Free Leadership and Crisis by Bobby Jindal Page B

educational world: graduate the kids you enroll. Pretty crazy, huh? Louisiana has the second lowest graduation rate in the South—less than 40 percent. We would never accept having the second worst football team in the South, and we shouldn’t tolerate the second lowest graduation rate either.
    Our reforms work like this: we’re asking state colleges to enter into six-year contracts. The contracts require these schools to retain and graduate their students at a higher rate, provide a rigorous education, eliminate low-performing programs, and do a better job transitioning students from two-year to four-year schools and from four-year schools to a job. In return for accepting accountability, we grant the schools more financial flexibility and operational autonomy.

    It’s all driven by a simple premise: every time a school fails to graduate one of its students, it hurts the economy and sends a person into the job market with nothing more than accumulated debt and a lack of education and training. And every time we graduate a kid with a degree that doesn’t actually qualify him for a job, we do much the same thing. We need to provide students with the training they need to have productive careers.
    Sure, my dad graduated in civil engineering because he was good at math, but more importantly, he thought people would pay him to design things, and he thought his family would appreciate his having a paycheck and providing a roof over their heads. For him, education was a means to achieve mobility and independence, to get ahead, and to care for his family.
    What makes for a good education is no secret: motivated teachers, competition, measurable results, supportive parents, classroom discipline, and the right incentives. Unfortunately, the higher education system often encourages and rewards the exact opposite of what students need to succeed and what our economy needs to grow and expand. Moreover, this establishment often just flat-out resists change, especially when suggestions come from an “outsider.”
    When I headed the University of Louisiana system, I remember a faculty senate president pulling me aside to complain that I was looking at education all wrong, because I was emphasizing the importance of education in developing our economy. I was ignoring the intrinsic importance of having a liberal arts education, he said. (I guess his theory was that you can’t have the proverbial starving artist without the starving part—though I am not sure the hungry artists out there would agree.) Now, of course we should cherish education for the well-rounded value it brings to our lives, even if
it doesn’t always provide a specific economic benefit. But in terms of public policy, when we’re spending taxpayer money on education, it makes sense that we direct it in ways that will help our economy grow.
    The education establishment cannot rightly expect us to take dollars from taxpayers, who often earn less than the average college professor, and use that money to subsidize courses or research on professors’ esoteric pet topics. The world does not need another scholarly article on something random like “The Embedding of Economic Pressures and Gender Ideals in Postsocialist International Matchmaking.” 1 Taxpayers need to know that investing in education has a real purpose—that it will create better lives and more job opportunities for their children and grandchildren.
    Anyone looking to reform our education system inevitably runs up against the education establishment, which is utterly opposed to prioritizing how schools and teachers perform. Because the establishment simply does not want to be held accountable, they hide behind the students, claiming some kids just can’t learn, or that other teachers, classes, or schools are not preparing them for success before they arrive on a college campus. This attitude of blaming everyone else for not properly educating our kids is the establishment’s version of “the dog ate