack.

A New York Times story said, “If all 17 legal successors to the President were incapacitated, non-elected officials would assume office in extreme emergencies.”

This story is reminiscent of a little known and virtually disregarded provision in the Texas Constitution. In 1961, the Legislature recommended, and the voters ratified, a constitutional amendment providing “for temporary succession to powers and duties of public office in periods of emergency resulting from disaster caused by enemy attack.”

Enabling legislation was passed in 1963 requiring all state-wide officials, except the governor, to designate “emergency interim successors and specify their order of succession.” The officeholder was to designate “a sufficient number of such emergency interim successors so that there will be not less than three nor more than seven such deputies or emergency interim successors or any combination thereof at any time.”

Former state representative Bill Hollowell of Grand Saline, author of the constitutional amendment and subsequent enabling legislation setting up a system for selection of an emergency legislature, recalls that longtime Speaker of the United States House Sam Rayburn was concerned about continuity of state governments in event of nuclear attack. Rayburn wrote to Texas House Speaker Jim Turman in 1961 urging Texas legislative action.

While legislation has mandated designation of emergency interim successors in both the executive and legislative branches, few officials have followed through. I was the only state official to fulfill that constitutional requirement (and was ridiculed by Texas Monthly for doing so in my first term as lieutenant governor in 1973). I filed the required list of successors with the Secretary of State. The list included Steve Oaks, then my executive assistant, and the late June Hyer, then parliamentarian of the Senate.

Oddly, the 1962 constitutional amendment allowed the legislature to set up a system of continuity of all state and local agencies but specifically excepted members of the legislature. This was contrary to a 1959 proposal from the Council of State Governments, which recommended provision for designation of emergency legislators.

Rep. Hollowell won passage of such an act in 1985. That act directs the executive director of the Employees Retirement System of Texas to submit to the lieutenant governor and speaker of the house lists of individuals residing in each state senatorial and representative district who are members or retirees of the Employees Retirement System and who previously served as senators or representatives.

Lists are to be prepared for each legislative district ranking the designees in descending order according to the number of years served in one house.

Designees are to be asked by the lieutenant governor and speaker of the house if they are willing to serve as emergency interim successors if the incumbent becomes unable to serve.

There is additional provision for incumbent legislators to file an alternate list of designated successors for use if a successor cannot be obtained from the Employees Retirement System list.

Most of the 50 states have adopted similar plans for designation of executive and legislative successors in event of nuclear emergency.

Reflective, again, of the general belief that nuclear attack will never happen, former Reps. Hollowell and David Hudson of Tyler are the only two legislators in the 181-member Legislature ever to file an alternate list of successors.

Whatever the likelihood of such a disaster, the differences between the federal and state approaches to the problem are significant. The Feds, in the person of President Reagan, set up a secret agency, the National Program Office, to devise a plan that had no legitimacy, no legislative or constitutional authorization. Texas, on the other hand, legally and openly adopted constitutional amendments to do the same thing.

The Cold War Concerns that led to the state action and the weird secrecy of the federal government belong to the era of the drive for nuclear fallout shelters in every house. They are curios of history, but they reflected real concerns of the 1950s and 60s.

Health care is the top concern of many Americans in the 1990s. How do we get health care? And how can we afford it? Health care is becoming the political, social, and collective bargaining issue of the 1990s.

In the past six years our country has doubled the proportion of our income we spend on health care – from 6 percent to 12 percent of our gross national product. We spend one-third to one-half more on health care than do other industrial democracies.

But we don’t live longer than our Canadian and European counterparts. We are not noticeably healthier than they while we do live. Our babies die more often than theirs, and we are not particularly happy with our system.

Polls show health care to be one of our biggest national concerns. Our health care system is an expensive technological marvel that often makes people well in ways that would have seemed miraculous just a few years ago. But it also impoverishes many of our citizens and neglects millions of others. There are about 40 million people in the United States without health care coverage. There are none in Canada.

Canada spends about eight percent of its gross national product on health care–about one-third less than we do. Canadians are so satisfied with their system that health care is not a political issue.

But it certainly is here.

Governor Richards, Lieutenant Governor Bullock, and Speaker Lewis have recently appointed an interim committee to recommend steps to the 1993 Legislature to improve health care access and lower costs in Texas. The LBJ School of Public Affairs in Austin is making a study of the issue to help that committee in its deliberations.

An election to the United States Senate in Pennsylvania recently turned on the health care issue. Senator Wofford defeated a popular former governor, Dick Thornburgh, apparently because of dissatisfaction with national health care policies. Not that there has been any shortage of federal policies. New ones are created by the week. In fact, there are more federal policies than dollars.

Earlier this year, President Bush told the National Governor’s Association that states should be the laboratories of health care policy for the country. The next week, the Bush administration tried to cut off federal matching funds to Texas and other states because they choose to provide indigent health care through local, rather than state governments. So much for federal policies.

Federal programs, except Medicaid, have basically tied health care to employment. That doesn’t work because there are millions of people whose employers can’t afford the insurance and millions more who have no employer at all.

The price of health care goes up faster than other things because price competition does not work well. Doctors and hospitals are paid largely by insurance companies and governments. We all ultimately pay those costs, but we don’t realize it in the same way we do when we pay a lawyer for legal services.

There is no great mystery about how to cut the cost of any particular medical service. It can be done in two ways: 1) cut what doctors, hospitals, and drug manufacturers get, and 2) cut administrative costs–including malpractice payouts.

But cutting the total bill is another matter. People who have health care coverage see the doctor more than people who do not. A study by Anne Dunkelberg of the Texas Research League shows that Texans with coverage use the system 28 percent more than those without coverage.

A reasonable national aim would be to have a system efficient enough to provide regular coverage for those who do not have it–at no increase in total cost. Surely we are smart enough to figure out how to do with 12 percent of our national effort what the Canadians do with eight percent of theirs?

In Canada, doctors are paid for the number of patients under their care, rather than on the fee-for-service basis most used in this country. It is a single-payer system–the government pays the bills directly. Citizens choose their own doctor, just as we do.

Canadians have to wait longer for some kinds of care than do our citizens who have health care coverage. Some Canadians come to the United States to get quicker treatment with expensive machines (CAT scanners, magnetic resonance imagers) not as widely available in Canada. On the other hand, Canadian costs are lowered by the more efficient use of hospitals, which are always full.

The system probably could not be imported to the United States without major surgery, but it is a good place to start.

Within the next few years, hundreds of thousands of highly trained men and women will be mustered out of the armed forces.

Of the 750,000 soon-to-be veterans who will leave military service over the next five years, about 150,000 are commissioned, warrant, and senior non-commissioned officers. They are trained in vital technical skills and are natural leaders.

Though well qualified, many will not be able to find jobs that use those skills. Typically they will have spent one quarter of their military careers as students or instructors in their specialties. Many of these veterans will be men, many of them minorities.

They are in their forties and fifties, with twenty-something productive years ahead of them. The nation has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in their professional training. In short, they are fine prospective high-school teachers.

With the proper incentives, maybe 75,000 might become teachers.

That many new teachers would not only be readily absorbed in the next five years, but welcomed into the classroom. About 90,000 potential new teachers a year now graduate from colleges of education. School districts hire over 175,000 new teachers a year. The deficit is filled by former teachers returning to the classroom, teachers who have never taught despite being qualified to do so, and new teachers from alternative certification programs.

More than one million new teachers will be needed in the next five years. Colleges of education will provide about half a million. Well-qualified veterans can help fill the gap.

With the growing dissatisfaction over the teaching profession and the pressure to find new sources of teachers, Texas and many other states have already begun qualifying teachers in non-traditional ways.

These “non-traditional” teachers have done just as well as, or better than, education graduates on certification tests and on the job.

About 28 states now have such programs. These programs are an integral part of the President Bush’s “America 2000” program for education. In his recent report to Congress the President said that “The solution to the problem of attracting talented teachers is not to regulate the industry further but to open it up to the competitive process and to reduce certification requirements in ways that do not threaten but instead encourage excellence in teaching.”

The inclusion of veterans in the President’s solution for the teacher shortage makes sense.

Can people who have not graduated from college teach in high school? A college degree indicates maturity and knowledge. So does ten or so years of service in the armed forces. I have never known a Chief Petty Officer who could not teach a high-school class. For centuries, non-coms have spent most of their time educating adolescent boys.

Teacher programs don’t have to take years. College graduates in the TEACH AMERICA program enter inner-city classrooms after three months of training.

Could not mature veterans with 10-20 years of military service be trained in the same length of time? Of course. They could be teaching in the classroom in a matter of months.

The success of this program will be determined by the quality of the soon-to-be veterans willing to enter it. The quality will be determined by the incentives offered, most logically through the military retirement system.

Veterans leaving the service have pension benefits ranging from none for those with less than 20 years service, to 50-75 percent of final pay for those with 20 30 years of service and 75 percent for those with more than 30 years of service. The pensions, of course, are in addition to medical benefits of enormous value.

Under this approach, a qualified veteran who becomes a teacher would earn military retirement credit in the classroom. The credit could be either on a year-for-year basis or proportional. The cost of the additional benefit would be deferred until retirement of the teacher-veteran, who would also earn credit in the individual state’s teacher retirement system.

For instance, a veteran with 15 years of service would need five more years to qualify for the 20-year retirement option.

A more costly alternative would be to offer the 15-year veteran a flat 40% pension (2.5% per year) for so long as the veteran teaches. The enhanced pension (50%) would be payable at the completion of five years in the classroom. This relatively small pension would compensate for the low entry-level pay of teachers.

The program which would result from this effort would involve the coordination of federal, state, and local efforts.

Specific actions would include the promotion of the program within the military, modification of the retirement system, creation of state programs of alternative certification, mobilization of the colleges and universities, and involvement of school districts in need of trained personnel.

Employing trained military personnel at or nearing retirement is a logical way to address several of our problems. The reduction of the armed forces, the need for more teachers, and the stagnation of the economy present a unique opportunity for the nation.

(Hobby, a former lieutenant governor of Texas, teaches at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas.)

Are public schools in this country as bad as we are led to believe?

Not by a long shot.

Can we do better?

You bet.

Hans Mark, Chancellor of the University of Texas System, recently put the figures about “dropout rates” and Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores into perspective.

SAT SCORES. The SATs were first given 50 years ago. About 10,000 students, mostly seniors at Northeastern high schools, took those first tests. Mark guesses, as do I, that those 10,000 would rank in the upper one-third (and probably much higher) of the more than 1,000,000 seniors that took the test in 1990. In other words, the average test score was higher when only a small elite group of students took the test.

Last year, 42 percent of all seniors were tested. Of course the average score was lower. But that doesn’t prove that our schools are doing a poorer job. All it proves is that the alarmists need a course in elementary statistics.

But aren’t we spending a lot more money on education ad getting poorer results? We are certainly spending a lot more dollars, but less of our effort. In 1970 we spent 4.2 percent of our gross national product on education, compared to 3.6 percent in 1990.

“DROPOUT RATES.” The very term, Mark points out, looks at the hole instead of the donut. The more significant number is the completion rate–how many 17-year-olds finish high school. In 1911, the first year for which numbers are available, 10 percent of the 17-year-olds finished high school. By the late 1940s, when both he and I finished high school, 30 percent of the 17-year-olds did so.

Today (and for the past 20 years) 70-75 percent finish. The fact that that number has stayed the same for a generation suggests that we should consider a new approach to secondary education.

The first nine grades would provide serious basic education. Serious basic education means a no-frills, no-distraction program to equip all students with the basic skills needed to function in society and to learn whatever the student needs to learn as life’s demands change in the future.

“Serious” means small classes. Educational research–as well as common sense–shows that the best learning happens in classes of about 15 students. A recent experiment in Tennessee re-emphasizes this fact and shows that small classes are particularly effective with students from underprivileged families.

“Serious” means physical education but not competitive athletics that take away from class time.

“Serious” means rigorous instruction for students that are hard to teach, not segregating them in what today passes for “vocational education.”

“Serious” means a 210-day school year, not the current 180 days nor the 165 days advocated by Skip Meno, Texas’ new commissioner of education. (The commissioner quite rightly wants to put more time into teacher development, but that time should not come out of classroom time.)

“Serious” means paying teachers twelve months a year, like any other professionals. That means a 15 percent increase in teacher pay. The longer school year and the increased time for teacher development means year-round school. It also means the end of the wasted month in the Fall, now devoted to teaching students what they have forgotten over the summer.

“Serious” means more dedicated, well-trained teachers. But fewer teachers enter the profession every year than leave it. Very few minorities now become teachers.

So where are these new teachers to come from? How about from among the several hundred thousand sand such men and women who will shortly be mustered out of our armed forces and will be looking for jobs? Officers and senior non-commissioned officers who have spent a decade or more in the armed forces are an ideal pool from which the leaders we need in our classrooms can be recruited.

They have spent about one quarter of their military careers as students or instructors in their technical specialties but have not put in enough years to qualify for retirement benefits. Why should not they be encouraged to teach by continuing to earn those benefits in our class rooms?

After the nine grades of serious basic education would come two years in which students immerse themselves in fields in which they are interested (and are more likely to excel). Magnet schools specializing in math and science (North Carolina has led the way), language and social sciences, performing arts, health sciences, law enforcement, electronics and mechanics, have been popular and successful.

A twelfth year would be available for college-bound students who need it. The twelfth grade has always been a pretty dubious idea. Some colleges now let students enter directly from the eleventh grade.

Here is a system that will let students break the pattern of frustration and failure that makes many of them to give up on school, and on themselves.

Here is a recipe for success.

Texans can make a difference. That’s what two constitutional amend- ments on the ballot November 5 are about. The amendments allow each citizen to cast his or her own vote concerning issues that will decide the future of our state. Two of those issues are whether we will help eliminate substandard living conditions in the colonias (Proposition 12) and whether we will ensure Texans access to higher education regardless of their economic status (Proposition 13).

The colonias are impoverished communities located along the Texas-Mexico border. Over 200,000 Texans live without the basic water and sewer service most of us take for granted. Texans in the colonias are living in conditions worse than those in most Third World countries. They are plagued with hepatitis, dysentery, encephalitis, and cholera. Raw sewage stands in the streets and, of the scarce water available, most of it is contaminated and must be boiled before drinking.

Legislation passed in May, 1989 and approved by voters now requires developers of colonias to provide drinking water and sanitary sewer service for all lots of 5 acres or less. Voters also approved $100 million in Texas Water Development Bonds to help residents in existing colonias finance the necessary sewer lines and plants. But more money is needed to provide grants to municipalities so that every resident can have clean water and sewer services.

Proposition 12 represents government work at its best–helping Texans help themselves. It would direct an additional $250 million in previously sold bonds to the colonias to provide adequate services to all residents. The money would pay for low-interest loans and grants to municipalities undertaking water and sewer projects.

This is not a give-away program. In all cases, the people receiving the help are paying back as much as they can. And by law, at least 25 percent of the funds to install water and sewer services will be re-paid.

Taking responsibility for these impoverished communities is not only humane, but practical. Water and sewer will go a long way towards helping these families become more productive citizens and taxpayers.

Access to education also helps Texas residents become more productive citizens and contribute to economic advancement in our state. But for far too many Texans, education could stop with high school if it were not for our loan programs funded by general obligation bonds.

Proposition 13 would allow the sale of general revenue bonds in order to fund loans for students from low-income families, loans for low-income students in graduate programs, health education loans, and the college access program aiding students from middle-class families who do not meet federal eligibility standards for other loans.

As with Proposition 12, Proposition 13 is not a give-away program. It is not a bailout for students who default on their college loans. It is about providing loans to help Texans of any income to attend college.

Since the creation of these programs in 1965, over 200,000 Texans have taken advantage of these loans. While the loans are funded by bonds, they have never required tax dollars to back that obligation. The students have repaid the loans and, as a result, the program has generated $75 million more in revenue than was needed to retire the bond debt.

These loans are only made to Texas students attending accredited Texas institutions. The default rate is less than 6%, a full 10% below the national average for student loans. Defaults are covered by interest earnings, not by taxpayers.

The cost of higher education is rising, and more and more students and their families are requiring loans. These loans can make college affordable. For the average undergraduate student receiving a loan, the saving is $1,184 over the life of the loan. Medical students receiving a loan save an average of $15,223.

Passage of Proposition 13 would enable Texas to continue the tradition of providing the lowest cost loans available to help our young people obtain a higher education–at no cost to the state.

In just a few months, it will be 1992, 500 years after Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and “discovered” America.

Will the anniversary will be the occasion of big celebrations of that event? Well, yes and no. Every year for a long time, stories have appeared about October 1 debunking Columbus’ achievement.

This year scholars are debunking not only Columbus, but another cherished figure of the American tradition: Mark Twain. They are saying that Twain didn’t say a lot of the things that have been attributed to him.

Even the quote most often attributed to the father of Huck Finn may belong to someone else: “When I feel the urge to exercise, I go lie down until it passes away.” The first pronouncement of that excellent advice seems to have come from Robert Hutchins, longtime President of the University of Chicago.

The scholars at the University of California at Berkeley who have thus far compiled 21 volumes of Twain’s original material can’t be sure he said “So I became a newspaperman. I hated to do it, but I couldn’t find honest employment.”

Or, “There is nothing so annoying as to have two people go right on talking when you’re interrupting.”

Or, “The Devil is alive and doing well because he has so many damned helpers.”

Or, “When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it’s always 20 years behind the times.”

The Twain scholars even doubt that he ever said “Better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.” Would you believe Abraham Lincoln?

People like to attribute witty sayings to Twain because, as Robert H. Hirst, editor of the Mark Twain papers said to The Chronicle of Higher Education: “As soon as you say Mark Twain said it, people are ready to laugh. It helps people tell their joke.”

For years people have been saying that Columbus did not “discover” America. Of course he didn’t “discover” America. Millions of people lived in North and South America when Columbus landed in the West Indies on his first voyage to “New World”. They would have been surprised to have been told they had been “discovered”.

It is more accurate to say that Columbus “encountered” the Bahamas than to say he discovered the Western Hemisphere.

Christopher Columbus was almost certainly not the first sailor from the Eastern Hemisphere to land on the western shore of the Atlantic or the Eastern shore of the Pacific.

Norsemen certainly landed on Greenland, Newfoundland and Canada about the year 1000. In these days of multiculturalism, other claims are put forth that:

*Japanese fishermen, fleeing a volcanic eruption on Kyushu, landed in Ecuador 5,000 years ago.

*Descendants of Jewish refugees from Roman persecution fled to Tennessee in the second century AD.

*Ancient Gauls discovered America but abandoned it.

*Egyptians in reed rafts discovered America.

*A Chinese Buddhist named Hui-Shen and four other monks landed in Mexico in the fifth century AD.

*St. Brendan the Navigator, a fifth-century Irish monk, sailed to America in a curragh, or leather boat.

*Ten boatloads of Welsh colonists, led by Prince Madoc, settled in or near Florida and intermarried with Indians. Their descendants, according to this theory, are blue-eyed Mandan Indians in the Dakotas.

These speculations have never gained acceptance among historians, but there is fascinating evidence supporting several of them, particularly the Jewish and Welsh theories. A fascinating summary appears in a story by Donald Dale Jackson in the September issue of the Smithsonian Magazine.

Whatever the truth of any of these stories, Columbus’ “encounter” was the one that counted. The other voyages, if they took place, did nothing to bring the two hemispheres together in any lasting way.

It remained for Christopher Columbus, The Admiral of the Ocean Sea, to make the truly historic connection. (Columbus’ greatest biographer, Samuel Eliot Morison, gave Columbus that poetic title).

Columbus, of course, has another set of critics who do not doubt that he paved the way for European exploration of the Americas, but blame him because he did. It is really a bit much to hold Columbus responsible for the excesses of later Spanish explorers in the New World, slavery, racism, or whatever.

What would Mark Twain have said about the Admiral’s detractors? Probably what he said about another historical dispute: “The researches of many commentators have already thrown much darkness on this subject, and it is probable that, if they continue, we shall soon know nothing at all about it.”

Frustration with politics and government is everywhere. It is a deeper resentment and dissatisfaction than most of us have ever seen.

Why?

Because politics seems to ignore the things that concern us most. Some politicians seem more interested in fighting a sort of cultural civil war left over from the 1960s. What really concerns the country is our standard of living, the economic pressures on the middle class, the hopelessness of the poor.

Out of this despondency has come a book that expresses the black mood of the nation’s politics, yet inspires a vision of hope. E. J. Dionne, in his recent book “Why Americans Hate Politics”, captures this dissatisfaction more accurately than any other writer of the day.

Our schools are in trouble and our health care system is breaking down and millions of people are out of work. So why, Dionne asks, do liberals and conservatives keep talking about the same old things when the country wants to move on?

Fair enough. So let’s move on. Let’s quit bashing public servants and government the way Democrats and Republicans have lately been so fond of doing.

Let’s talk about the real problems of the nation. Let’s set an agenda for the 1990s that everybody ought to be able to agree on. Everybody, that is, except conservatives and liberals more interested in ideology than in helping people; except Democrats and Republicans more interested in partisan advantage than solving national problems.

That agenda has to include education, social security, health care, environment, and poverty. Let’s talk about education first, the others later.

Would it be too much to ask that we even begin to take education seriously? We certainly don’t now.

If we took education seriously, we would make it a full-time job. In the United States, students go to school about 180 days a year. In the industrial democracies with whom we compete, the school year is about 220 days a year. And the days are longer.

World events have given us an unprecedented chance to put thousands more superbly qualified teachers in the classroom in a matter of months, if only we are smart enough to do it.

We are in the midst of a major demobilization. In the next five to ten years, hundreds of thousands of men and women will be discharged from our armed services just when we need them desperately.

Many of them are already experienced instructors. Typically, they will have spent about one quarter of their military careers as either students or instructors. Here is a pool of able and disciplined citizens in whose training the nation has invested trillions of dollars over the last two decades.

Many of them will lack five years or so of service before they can qualify for military retirement. Why don’t we set up an Armed Forces Reserve Teacher Corps?

Qualified officers, senior non-commissioned officers, and specialists in critical fields would be given teacher training. They could then be discharged into the Teacher Corps and earn credit towards military retirement in their teaching years.

The idea of using military personnel for a national purpose not directly related to warfare is hardly new. In 1957 Congress, spurred by Sputnik, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into public education under the National Defense Education Act.

In the 1940s and ’50s, we built our first national highway system and called it a defense project. James Fallows, writing in the August Atlantic, points out that we have used the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to foster the development of essential technology. We have used the Office of Naval Research to pay for research at our universities.

Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, has long proposed a national service corps in which young men and women would work for their country in a variety of social services. The Reserve Teachers’ Corps would complement Sen. Nunn’s idea beautifully.

This idea is too simple. Conservatives will be against it because they would rather spend money on prisons than schools. Liberals will be against it because it threatens teacher unions.

And all it would do would be to put a lot of highly qualified teachers in the classroom when they might otherwise have trouble finding jobs.

Let’s use our military establishment to improve secondary education in the country. Let’s use the most effective schools our nation has to solve our most pressing national problem: public education.