The Strategerist

Margaret Spellings— A Life in Education Policy

Episode Summary

A citizenry that has high quality education is the foundation of a thriving society. Former Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has dedicated her career to ensuring generations of students receive that high quality of education. She shares how important it is we equip our children for the workforce and college, what she would focus on if she was running for president, and the nickname she got saddled with in the 90’s.

Episode Transcription

Andrew Kaufmann: We're joined today by a long time friend of ours, the great Margaret Spellings. She's the former US Secretary of Education and the Domestic Policy Chief, and had a really impactful stint as the CEO of the Bush Center. Now, she's CEO of Texas 2036. Margaret, it's great to talk to you again.

 

Margaret Spellings: Andrew, great to see you my friend.

 

AK: It's been too long.

 

MS: I know.

 

AK: And our co-host today is Anne Wicks, the Ann Kimball Johnson Director of Education Reform at the Bush Institute. I figure we've got a couple of education experts here, so let's talk some education. Anne, thanks for doing it.

 

Anne Wicks: Andrew, I'm happy to be here as always.

 

AK: But before we get to education, I think it might be interesting. This is I believe our first guest that, beyond President Bush, has some real exposure to strategery. Margaret, where did you cross paths with strategery in the past? 

 

MS: Well, I participated in it when it existed at the White House. A meeting that was conducted in the evenings on a regular basis, I would say, every four to six weeks or so, that Karl and Barry Jackson and Alicia Clarke and others were involved in preparing for. And it was a time in the evening when we could, as assistants to the President, and the Chief of Staff, and sometimes others, maybe some folks from Congress look over the long haul, three to six months, about where the world was, where the American people were, what were the winds of change and how did we need to be responsive with the President's time and the things that we were doing.

 

AK: Did he know that he was being poked fun of in the title of that meeting? 

 

MS: Well, it started out as on the q.t but then eventually he figured it out as he always does. You know the boss.

 

AK: Exactly. He'll catch wind of things sooner or later. So Margaret, you spent your career really in education, in a long and illustrious career. But where did that passion for education come from? Where did that start? 

 

MS: Well, really, I got a lot of it from George W. Bush and from knocking around the state legislature because it doesn't take you too long to figure out that if you're in state government, the place where the action is, is education. More than 50% of all state budgets, as far as I know, are spent on public K-12 and public higher education. And so you gotta follow the money, and that's where the policy is. The other thing I love about education is it's the ultimate populist American dream issue. We all have our own experiences with it, good or bad, and it has made a difference to good or ill in everyone's life, and it's fundamental to our society. When Bush ran for Governor, he had a four or five-point plan, the foundation of which was education. Because he believed, and does, as do I, that if we get education right, we get criminal justice right, we get health right, we get lots and lots of things in our world and society, not to mention, economic growth, and prosperity.

 

AW: It's shocking that anyone cares about anything else. Right? 

 

MS: I couldn't agree more.

 

AW: Only education, Andrew.

 

AK: That should be the focus of the Bush Institute.

 

AW: I know.

 

AK: Or at least have a department.

 

AW: Yeah.

 

AK: Wait a minute.

 

MS: Yeah, right.

 

AK: Wait. It does.

 

AW: There you go, Andrew.

 

MS: Well, there are lots of other things, and I wanna talk... But in my new [03:10] ____ at Texas 2036, we certainly recognize the primacy of education, but also how connected it is with these other policy areas that are so important.

 

AW: Well, when you were first getting going in Texas in the '80s, you were part of the Perot Commission, which originally started looking at some teachers raises, which turned into a much broader reform. But you had a very famous reform that came out of that, "The No Pass, No Play initiative". That was sort of controversial at the time, but why was that significant, do you think? 

 

MS: It was, but it was... I would not say it was the major reform at the time, it was actually foundational. This is a little history lesson. The mid-80s, this was the time when the whole accountability and standards movement was beginning to develop around the country, and then Democratic Governor Mark White asked Ross Perot, the CEO of VDS at the time, and his lawyer, Tom Luce, the founding Chair of 2036 and FO George W. Bush and FO Texas Education Reform, to lead that effort. And I was a young staffer working for a member of the Texas House of Representatives, who was the chairman of the Education Committee. And so it was a combination of things. It was our first crack at accountability and standards and assessment and, yes, "No Pass, No Play", but also class size requirements for the early grades, which drove resources down into the early reading grades, and so forth. So it was extremely comprehensive. The, "No Pass, No Play" became a lightning rod because it was so right in the middle of the essence of, and ethic of Texas football.

 

AK: Don't mess with Texas football.

 

MS: Amen. And what it really said and lifted up for Texans was, "Do we care about academics and learning as much as we care about sports and extra curriculars and football?" And so it said, "If you're going to be a student athlete, first, you must be a student."

 

AW: Correct. I always loved that as a high school athlete and a college athlete, that "No Pass, No Play" in Texas, because I thought, "What a disservice you do to young people if you don't emphasize or help them realize the student part of being a student athlete, and there's a life that goes well beyond whatever you're competing in."

 

AK: Well, and it's interesting too because at the...

 

MS: Are you still playing a sport today, Anne, or you make your living in some other way? 

 

AW: I have retired from athletics. Thank you, Margaret.

 

MS: Yeah, that's my point.

 

AW: For some years. Correct, right? Yes, I had to actually know how to read and write to be able to succeed as an adult. But I always loved it.

 

AK: Playing volleyball at Stanford, right? 

 

AW: Yes Andrew, many, many days ago. Have the arthritis to prove it.

 

AK: Oh man.

 

MS: And the knees.

 

AW: Okay, so you are well known, Margaret, for two things. Well, many things, but your pragmatism and your sense of humor, I think we all know. I think in one of my early meetings with you, you described something I was working on as a nothing burger, and you were quite right, but I thought, "That is a perfect way of capturing an empty policy." And I think when you were advising then Governor George W. Bush, the teachers groups gave you an interesting nickname, The Princess of Darkness, but you embraced that and I'd just love for you to tell us a little bit about that part of your past.

 

MS: Yeah, actually, it was a colleague of mine. I represented school boards and my friend represented school administrators. So together we represented management. And there are four teacher organizations in Texas, two of whom consider themselves a union, affiliated with the NEA and AFT respectively, and two that are teacher professional organizations. But our union friends, and they are friends, and we got along really well obviously on different sides of lots of issues, but they dubbed my colleague, and my friend, and me the Princesses of Darkness. So, and good humor on [07:01] ____ which used to be a lot of fun in the waning days of the Texas legislature, that last night of the Texas legislature. We had black taffeta capes made with silver Princess of Darkness written on the back, and I think I still have the thing somewhere around here that I might have to get out if people give me trouble around here.

 

AK: Yeah, we might... Can we tweet a picture of that somehow, we need to...

 

AW: I know.

 

AK: We need to get that. [chuckle]

 

MS: I gotta find it. It's probably in one of these boxes that have been moved around with me all these years.

 

AW: It feels like an important artifact about...

 

[laughter]

 

AW: Humor and pragmatism and getting things done.

 

MS: But it was all in good fun, obviously. And I admire... And we worked with a lot, especially the AFT on reading. You'll remember these days, Anne. The teachers and we found common cause around the under preparation we were doing with teachers and how they learned to teach kids to read. And so, we had some differences, certainly, but we also had a lot in common.

 

AW: Yes, which is amazing when I think about... When we moved to the federal level, No Child Left Behind, obviously was such a signature important piece of legislation when President Bush was in office. And it was a very bipartisan effort, which I think reflects some of that pragmatism and humor and finding common ground. Do you ever think we'll see that sort of collaboration again? 

 

MS: Well, I certainly hope so. And it's something that I've been reflecting on too. In fact, Andrew, this is what you can tweet. I have a framed thing. It's one of my proudest professional achievements on my wall, which is the vote tally from the Senate and the House, a signing pen from the signage of House Bill... I mean of No Pass, No Play... No Pass, No Play. No Child Left Behind. [chuckle] No Child Left Behind passed the House 381 to 41.

 

AK: That's impressive.

 

MS: And the United States Senate by 87 to 10. I don't know that they could adjourn by 87 to 10 these days.

 

AK: Right.

 

MS: And so when you think about things like the ACA/ObamaCare, or budgets, or debt ceiling things, we do so many things on those partisan razor thin margins. And it's hard to make those things stick with the American people, and build the building blocks of policy that improve, in our case, schools over time. And so I very much appreciate the time I had working with Senator Kennedy and Congressman Miller and the folks on the other side of the aisle, as well as our Republican colleagues to make that happen. 'Cause it wasn't easy, but it was important.

 

AK: What do you think has changed? Like what changed between when you were getting that bill passed to today? 

 

MS: Well, as you know, I'm the number one fan of President Bush, and you know we had leadership. We had great leadership. And he made it a personal and a presidential priority. It was the first thing he did when he came to office. And all of the chemistry was right to get it done. Obviously, timing is always everything. But we had leadership. We had a president who cared a lot about education, he'd run on it. My friends on the political realm, the Karl Roves and Mark McKinnons of the world say that it probably was a part of the difference in the election. Women, Hispanics, people who care about education as a top priority area, thought that George W. Bush had something to say.

 

AK: And if you were stepping into office here as president at the next election, what education topic would you want to focus on? 

 

MS: Well, and it's the kind of thing that we're focusing here on at 2036, but we've gotta do a better job of, we call it pathways. I don't like that language. These transitions between high school and college. And we always think about those pathways, those bridges, going from high school to college as opposed to going from college to high school. We need for Muhammad to come to the mountain. We need for our high schools to be what they once were, and that is places where people, young people, could get the skills they need to participate fully in the job market or in higher education, and we're not doing that now. So, how do we, my bumper sticker, think about turning every high school into a community college? Through relationships with community colleges, four year universities, dual enrollment, P-tech, lab schools, on and on. But right now those kinds of programs are too boutiquey, too limited. And we need to do it more broadly. We have done this before, advanced placement an international baccalaureate. We have built all that infrastructure at the elite end, if I could say it like that. We've trained faculty, we've brought the supports for kids. We have standards, we have assessments that mean something, on and on. We need to do that for everybody else.

 

AW: Absolutely. Well, it's back to school time. And lots of people are debating the merits of classes or majors or schools or universities. What advice would you give people if they're thinking about, "What's gonna be meaningful to me or my child or my sibling, myself, as a student in the future? What should I be preparing myself for?"

 

MS: We hear a lot today about the so called soft skills, teamwork, working together, and all of that. And you know, sure.

 

[laughter]

 

MS: But it's not a substitute for learning how to read and cipher at a high level.

 

AW: Yes.

 

MS: And we're not doing that now. And I am... It just breaks my heart to see the NAEP results in Texas go DOWN when we, and North Carolina, once led the nation on closing those achievement gaps and NAEP results. And it wasn't an accident. It was leadership and policy from the likes of George W. Bush and others who said, "Every kid matters. We're gonna invest in reading. We're gonna invest in teachers", and it showed up on the bottom line. And we took our foot off the gas and it's a... The results were speaking for themselves.

 

AW: Yes, yes. Dishearteningly, dishearteningly so I think. We're working on a piece that's looking at the A schools here in Dallas, which have really intensified the great principals, teachers, and instructional practice in some of the lowest performing schools.

 

MS: Good work. Sure.

 

AW: And as we're watching what they're doing, it's just really, really great instruction. Deep into content. And it's not a new fancy policy. It's not a shiny object. It's not...

 

MS: It's not a technology. It's not a... Yeah.

 

AW: It's actually just great practice and the kids do well.

 

AK: How do you replicate that? 

 

AW: Well, Andrew, that's the million dollar question, or the billion dollar question, I guess. But...

 

AK: The kind we like to ask.

 

AW: Yeah.

 

MS: Well, we do know how to do it. We know it takes a great teacher who is very skilled in their practice. It takes classroom management techniques, accountability and standards that are clear, measurements aligned with standards. It's a cookbook of things, but it's not beyond our capability.

 

AK: Right.

 

MS: And guess what? It's happening in schools all over this country, and all over this state everyday, proving that it's possible. And, sadly, not happening in way too many others.

 

AW: One thing I was struck by in the A schools, it's just a discipline of practice.

 

MS: Hell yeah.

 

AW: It's just an absolute discipline of using data and practice.

 

MS: And an expectation that the kids can do it.

 

AW: Yeah, absolutely.

 

MS: And that is, to me, foundational and fundamental. If I had a nickel for every superintendent that... And I used to keep a little clip file that's also probably in one of these boxes around here, that basically had what President Bush would have called, "The soft bigotry of low expectations." Language that was, "Well, everybody knows that not everyone can learn to read." Well, darn near everybody can. And is everyone gonna be an astronaut? No. But can everybody have those basic skills to participate fully in our economy? A whole lot more then are now.

 

AK: One of the things that's a big topic right now in current events is the topic of free higher education, getting out of the early basics and into more workforce development. Texas, maybe, is ahead of its time. UT announced that they're bringing a lot more free tuition for students in Texas.

 

MS: To their flagships.

 

AK: To their flagships, right. So is Texas ahead of the curve or is it more of a national issue where presidential candidates need to be solving this? 

 

MS: No, I think this is a great place for state action. I'm not a fan of free college. And by the way, although it's a byzantine, cobbled together, hard to navigate, financial aid system, but largely college is affordable at the very low end. But my idea of bringing community colleges to high school, if we actually did that, we would cut the cost of college in half because you would get the equivalent of an associates degree while you were in high school and then be able to shop in your community college or your public university for a really good value. Texas ranks fairly well on affordability. We could do better. I commend UT and A&M for investing in those high-flyers at our flagships. Those are students who probably often would have found financial aid anyway. The masses, the folks, the students I'm worried about, are those who are in our comprehensive universities, and our community colleges, and our HBCUs.

 

AW: When you were Secretary of Education, the Spellings Commission on Higher Education...

 

MS: I didn't name it that.

 

[laughter]

 

AW: Yes, it was named in your honor, let's be very clear.

 

AK: I thought it was named after the verb, like...

 

[laughter]

 

AW: It was not a dictate. But it had some really interesting findings about access, affordability, quality, value, all the things that we were just talking about.

 

MS: Right.

 

AW: Are you encouraged? Are you seeing some pockets of that practice around? 

 

MS: Sure. And I do think it was a conversation starter that was overdue. Higher Ed has enjoyed, and I've been a part of the enterprise and loved it. But for a long time had the, "Send us the money and leave us alone", kind of attitude about some of these things. And what the Spellings Commission, so called, the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, asked institutions to do was to tell us what their goals are, what do they aim to do, and to establish some measurement systems around their own self-described goals, and say if they're any good, and prove it.

 

MS: And that obviously was not terribly well-received in the Congress. But the good news is, is that states and foundations like the Gates Foundation, and Lumina, and others, started to embrace those kinds of ideas and principles. And fast forward to today, there's a lot more of that going on. The Obama administration had a not dissimilar kind of view of some of those issues about how our better understanding of what students were paying for and the value of it in the marketplace, different approaches to some extent. But I think the body politic is moving in a direction that is shining more light on higher education, asking more questions. And frankly, all the while as the price has gotten so high, students and consumers are very price sensitive. And the good of that is that community colleges, I think, are much less stigmatized than they once were.

 

AW: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. When you think about your work now leading Texas 2036, named for the upcoming bicentennial, focused on many issues around sustaining Texas, tell us, why should this organization exist. What are you focusing on? 

 

MS: Texas 2036, on a probably too long bumper sticker, is trying to put sensible people together to think long-term about the most important issues into our bicentennial and beyond, by using hundreds of publicly available data sets and data systems to inform our work. And we aim to be a fact-based, not political organization, but a data-based organization. And those six areas that we're working on that we think are the most important things, and frankly, sometimes are not the focus of the public debates that we see in Austin or other state capitals or our national capital, but our six areas are education and workforce, health and healthcare, justice and safety, natural resources, infrastructure, and finally something we call government performance, which is how well do we run this $250 billion enterprise we call the State of Texas.

 

MS: Do we have the right data? Do we have the right planning? Do we have the right people? Do we have the right governance? Are we, as I like to say, organized for success? And so, there's plenty of room for discussion and elevating. And the other thing is I think we wanna help Texans understand how their state is changing and how we need to be responsive to those changes, or we will not continue to be able to produce the so-called Texas Miracle. We're growing, we're growing diverse, we're growing poor. We have tremendous assets and blessings in our state, a gulf coast, an oil and gas industry, amazing land, vast size, lots of people. Our biggest asset of course is our people, young people. And so lots to work with. Storm clouds in the offing, as George W. Bush would have said, but nothing beyond the capability of Texans.

 

AW: I heard your founding chair Tom Luce talk about how we can't rest on our laurels thinking, "Well, we've got full state coffers in this booming economy, and we can just ride off into the proverbial sunset." And he was describing that not too long ago some of the wealthiest counties in this country were in and around Detroit and it was not of short time to think about what's happened in that region over the last 30 years. And that really stuck with me as I think about, What do we take for granted and what should we be thinking about looking around corners here in Texas? 

 

MS: Absolutely, and it's not just Detroit, it's the rust belt, it's the... We see all these ebbs and flows. And frankly, there's a new, fairly recent issue of The Economist magazine that talks about Texas and California. And you can drive out of this parking lot and see a lot of California license plates 'cause people are coming here in droves. Why? Because they've made some poor policy choices that have made it a very expensive, hard place to do business.

 

AK: We even saw on the news today that Uber is bringing offices...

 

MS: Uber. Yeah.

 

AK: Here in Dallas, which is excellent.

 

AW: Are they really? 

 

MS: Yeah.

 

AK: Yeah.

 

AK: More California license plates.

 

MS: A big [21:47] ____. [chuckle] Exactly. And one thing I will say, Texans welcome newcomers.

 

AK: Absolutely.

 

AK: That's another one of our assets. We have been a huge hub for immigration, and frankly, it's been a big part of why the Texas Miracle has occurred. Some of you all are there sitting around this table right now.

 

AW: Yes.

 

AK: Absolutely.

 

AW: Guilty of being a California import to Texas. I will own that, and I'm glad to be here.

 

AK: We welcome you.

 

AW: Thank you Andrew, thank you.

 

AK: So Margaret, one of the things we ask... We ask all of our guests one question or the other. I think we'll ask you today this one, which is, what are we not talking about as a nation that we should be talking about? 

 

MS: What binds us together, our aspirational ideals, our expectations for ourselves and our children, those kind of foundational sensibilities that used to be stipulated and well understood that I think are not so much. And I don't know if that's in part a failure of our education system, or things that haven't gone on in homes and families, or what. And it's the stuff that George W. Bush talks about, it's the love your neighbor, care about your community. It's those be a good person first sorts of things, and then we can start talking about policy solutions. But anyway, I hope that we'll have leaders, I know we do in Present Bush, that can remind us what binds us together.

 

AK: Well, this was just like old times, Margaret. Thanks for spending some time with us.

 

MS: Andrew, thank you.

 

AK: And learn more about Texas 2036 at Texas2036.org. It's an interesting organization that's getting off the ground and really getting some good work done.

 

MS: Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, Anne.

 

AW: Thank you.

 

MS: Appreciate you all.

 

AK: Thank you.