Core of Conviction : My Story (9781101563571) (15 page)

During holidays, he would make sure that the kids helped with the Christmas decorations, inside and outside; he would make sure that they sent their Christmas cards, that they remembered their duties as a Secret Santa to someone else. The proper observance of holidays, of course, is the great joy of family traditions. In addition, such observances are comforting and reassuring to children.

Marcus and I agreed that the world imposes adult situations too early and quickly on kids. We thought, “We can't let them lose their childhood.” So the movies that we let them watch were always on the wholesome side—anything without bad language or adult situations was okay. We also enjoyed
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
, and
That Thing You Do
. And, of course, the Narnia movies. Every Christmas, we would watch
It's a Wonderful Life
. Now, when Marcus walks in through the garage door after driving home from work, I often say, “Welcome home, Mr. Bailey!” We also have made it a point to see, almost every year,
A Christmas Carol
at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. That's a show, and a story, that just keeps getting better and better. We loved the positive moral and ethical vision of Charles Dickens and the high quality at the Guthrie.

Or course, kids being kids, and families being families, there's always an unpredictable impishness. For example, the baby of the family, Sophia, didn't understand how goldfish could breathe in water, and she'd want to pull them out of the water and into the air so they could “breathe.” So someone had to come and grab the fish as they flopped around and put them back in the bowl. But once Lucas put some pieces of chicken in the microwave, cooked them up, and then showed them to her, saying this was what happened to the goldfish once they were out of the water. “Not a fish! Deedee, not a fish!” Sophia wailed, till Lucas explained to her that it was just a joke.

Indeed, Marcus himself was not immune to the imp impulse. As we celebrated our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, he looked at me and deadpanned, “You know, we might have a chance. This thing might actually work out.”

As the kids grew older, it was time for them to take on responsibilities of their own. Marcus decreed that every summer, the kids had to either get a job or do volunteer work somewhere. And so they all were busy. All across Stillwater, young Bachmanns were mowing lawns, busing tables, hostessing at restaurants, volunteering at hospitals and Bible camp—you name it. But always busy—it was expected.

No matter what happens to me or to Marcus, he and I agree: Those kids will always be the proudest accomplishment and legacy of our lives.

In the meantime, Marcus's career was advancing. In 1995 he earned his PhD and thereafter we launched Bachmann & Associates, a Christian counseling service. I was cofounder of the company and have been involved in the business side of its operations. As I like to say, I have signed both sides of a paycheck, the front and the back. That is, I have endorsed paychecks made out to me, and at Bachmann & Associates I have signed paychecks going to others. Our company has been a success; we have created some fifty jobs. Yet even as I was learning about job creation, I was being reminded, yet again, of the challenges that small businesses confront. Taxes, regulation, bureaucrats: I've dealt with 'em all. So whenever I speak to a gathering of the National Federation of Independent Business, I can truthfully say, “My husband and I have walked in your moccasins. In fact, we still are walking in them—or trying to.”

But in our business we will never apologize for being pro-life and promarriage, and we want everyone to know that we approach all our work from a Christian perspective. We are respectful and honoring of every person entering our clinic. We make no secret of the fact that we endorse biblical values and integrate biblical principles into our counseling.

For years, even before we were married and all through our marriage, we had been actively speaking to and contributing aid to unwed mothers as we helped them find the strength to carry on with their pregnancy. These expectant mothers, most of them, were teenagers; as newlyweds, we reached out, on an informal, one-to-one basis to help and encourage young women to choose life. We never judged, only helped as best we could. And we prayed and prayed and prayed. We beseeched God to help these mothers to keep their babies, not only till birth but after that, if possible. But if that wasn't going to be possible—and it often wasn't—then we would help as best we could to find a new home for that child and a new start for the mother. We drove them to pro-life adoption agencies, and I even helped one woman through her childbirth experience—again, strictly as a volunteer, trying to support this courageous mother's decision, after being abandoned by the baby's father, to stick to it and choose life.

I must say, Marcus's therapeutic work opened my eyes to the myriad troubles that people were confronting in the modern world. These troubles included syndromes that I had never heard of as a child, such as anorexia and bulimia. Marcus did everything he could in his counseling, but he and I still wanted to do more. We thought about it and prayed about it, and we knew we had the energy and capacity to open our hearts and home to people who had need. It was risky. We had little kids to think of, but we still wanted to be part of the solution for people who were hurting and who needed help.

During the nineties, we learned of friends at church who were accepting foster children into their homes. Marcus and I agreed at the same instant—that's what we want to do as well. We began by providing short-term care for girls with eating disorders who were patients in a program at the University of Minnesota. These girls moved into our house—the house didn't get any bigger, but our hearts were broken for these girls and their families, and we wanted to help. As Psalm 68:6 tells us: “God setteth the solitary in families.” Well, that's exactly what He did in our home.

Marcus and I knew that this was the last stop for some of these girls before they finished high school. We weren't trying to save the world; we were just trying to give consistent care and love to some kids in need of a new start. That is, to show them a home where the dad comes home from work each day and kisses the mom. This is what it looks like when husband and wife cherish each other; this is what it sounds like in a family that doesn't pretend to be perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but which was open to helping to heal the hurt in a few kids' lives.

For their part, our biological kids were good sports through the whole experience. Yes, we had to bunch them up in bunk beds to make room for the new kids, and yes, we had to form long lines to use the bathroom. But our kids shared in our passion for helping others, so everything was fine. It's sometimes said that homeschooled kids grow up being naive about the world; I don't think that's true, and I know for sure that our kids grew up knowing about the many challenges of adolescence. In fact, Marcus and I are confident that such knowledge has armored them.

The girls moved in with us and became part of our family. Most stayed with us for about two years; the shortest stay was a few weeks, the longest three and a half years. They had the same chores as the rest of the kids. And so we all learned to grow and adjust. I hope that many more families too, as they are able, will find it in their hearts to accept foster kids. If they do, they will find it a deeply rewarding experience. But that's not to say it's easy. We had all the sorts of difficulties that one might expect from teenagers, but that goes with the territory of parenting any teen.

We had as many as four girls at once, so that's four plus our five biological kids, making a total of nine. Quite a crew! Marcus had been working with people all his life—he was a natural! We eventually had to move a wall to make a bigger kitchen to accommodate our burgeoning census.

Some of the foster kids asked if they could go to Christian schools, but state law required them to go to public school. I am proud to say that all of our foster kids graduated from high school.

And yet at the same time, I came to be concerned about some of the curriculum they brought home. One day, when one of our girls came home and showed me her eleventh-grade math “homework,” which was just coloring in a poster, that was my decisive moment on the path to school-reform efforts. If anyone needed a leg up in life, I realized, it was these girls, as well as other at-risk young people. And increasingly, I was worried that academics seemed to be displaced by curricula that imposed politically correct attitudes, values, and beliefs. That's not an education; that's an agenda. And a loss for the kids' future.

Of course, people ask many more questions about our foster kids. We love them and their families, always. Those girls were each a unique blessing and a gift to us, and we know that their parents also loved those girls, even amid family challenges. But those kids have been through enough. They have a right to privacy. They have all had challenging lives, and surely they don't need be pushed into the spotlight. No doubt curious reporters will pursue them, but Marcus and I wish they wouldn't. Just as we encourage foster care, we also pray that all of our foster children will be able to get on with their lives without embarrassment or harassment.

So those are our twenty-nine kids. The five biological children who are here with us, the sixth who is in heaven, and the twenty-three foster kids. We love every one of them and are proud of each of them.

Today, our foster children are grown and launched into the world, and our biological children, too, are out of the house. Now, for the first time in twenty-nine years of parenting, our parenting responsibilities are no longer daily. Dare I say, “Bring on the grandkids”?

CHAPTER EIGHT

Stillwater Activism

IT was the declining quality of education—ominously visible in Minnesota by the nineties, and in America as a whole—that proved the decisive factor in getting me into politics. There would be no stillness in my life in Stillwater.

As a kid back in Waterloo, I had always enjoyed taking the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. Every year, we would sharpen our number 2 pencils and hear the familiar instructions, always the same: Fill the oval, don't mark outside the lines. I was proud that the famous tests, offered nationwide, were produced by the University of Iowa, located in, of all places, Iowa City. It was Iowa all the way! I instinctively believed that tests were a good idea, because some things should be measured. After all, if you want to improve something, you have to be able to measure its progress—to see whether or not it has really improved. Also, as a kid, I was always proud that Iowa placed first in the nation. So I would pull out my trusty pencil and happily start scratching away on the tests.

But if tests are a good thing, there's still a danger in centralized testing. And in my lifetime, the benefits of testing have often been lost, especially when the testing—and the judging and the controlling—are administered by a distant bureaucracy. We should all seek to measure and improve ourselves, but at the same time, we should rightly fear the power of one-size-fits-all “improvers.” When Marcus and I were raising our children, we wanted to know exactly how well they were doing. But we didn't need the federal government to test our children; we would test them ourselves.

Happily, my husband and I were to various degrees able to homeschool our five biological kids—the boys for longer periods of time, and the girls until they were proficient in reading. And then we sent them to Christian schools. Marcus and I believed that if we taught the kids to read, they would be able to succeed in school, and they have. But at the same time, we could see that other parents might not be so fortunate. Indeed, it was both a shame and a waste that while governments at all levels were spending increasing amounts of money on the public schools, the federal government's regulatory burden, piled on top of the schools, increased much faster than federal aid. These “unfunded mandates,” as they are called, proved to be an enormous weight on local schools. We knew plenty of motivated teachers and administrators, and yet the educational bureaucracy was grinding them down into defeatism and fatalism.

During this same time, in the early nineties, a new idea, charter schools, came onto the scene. Charter schools are a sort of public-private educational hybrid in which the charter school—run, perhaps, by a motivated group of experts, activists, and parents—could contract with the government to run a school independently of the traditional public school system. I have always believed that parents should be able to choose the school that their child attends, just as we are empowered to choose most other things in our lives. Charters were therefore a creative and constructive step in the right direction—toward full autonomy for responsible parents and local communities.

One idealistic education activist in Stillwater was a man named Dennis Meyer. A former junior high school teacher, Denny had a vision of improving education by returning to the traditional verities of reading, writing, and 'rithmetic. So in the fall of 1993, Marcus and I joined with Denny and other motivated neighbors to open the New Heights Charter School; immediately, some two hundred students signed up. Denny was the CEO, while I served on the board of directors. Our goal was simple: We wanted to provide the best possible education for children in the area, based on sound and proven principles. We wanted rigor. We wanted our kids to gain knowledge, facts, and information. We also wanted a special emphasis on help for kids with troubled backgrounds—and that was a lot of kids, even out in the leafy suburbs. Most of all, we wanted to impart the classical building blocks of knowledge for each student, not the latest fads and attitudes to emerge from an ivory-tower school of education.

Unfortunately, within months, we were confronting dissidents and protesters who accused us of trying to advance Christian values in the school. Yes, we were Christians, but we never sought to impose Christianity on our students. However, some liberal activists seemed to think that the word “rigorous” was somehow code for “religious.” They even accused us of objecting to showing the movie
Aladdin
, because we allegedly feared the depiction of a magical genie. Well, of course, that was bogus. We weren't afraid of Robin Williams and his character; our objection to showing
Aladdin
was that kids don't need to go to school to see fantasy movies. They can see them at the movie theater or at home. Students should go to school to learn the best that has been thought and said. If you wonder why kids get less than they should in education and why they graduate with minimal skills, it's because too many “experts” think that comedy cartoons are a legitimate part of a curriculum.

The Minnesota charter school law mandated that 51 percent of the school board be composed of licensed Minnesota teachers, so parental input was always going to be outnumbered by the professional staff. Unfortunately, rather quickly it became apparent that the original mission of the school's founders wasn't shared by the board. If the board couldn't agree on the school's direction, how could we go forward? Parents put time and effort into the school because they wanted high-quality academics for their children. When they sensed that the mission of the school had changed, to focus primarily on at-risk kids with lower levels of academic achievement, they took their children and left. Ultimately, Marcus and I saw we wouldn't succeed in restoring the school's original focus, and so I and other board members stepped down. The school survived, and many excellent and dedicated staff remain. The focus was, indeed, on “at risk,” and today, I am proud to say that the school fulfills a positive purpose in reaching out to kids who otherwise could have fallen through the cracks of the system.

The New Heights experience taught me a lot. I learned about school governance, and also about the ins and outs of dealing with state and local authorities. And I certainly learned that the fight for education reform would not be won easily. Yet at the same time I could see hope. I could see, among the majority of folks in Stillwater, and among a majority of Minnesotans, a great hunger for better education. The relentless dumbing down of the schools since the sixties had inspired an unexpected boomerang. By the nineties, parents had wised up; they wanted better schooling for their kids because they wanted them to succeed. And that inspired me.
I might not always succeed,
I told myself,
but I will always keep trying
.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan campaigned for the presidency on a platform that included abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. Only recently created by President Jimmy Carter as a political favor to the teachers' unions, the department had failed to deliver either better test scores or more rigorous curricula dedicated to academic excellence. That sounded like a good idea to me, because I have never believed in federal control of the schools. The vast majority of parents can figure out for themselves how to educate their children and how to provide them with good values. And if some parents can't do so, well, there's most likely someone nearby who can step in. That's what I mean by local control and by the wisdom of letting the fifty states—all those separate laboratories of democracy—chart their own courses on education. The challenge of good schooling, I firmly believe, is best addressed as close to the student as possible.

Yet during the eighties, a new idea took hold: that the federal government should take the lead in education, not just as a matter of national policy, but as a matter of
international
policy. That is, the U.S. government should work with the United Nations to remake American society, as part of global “solidarity.” This story seems astonishing, I know—it astonished me when I first learned about it. But this larger context for education reform is so important that I am providing details and documents in an appendix at the back of the book even as I focus here on the American part of the story.

As a result of new-style educational thinking, Americans were saddled with Goals 2000, enacted by Congress in 1994 and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. That piece of legislation sets forth a lofty set of goals for the nation, starting with the blanket statement “By the year 2000, all children in America will start school ready to learn.” Well, obviously, everyone is in favor of such a goal. But how do we go about accomplishing it? And did anyone honestly think that a federal program would produce that? That seems like a nice notion, but in the real world, such goals can be achieved only in the old-fashioned way—by working for them. Can the federal government do it? Can Uncle Sam, in view of his abysmal track record on social policy, be relied upon? Can we trust Bill Clinton—or any president—with our children?

So as we poke around in Goals 2000's fine print, we see, for example, that an official federal goal is to make sure that “every parent in the United States will be a child's first teacher and devote time each day to helping such parent's preschool child learn.” Okay, that sounds fine, in the aspirational sense, but here comes the kicker: “and parents will have access to the training and support parents need.” And what “training and support” is that? Who will provide it? Well, it means that if a parent can't handle his or her parental duties, a benevolent-seeming bureaucrat will step in to “help.” You know the old line, “We're from the government, and we're here to help you.” Indeed, as Goals 2000 makes plain, if children and parents for any reason don't measure up to federal requirements, there's a “partnership” or “team” of agencies that will happily move in and take charge. Yes, that's our federal government—always efficient, always effective, always at your service!

Here's another goal: “By the year 2000, United States students will be first in the world in mathematics and science achievement.”

Oh my, who can be against that? Who can be against winning the international brain race? But wait, there's a small detail left out: actually doing it. How will this victory happen? And will these same people who brought failure now bring success? I recall my foster daughter, the one whose eleventh-grade math homework consisted of coloring in a poster: Was her colorful homework helping to fulfill Goals 2000? The truth is, the United States hasn't been anywhere close to first place in math for a long, long time. These days, countries such as Finland and South Korea are always at the top; they are the new Iowa, you might say. Typically, the United States ranks down in the teens and twenties in international rankings of math and science; a recent study the World Economic Forum ranked the United States forty-eighth in the quality of math and science instruction.

But wait—there's more! Goals 2000 still had more to offer: Washington now decreed that a greater percentage of students would graduate from high school, that more students would be proficient in foreign languages, that the dire achievement gaps between population groups would disappear, that all students would be knowledgeable about diversity—and, of course, that the lion would lie down with the lamb. I made that last one up, but the fully delusional quality of these goals is captured in goal (7)(A): “Every school in the United States will be free of drugs, violence, and the unauthorized presence of firearms and alcohol and will offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning.”

Needless to say, I am 100 percent in favor of our having safe schools, free of drugs and violence, offering “a disciplined environment.” But it's preposterous to claim that a federal government that can't even be bothered to defend the U.S.-Mexican border against human traffickers and narcoterrorists is qualified to lecture the rest of us on how to keep our schools safe.

Indeed, the Goals 2000 pledges were so ambitious—and so ludicrous in their pseudodetailed optimism—that they are worth recalling in full (they are appended in the back of the book). Yes, they make for turgid reading, full of stilted bureaucratese, but trust me: Every word therein was crafted by “experts,” working their part of a grand central plan in which a new kind of bureaucratic-corporatist ideology—of schools as state-supervised education factories, doling out dumbed-down instruction to meet the plan—replaces our traditional love of children and the child's innate and joyful striving for excellence.

It's worth remembering, again, that these fantasy goals became the law of the land in 1994. And if now, seventeen years later, they read like some cosmic practical joke, well, please be advised that you paid for it—through the nose, with your own hard-earned money. Your tax dollars at work. The federal government has indeed spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to do all these things. Moreover, while the goals statement consists of only about 1,300 words, each item comes with its own wagon train of fine print and regulation. And it's within all that red tape that the bureaucrats find their power—and even more of your money.

So if the gap between the stated goal and the reality is so vast—wider than a mile, to quote the songwriter Johnny Mercer—as to make the whole goals process comical in its costly incompetence, well, now you know why I got so fired up in Stillwater.

Because even as the central bureaucrats in Washington were grinding away, peripheral bureaucrats in each state capital were similarly grinding. In Minnesota, the state department of education bureaucrats in St. Paul were all too eager to join in on the effort, creating their own mini version of Goals 2000. So in 1998 the state launched a new education plan called Profile of Learning, as mentioned in chapter 1. And as always happens when the government unveils a new program, eager spin doctors rushed to herald the “historic breakthrough”—while relying on the silent assumption that nobody would actually read the fine print. Or remember how the previously heralded “historic breakthrough” had worked out.