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Illinois School Board Journal
November-December, 1998

Simon: We have to stand for something
by Debi Edmund and Pete Ellertsen

        A defining moment in former U.S. Senator Paul Simon’s political career came in 1988 toward the end of his unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
        Simon, retired from the Senate and now founding director of the Public Policy Institute at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, recalled the moment during a recent interview. His presidential bid had been grueling, and the decision to withdraw from the race came as a disappointment.
        But Simon kept his scheduled public appearances. One was at a high school in Milwaukee where he was honored for his role in enacting Public Law 94-142, the basis of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The original legislation, passed in 1975, required public schools to provide a free and appropriate education to all students with disabilities.
        "They arranged for a chorus of young people with learning disabilities to sing for me," Simon said. "First they recited the Preamble to the United States Constitution. Then they sang ‘This Is My Country,’ and we were all choked up, even the reporters. Every once in a while something comes along that makes you realize it’s all worth the effort. Sometimes politics gets rough, as we’re seeing nationally right now. But as I looked at those kids I thought, ‘If we hadn’t passed that bill, probably half of them would be in institutions today.’ That was passed in 1975, my first year in Congress."
        Simon is unapologetic about his role in getting the legislation passed. "I know it does cost more to educate a disabled child, but it’s been a huge help to millions of disabled people in this country," he said.

        By the time Simon left the Senate last year, his approach to politics increasingly appeared old-fashioned. An unrepentant liberal in a time of growing conservatism, he spoke of government in terms of bettering people’s lives, of uplifting people’s vision, of public service. Now he urges public officials, including educators, to do the same. And he steers an active course for his new Institute.
        The Public Policy Institute opened its doors in 1997. Simon said it promises to "find new ways of solving some very old problems." On a regular basis the Institute brings together policymakers from both political parties, along with other leaders, to work on issues. Plans are to develop and organize two or three major symposia a year. The Institute also plans to host an idea exchange every six weeks or so which concentrates on a different issue each time.
        Issues and tasks the Institute has tackled so far include the Social Security Retirement Fund and its long-term future, a summit on poverty to which a diverse group of top religious leaders were invited, a campaign finance reform package that won Illinois legislative approval, strategies for responding to crime in our society, a conference on TV violence, and an initiative to assess the impact of welfare reform in rural areas.
        "Unlike many academic public policy institutes, we are not interested in simply having fine intellectual discussions," Simon said. "Before we have a full-blown symposium, I want to ask the bottom-line question: ‘Can we contribute something?’"
        Paul Simon has enjoyed a long and illustrious political career. He was elected to Illinois House in 1954, to the Illinois Senate in 1962 and lieutenant governor in 1968. After losing a gubernatorial primary bid—his only loss at the polls—he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974. There he served for 10 years, and in 1984 won election to the first of two terms in the U.S. Senate. His policy interests spanned such wide-ranging topics as the budget, disability policy, foreign affairs, labor, and television violence.
        He also played a key role in education policy. "Every year I was in the state legislature, every year I was in Congress, I served on the education committees," he said. "Usually when you pass something significant, it takes a real struggle to do it."
        Education policy Simon had a hand in writing includes the National Literacy Act, the School-to-Work Opportunities Act, several provisions of the Goals 2000 Act, and the 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

        When serving in Congress, Simon consistently voted against using tax dollars for private school vouchers. On the issue of charter schools, he says "the evidence is not in yet." But he does applaud innovation. "The inner city is where our greatest public education problems are. I remember visiting a school in Cincinnati, fourth grade, in a really run-down area. It was a language immersion class, and they had waiting lists for kids to get into the school. Because of the Cincinnati situation, they made sure each classroom was half black, half white. I walk in and here are these fourth graders in this inner city school, jabbering away in German, discussing their arithmetic and other things. Structurally the building was not very impressive, but what was happening in that school was very impressive."
        However, he sounds a note of caution on issues of school reform: "I think we have to be careful that we don’t do anything to take resources away from the public schools. About two years before I left the Senate, I visited 18 schools on the west side of Chicago and the south side of Chicago. Those were the poor areas in Chicago. When you see a school library with shelves and no books, or you see kids erasing a workbook—you can see the answers put in by someone who had the workbook before—you know we simply have to devote more resources to doing the job there. I’m leery of things that will detract from the public school system."
        Simon has also found time to write 17 books, and during his years as a lawmaker, wrote the newspaper column P.S./Washington—one of very few such columns that wasn’t ghosted by staff and perhaps the only one written on a manual typewriter as late as the 1990s. In November 1994, as Illinois’ leading statewide Democratic officeholder and with the strongest political standing of his public service career, Simon announced that he would retire from the Senate when his term expired January 3, 1997. He joined the Southern Illinois University faculty only weeks after retiring from the Senate, and now teaches political science and journalism, in addition to directing the Public Policy Institute.
        Simon expects the Institute to tackle some education issues. He holds the same yardstick to them as he does to other issues.
        "One of the qualities sometimes missing in public office today," he says, "is courage. My hope for the Public Policy Institute is that occasionally we can call for things that may be unpopular but need to be done. My belief is that away from the partisan wars of Springfield and Washington, we can fashion bipartisan answers that reflect understanding and vision."
        One of the more publicly contentious issues the Institute plans to tackle is character education. Educators and business leaders brought together by the Institute recently agreed that core values—such as honesty and the work ethic—should be part of the curriculum in grade schools, high schools and community colleges. During a three-hour session at SIU-Carbondale, Simon initiated and moderated a free-flowing discussion that included educators and representatives of government and major business groups. Leaders at this discussion included a representative of the Illinois Association of School Boards. The Institute plans to monitor and support an initiative being undertaken by the Illinois Community College Board to include core values in the curricula of community colleges throughout the state. The Institute also plans to work with SIU’s College of Education to determine ways in which core values can be stressed in other educational settings throughout the nation.
        "We don’t want to get into religious dogma, but still things like integrity and respect for other people, those are things we all agree with," Simon said. "There’s a general agreement that we can be doing more in this area. As soon as you talk about character education, some people think religious doctrine. But there really are many things we do agree upon that are part of what an education should be, and many things teachers tend to instill in students anyway, automatically. They don’t call it character education, but they’re doing it. Now we’re discussing within the Institute, within the staff, how do we follow through on that."

        Another issue on the Institute’s agenda is adult literacy. "We have, by the most conservative estimate, 4 million adult Americans who cannot recognize their name in block print, and 23 million adult Americans who can’t read a newspaper or fill out an employment form. Too often they pass this affliction on to their children. . . . When we passed the National Literacy Act, I said I hope we can almost eliminate illiteracy in this country by the year 2000. Well, we’ve come nowhere near that goal."
        Also being considered as a symposium topic is the number of days in a school year. "If you have additional days of school, you’re going to have to pay teachers more, you’re going to have to air condition some schools. There are expenses. How do we compete with the rest of the world and still do what needs to be done?"
        Even when the issue is not education, talk about the quality of public schools has a way of creeping into the discussion, Simon observed.+
        At an Institute symposium on crime, "Odie Washington, head of the Department of Corrections in Illinois, gave a statistic that really startled me. I knew that about 82 percent of the people in our prisons are high school dropouts. But he said the average prisoner in the Illinois state penal system has a little less than a sixth grade education."

        During a discussion on poverty in southern Illinois, in which people from Alexander and Pulaski counties brainstormed ways to improve the economic situation, "one of the first things that came up was, we have to improve the schools."
        Perhaps the most high-profile Institute project was a 1998 symposium on faith, communities and poverty, that brought together a wide range of religious leaders: "Poverty is a moral issue," Simon said. "We have a higher percentage of our children living in poverty than any other country. So we pulled together religious leaders to work on this issue, and they came up with a surprisingly eloquent statement. But inevitably as we talked about poverty in our country, we got into the whole question of the lack of quality schools in some of the poorer areas. So education is involved in almost every subject we deal with."
        Simon acknowledges that both politics and public education have suffered from an image problem in recent years. In the political realm, "I have seen public opinion polls take the place of leadership too often, and I have seen excessive partisanship harm our decision-making process," he says. "I think that people in politics have to stand for something."
        During his four decades in elected office, Simon emphasized constituent service and practical measures that might do some good for people—especially downtrodden or neglected people who might need a little extra boost from government. Usually described as a liberal, he accepted the label but sought to combine it with a pragmatic outlook. This he coupled with a career legislator’s instinct for compromise.
        One factor contributing to public cynicism, he says, is "excessive partisanship. I’m a Democrat, and I’m proud to be a Democrat, but most issues are nuts and bolts things, where people of good will have to sit around a table and say, ‘How do we solve this problem?’"

        Now that he is in the classroom, Simon’s instincts still lead him to the pragmatic, to seek possible avenues for compromise and areas of shared values—but above all to craft workable solutions to problems rather than merely to discuss them. Public service, he says, is what politics should be about.
        "I think one of the reasons for cynicism today is the public doesn’t see us standing for anything other than what the latest poll says," he said. "That’s one of the discouraging things about the Clinton presidency. In fact, I thought the worst part of the current scandal was when Bill Clinton asked [image consultant] Dick Morris to take a poll on whether or not he should tell the truth. You don’t take a poll on something like that! I never took a poll on anything before I decided how to vote on things—I did what I thought was best for the country."
        Similarly, Simon advised school officials to stand by their principles, serve the public and tell the truth.
        "We have to make sure we’re doing a good job," he said. "I wouldn’t worry about criticism if it is misdirected—I worry about criticism when we’re just drifting instead of really lifting a vision and doing a better job. I think the schools have to show that we’re doing a good job but we’re not satisfied with the job we’re doing, we want to improve."