The Valley News editorial “Our Fall from Grace: From George H.W. Bush to Trump” (Dec. 5) elicited a pleasant memory of my personal encounter with the 41st president. But I believe the editorial also understated the former president’s impact on our politics, our public schools and our nation as a whole.
I met George H.W. Bush in 1987, when he was vice president and visiting Exeter (N.H.) High School, where I was serving as superintendent, to be the commencement speaker. Following his address to the students, Bush joined the principal and the School Board chair on stage to shake hands with the graduates and give them their diplomas. The students at Exeter had a tradition of handing something to the person giving them their diplomas: a pebble, a chess piece, a flower or, on one occasion, a brick. The 1987 graduates, we learned, would be handing out marbles. The high school alerted Bush’s staff to this tradition and we arranged for him to hand me any marbles he received. Bush gladly participated in the tradition, exchanged smiles with each graduate, and posed for pictures whenever a parent came forward with a camera. He seemed genuinely to enjoy himself and everyone agreed he was down-to-earth and very gracious.
The George H.W. Bush I met at Exeter High School in 1987 reminded me of the George H.W. Bush who ran against Ronald Reagan in 1980. At that time, Bush’s sparkling resume and forthright candor made him a formidable candidate for the presidency, an appealing alternative for those who believed Jimmy Carter was “in over his head.” A war hero and successful businessman who held several key elected and administrative positions at the federal level, Bush ran for president as someone who could make the government function more effectively. In the primary campaign, however, Bush faced an uphill battle against Reagan, an amiable former celebrity and governor who saw government as the problem and tax cuts as the solution.
During the primary campaign, candidate Bush criticized Reagan’s “trickle-down” tax cuts as “voodoo economics,” avoided Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric and shunned the coded language of the “Southern strategy” that Reagan used. Instead, Bush campaigned on his own qualifications, the need for unity in the country, and the value of a capable leader who understood how the federal government worked.
Ultimately, despite his qualifications and the support of GOP leaders, Bush lost all but a handful of primaries. To appease the still sizable moderate wing of his party and the party leadership, Reagan reluctantly chose Bush as his running mate. In the years that followed, Bush embraced Reagan’s agenda, promoting the tax cuts he argued against as a candidate, supporting the president’s desire to shrink government and standing by Reagan through the controversies that emerged during his presidency.
On the other hand, the George H.W. Bush I met at the Exeter High graduation in 1987 did not resemble candidate Bush who defeated Michael Dukakis in 1988.
During that campaign, Bush vowed to never raise taxes under any circumstances and introduced the world to Willie Horton. He seemed mean-spirited and determined to win no matter what the cost. By adopting Reagan’s “voodoo economics” and the GOP’s “Southern strategy,” Bush avoided defining himself as a moderate Republican, setting the course for his party to evolve into the Party of Donald Trump.
When he ran for president in 1988, the Bush who attended Exeter High School’s graduation did show through in one way: his aspiration to be “the education president.” In a speech he gave at Manchester (N.H.) High School during the campaign, Bush said he hoped to instill “a renaissance of quality in our schools,” and at many campaign stops he spoke of the need for our nation to provide a solid education for all students.
Unfortunately, candidate Bush did not focus on this unifying and high-minded idea during his debates in 1988. Instead, he focused on Dukakis’ decision to veto a bill requiring Massachusetts students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, an issue he raised in their debates and an issue that overshadowed any substantive dialogue on the direction public schools should take.
Once elected, Bush did make an effort to fulfill his education promises. In 1989, he convened an Education Summit, attended by 49 of the 50 governors, that set the “quality standards” that became Bush’s “America 2000” goals. At that time Bush proclaimed, “The American people are ready for radical reforms. We must not disappoint them.”
In his 1990 State of the Union message, Bush declared that, by 2000, every child in the United States would start school ready to learn, the high school graduation rate would rise to at least 90 percent, every American adult would be a literate and skilled worker, our nation would lead the world in math and science achievement, and every student would leave grades four, eight and 12 having demonstrated competency in English, mathematics, science, history and geography.
In defining these goals, President George H.W. Bush set the course for education policy for the next 25 years as Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all adopted programs that defined increasingly ambitious standards and required students to take and pass examinations to prove that they were prepared for higher education or the workplace.
The design of the tests, and the consequences for failing them, were first determined on a state-by-state basis. By the time Bush’s son took office in 2001, though, there was a bipartisan consensus that all children should be tested three times during their school years, that the results of those tests should be used to identify “failing schools,” and that those “failing schools” should be closed or taken over by the state or another entity.
Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001, the education “reform” movement has morphed into a plan in which all parents should have vouchers they can use to enroll their children in whatever school they wish to attend.
Looking back on his ultimately unsuccessful re-election campaign in 1992, it is evident that Bush would not be unsettled by the direction the current secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, has advocated.
A recent article in Education Week offered this unedited excerpt from a 1992 debate, an excerpt that not only reflects Bush’s position on school choice and vouchers but also captures his idiosyncratic syntax: “We’ve got to get the power in the hands of the teacher, not the teachers union. … And so our America 2000 program also says this. It says let’s give parents the choice of a … public, private or religious school. And it works. It works in Milwaukee. Democratic woman up there taken the lead in this — the mayor up there — on the program. And the schools that are not chosen are improved; competition does that.”
My personal encounter with him makes me appreciate Bush’s genuine humanity. It is that George H.W. Bush who was lionized this past week in eulogies and editorials. But candidate Bush’s decision to adopt the GOP’s anti-government rhetoric and embrace its Southern strategy helped to make the GOP what it is today and contributed to the divisiveness that troubles us all. And the course he set as an advocate for school vouchers has led us to DeVos.
I will miss the good-natured vice president who accepted marbles from the graduates at Exeter’s commencement. I regret the partisanship of candidate Bush and the legacy he left as “the education president.”
Wayne Gersen, of Etna, is the former superintendent of the Dresden School District.