Ep. 41 "An Inside Look Into Educational Policy & Those Who Make It" - Guest Steve Newman (Part 1 of 2)

The strength of a company lies with the quality of its leadership. Our guest, Steve Newman, learned this first hand while serving in the Virginia Senate and other elected positions, including his local city council. In 2010, he was instrumental in the Governor’s Higher Education Reform Commission  and coined the word “educrats” to describe those in government who are more interested in self-serving agendas than changing student’s lives. Join us today as Melvin and Steve discuss policy creation and how citizens can stand firm for reform.


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Transcript

ADAMS: Today we are honored to have Virginia State Senator, Steve Newman, as our guest. Senator Newman studied at Lynchburg College and at Central Virginia Community College. He is the vice President and Chairman of the Board of Directors for Delta Star Incorporated—a manufacturer of medium power transformers and mobile substations with operations in Lynchburg, Virginia; San Carlos, California; Montreal, Canada. [00:30]

He entered politics in 1988 at the age of 23, and became the youngest-ever elected representative to serve on the Lynchburg City Counsel. Four years later, he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates. After serving four years in the House, he was elected to the Virginia Senate in 1996. He continues in that office to the present. 

While there, he has served as the [01:00] Senate President pro tempore, Chairman of the Education and Health Committee, Chairman of the Transportation Committee, Commerce and Labor Committee, and on the Finance and Appropriations Committee.  

He has served on several commissions, and has authored and sponsored Constitutional Amendments, numerous bills, and is rated as one of Virginia’s most “Pro Job and Pro Business” Senate members. 

Senator Newman and his wife, [01:30] Kim, have two sons—Tyler and Westly. So welcome, Senator Newman. So glad you’re here today with us. 

NEWMAN: Nice to have you join us here. I’ve been looking forward to this; thank you. 

ADAMS: The Noah Webster Educational Foundation is a non-profit foundation. We work to improve education through responsible leadership, core principles and best practices, engaging parents, educators, and legislators to bring solutions in education. We focus on the roles of instruction, parents, government, faith and morality, and facilities. 

Today, I’d like us to zero in on [00:30] the role of government in education. So, Senator, for listeners who are not well-informed on how the State government works, could you give us a quick overview of how it works in Virginia? Particularly focusing on the two houses of the State Legislature—how they interact, how they work with the executive branch to govern the commonwealth. 

NEWMAN: That’s a good question—it’s a big question—so maybe [01:00] the best place to start is on the foundational documents which is, of course, our Constitution. Unlike some States’ constitution, our Constitution is very prescriptive in many ways, but it’s very prescriptive on education. It talks about a requirement that we have–—a free, public, quality education. It also lays out the foundational mechanisms on how it is to operate. 

So in Virginia, we obviously have the executive side [01:30] and the legislative side, but then we have this operation of the State School Board, which is appointed by the governor. They make a lot of the policy. It doesn’t in any way usurp the legislative opportunity to set policy around their decision, but many times you’ll end up with them doing the strategic-type work and the legislature working on the higher level items. 

Within the legislature, [02:00] we are very much segmented into the committee and subcommittee structure. In the State Senate, I was Chairman of the Education Committee for many, many, many years, I also appointed the subcommittee chairman in that role. We had a subcommittee chairman that had K-12 and that was their focus. I sent most of the bills to that subcommittee, they worked out the technical items, [02:30] then there was a subcommittee report given back to the committee, and then we would vote on those items. 

The House of Delegates is set up in a similar fashion, The House of Delegates does actually have the ability to kill bills in subcommittee and they do not require a full hearing on the bills—the Senate of Virginia goes through that process. We generally work fairly closely with the administration in that committee. 

So you’ll have The Secretary of Education, you’ll have [03:00] SHEV and others that really represent education in general that work with us. That doesn’t mean we agree—what it means is that we work with a flow of data and a flow of information that allows us to get to the end product. 

That has been successful right up until the conservative side lost the majority. It was very successful in promoting a good quality education and we had a number of [03:30] stop-gaps in there to make sure that we actually did that. The last couple of years, the Virginia Education Association, which is an outside group that represents some teachers—not all teachers, has had extraordinary influence the last couple of years. They have really pushed for a complete elimination of the core subjects: math, history, science and English, and they’ve moved towards the soft subjects which they’re calling “The 5 C’s.” [04:00]

Those have very little to do with education. They have more to do with social items and they’ve pushed other items that we can talk more about. So in the past, that relationship has worked very well. When I was Chairman we had a solid relationship that allowed this to continue moving forward. 

That’s the overall structure. The school board, of course, is appointed by the governor, and depending on who the governor is, you can have very strong conservative members, [04:30] or those that are not so conservative, and they will settle a lot of the day-to-day policy. 

ADAMS: Interesting. Well that’s very insightful. Thank you for laying that out for us this morning—for all of our listeners, it helps bring perspective to how government works in the halls, so to speak, and in coming to decisions and sofourth. Again, I’m so thankful to have you with us because of your vast [05:00] experience working in the field of education as a State Senator. 


ADAMS: What is the mission and purpose of the Virginia education and Health Committee? 

NEWMAN: Under the code of Virginia and the way that the structure of  the Senate and the House operate, which is somewhat dictated by the Constitution, we actually have an oversight over the provision of the Department of Education and so we receive a lot of the reports and get a lot of the factual information [00:30]—this is in session and out of session, so a lot of that takes place there. 

As leadership always produces its own wake, if you have a strong chairman, which I tried to be, I would have a plan for every bill. In other words, we would have meetings the day before the committee, I would determine that I would like to see the bill go here or there, be killed, or pass, or modified—it doesn’t mean that my will [01:00] would always be done, but a strong chairman has a plan. 

We’ve seen in the past that if you have a weak chairman, they will either rely on the subcommittee chairman or they don’t have a plan—it’s really the will of the committee kind of process. It depends on the chairs. But overall, I think we have the ability to pass legislation in Virginia that can either override Board of Education Policy, [01:30] we can set Board of Education Policy, and probably just as important as all of that, is we are the originators of legislation that ends up going to Senate Finance Committee, which ends up driving the public education funding operation. 

So the funding in Virginia is complex. The education quality is complex. But those people that understand it and those chair people that are running it helps [02:00] with 1) the standards of quality. They’re called SOQs, you’ll hear them mentioned that way. Standards of Quality are basically the core items we are going to require every school board to have. 

In other words, how many principals are they required to have? How many counselors are they supposed to have? What are the standards of quality? Now these are not necessarily the subject-matter items, but it is the mechanism, the foundation [02:30] you need to have to be able to meet the requirements. 

Then, there’s standards of accreditation, we call them the SOAs. Standards of Accreditation basically determine what you need to know—in other words, what you need to teach and what you need to know. And for the longest time, when we had accountability in education, there might be an SOL test or something that says, “Yes, Johnny has some idea of what 2+2 means.” right? That has all gone away and we have gone to all “feel good” items now.

But in the past, [03:00] the Standards of Accreditation were tied to accountability standards—A-F is grading for schools and other items…. The last one is really how we end up with the funding mechanism. That’s critical because Virginia is a little different than other states. 

So in Virginia, education is a function of the State government and the local government, and we have a formula that we’ve come up with and it basically has to do with how poor [03:30] or rich a a locality is—and that formula has been somewhat sacred in the general assembly for many decades. 

A county like Lee County, in southwest Virginia, probably gets about 80% of their money from the state of Virginia and they donate 20% of their money. But in Fairfax county, that is basically reversed. They get about 20% of their money from the state of Virginia, and then about 80% they fund locally. [04:00]

So those are the three major mechanisms of how the Finance Committee and the Education Committee overlap. 

ADAMS: Here’s a little broader question—a little philosophical…I’m sure you’re going to have a view and maybe others are going to have a different view, but generally speaking, what is the primary role of education from the perspective of the government? 

NEWMAN: When the constitution was passed, it was basically to provide this quality and free public education in Virginia—as we all know, for a long time—and it’s a scar on Virginia—that there was either not a free education, there was a mechanism whereby you had to pay for education, or that the quality was different. Unfortunately there were some racial impacts on the quality of education as it goes back.

But I think the commonwealth of Virginia has a single purpose, and that is to prepare individuals for a life in the workforce and be productive citizens. We all know that really goes back to what is the religious schools which produced most of the schools in the past century—and also those religious schools, including William and Mary and others that were very much based on the ability to make sure that we understood the role of God in our lives and the impact that that had. 

I think it has morphed over the last couple of years.  The most recent morphing is that you can come out of the 1970s and into the 1980s we had moved away from accountability in education and moved away from the fact that you needed to have math, history, science and English—you saw that we moved away from Phonics and into Look See, we basically said there's no right answer —and that had gotten this commonwealth into deep trouble. 

Our SAT scores and our childrens’ ability to understand the basics of math, history, science, and English were going in a devastating direction. The General Assembly and the Governor’s office changed that. They came up with the standards of learning. The goals of the standards of learning were not to be these overriding tests that dominated everything, instead it was just, do you know math, history, scence, and English? That worked fairly well. As a matter of fact, SAT scores, reading scores—everything went up dramatically after that.

Unfortunately with President Bush’s No Child Left Behind, he had added test on top of test on top of test, and that just burned down the system. So what was the answer? It was basically to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the last couple years, under something that was unelected, called The SOL Innovation Committee, they had a mission, in my point of view, to completely destroy accountability. 

So what did they do? They basically got rid of all accountability whatsoever   and basically told areas like Lynchburg, Petersburg, and Norfolk, that they don’t need to worry about math, history, science, and English. And now they’ve moved more towards social discussions, and that’s where you end up with Critical Race Theory and other things coming in. 

Honestly, they’ve got plenty of time now because they don’t have to worry about math, history, science, and English, so we have a social agenda now—that’s a new experiment—it will fail. It’s probably the only thing that The Washington Post and I  agree on. They are dogmatic about this—is that if you get rid of all accountability, you’re going to have bad schools and children are going to suffer. So the Washington Post and I have agreed on that many many times even though we don’t agree on a lot. 


ADAMS: Who are the primary entities that engage with or influence the education committee and the legislator when it comes to education? You alluded to this a little bit earlier, but maybe dig a little deeper into that. 

NEWMAN: It’s a great question and it’s not one that’s asked often enough. You think about it, who is interacting, who are we hearing from? Is it parents or is it advocates for quality? [00:30] And the answer is basically—no. Individual legislators will get communication on it, but, Melvin, there is no advocate for quality in education. Let me say that again. There is no advocate for quality in education. 

If you were to go in today and sit in on an Education Health Committee, I can assure you, the meeting is going to be full, the docket will be full, the number of speakers lined up to speak will be immense. But who are these people? [01:00] Well, they’re the Virginia Education Association, it will be the Princiapl’s association, The counselor’s Association—It’ll basically be what I call the “Educrats”—the education bureaucrats. They are being paid to pull off of the system. 

The problem is, not one of those guys, in my opinion, is paid—is supportive of quality education. So what you end up with is a lot of this [01:30] pulling back and forth, and if you don’t have a strong chairman who doesn’t have a strong north star—”Listen, we’re going to do this, no one in the room wants to do this”—but we understand that parents love children, not government, and they’re going to make sure that we get a quality education. If you lose that, then the synergism of the room will take over. 

It’ll only become about money, it’ll become about making sure that we have teachers that can do [02:00] whatever they want to do in the classroom—and we love teachers! We appreciate the fact that they’re teaching our children—but we had a bill this last year, it’s a great example, the bill said that you could no longer fire a teacher because heir incompetent. That was the entirety of the bill. It wasn’t subdivisions of the bill or otherwise, it said that the portion of the code of Virginia that says that you could fire a teacher for being incompetent was thrown out. [02:30]

Everyone at the meeting supported the bill except for me and a few other guys out there. But if you had asked parents, “Do you want to have a competent teacher? Is that your desire?” The answer would be, “No.” Here’s what’s also important, if you had asked most classroom teachers, “Do you want that teacher down the hall, who we all know id incompetent, to not be able to be fired?” The answer would be a resounding, “Let that teacher go!”

But that’s not the push of the room. [03:00] But that’s a great question and the Educrats basically control the room because everyone else—you and I—are working. We love our children, we’re actually doing things, we’re working. But when you ask that question, it’s a really good one, it’s a bit of a sensitive question for me, but… It’s basically run by the Educrats and that’s the dominant discussion that goes on in committees. 

ADAMS: Wow. Well, I knew the answer to that question, as you can suspect, but a lot of people probably don’t, [03:30] and thank you for answering it so thougharly. That is an area that if we are going to gain quality education again, if we’re going to gain any kind of real best practices and core principles in education, we have to engage parents very actively in all of these roles. 

ADAMS Are there any educational structures or institutions in the commonwealth that are not under the authority of laws that are passed by the legislature forming education policy?

NEWMAN: There was with the SOL Innovation committee, I think that is a group that is very much not elected. I actually put in a bill to eliminate them, and through some negotiations, [00:30] the bill actually passed and they’re now gone. You’ll see, for instance, that the governor—especially under an administration—they will set up a subcommittee and working groups, and they’ll come out with some pretty crazy things. 

One basically wanted to do away with higher level math and others have been pushing Critical Race Theory, but they’re doing it and saying, “This is not Critical Race Theory”, it just has all of the components of Critical Race Theory. [01:00] 

So what you often have with some of the more progressive governors are these unelected groups and they put down a marker—they don’t have the ability to have the effect of law, so they can’t change policies—but they will come up with a packaged product, and that packaged product goes to the School Board, and then they adopt it because it’s been well considered and it’s a recommendation of a group. [01:30]

Or they’ll bring it to the legislature. A great example of this is when a group came up with a transgender policy, and I know that’s contraversial, but the basic idea of this group was to say that there are no more boys or girls—instead, if you had a lockeroom and a boy one day decided he wanted to be a girl, he could just go in there. That’s exactly what they recommended and exactly what’s being pressed down [02:00] on schools today. 

Again, it has nothing to do with teaching kids about math, history, science and English; it’s a social experiment—and this one actually said that if you have an overnight visit and you’re taking the cheerleaders and the basketball players and one day one of the basketball players says, “You know what? I feel like a girl today” then he was allowed and required to be allowed to stay at the girls’ location. 

Now parents would be horrified! It’s just not natural. [02:30] Only the looney Left can think this up, but this was an unelected group that got together, came up with these policies, and now they’re pushing them down on the school divisions. And I got to tell you that your school divisions nearby are going to be grappling with this someday soon. 

ADAMS: And so these are not actually laws, they are just recommendations from think tanks, is that what I’m hearing you say? [03:00]

NEWMAN: Of sorts, they come in a couple of ways, 1) governors put them together, 2) they can come in from outside liberal groups (the VEA for instance). I’m sure they are very nice people, and that type of thing, but their policies are somewhere that I don’t always agree with. 

Oftentimes, like right now when you have a liberal legislature, they’re actually an idea that legislators on the left  have. They don’t know how to construct it, [03:30] so they will put into the code a subcommittee that is required to come up with policy and they are to provide policy to the school board who is (quote) “to adopt the policy.” 

So, it’s an unelected group coming up with the policy, the governor appoints all the members, it goes to the boards who are ”to adopt the policy.” So it is driven by a code, but it is really a misuse of the code of Virginia, in my opinion. [04:00]