The Education Exchange: Lamar Alexander Tells Inside Story Behind Every Student Succeeds Act

PAUL PETERSON, HOST:

This is the Education Exchange. I am Paul Peterson, the director of the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance. Thank you for joining us. For 18 years, between 2003 and 2021, Lamar Alexander served as one of the representatives from Tennessee in the United States Senate. For that entire period, he served as a member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, sometimes called HELP. And for the last six of those years, he chaired the HELP Committee. And that was a time when a new federal law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA, was enacted. Senator Alexander’s memoirs have now been released on Post Hill Press under the title, The Education of a Senator. Well, I’m very honored to have Senator Alexander with me on the Education Exchange today. Thank you, Senator, for joining our listeners on the Education Exchange.

SENATOR LAMAR ALEXANDER: Thank you, Paul. And I’m delighted to be with you. I’ve followed your career for a long time and admired it.

PETERSON: Well, the title of your book, Senator, recalls a title that was used by Henry Adams. He called a book about himself, The Education of Henry Adams. And it was a very reflective, very influential commentary on his life and times. Now, your book reminds me of that in some ways, because you are telling us a lot about your life and times. Did you even choose that title with Adams in mind?

ALEXANDER: I would like to say that I did, but I did not. You know, I studied The Education of Henry Adams when I was at Vanderbilt, but I didn’t think of that. Actually, the other title that I thought about, Jon Meacham, the historian, wrote my forward. So, I kidded with him and said, well, we ought to title the book Forward by John Meacham. And that would sell a lot of copies. But I chose the title simply because it’s a book of lessons about what I learned working, you know, over nearly 60 years in public life, in and out of public life, with 10 presidents.

PETERSON: Well, yes, that’s exactly where I was going. You’ve had an incredibly long career, both as a governor for the state of Tennessee and as a senator from that state. And you’ve done many other things. You were in the Nixon administration. We could discuss so many things, and I would love to have the time to do that, but our listeners expect us to talk about education. So, I’m going to focus the conversation in that direction, if you will let me. How important was education as a policy question in your public life? Why did you seem to have chosen to focus on that to some extent?

ALEXANDER: Well, part of it was because I value education. My parents were teachers. My dad was a principal. Mother was a preschool teacher in our county in East Tennessee before there was any public kindergarten. But it was more of a tactical thing with me. When I became governor of Tennessee, our state was the third lowest in family incomes. And I started out by recruiting jobs, Nissan, auto jobs, other jobs. And then I realized we can’t ever recruit enough jobs to raise family incomes. We’ll have to grow them. And growing them meant better skills. And better skills meant better schools and better colleges and universities. So really…I was led to education as governor as a tactic to try to improve the quality of schools and increase student achievement so that we’d be able to grow our own jobs in the kind of world we live in today.

PETERSON: Well, you know, you were a leader in this regard. You were focusing in on this in the 1980’s, maybe even before that. But, you know, that’s only at the very beginning when the South sort of came alive. I think it was after the Voting Rights Act and governors had to appeal to black voters and white voters. And the one thing they… both sides of the racial aisle really cared about was education. And so you get this, you know, not only in Tennessee, but throughout the South, you know, the Bushes were all committed to education and the Bill Clinton was committed to education. It was a bipartisan movement. Now, do you feel like you were an instigator of that movement that has had a huge impact on the South in the subsequent decades that you have served in public life?

ALEXANDER: It’d be more accurate to say I was a part of it. Bill Clinton in Arkansas, Dick Riley in South Carolina, Bob Graham in Florida, and I all were elected the same day. William Winter was already governor of Mississippi. We all really faced the same challenges, so we worked together. We were different political parties, but we worked together. We tried to improve schools. So, an example of that is both Florida and Tennessee…we’re focused on trying to find a way to pay teachers more for teaching well. The idea of merit pay just never had made it into the profession of teaching in K–12. And Tennessee got there first. But Bob Graham, the governor of Florida, a Democrat, actually flew to Nashville and helped me talk a Democratic committee chairman into supporting Tennessee’s master teacher career ladder program, which, rewarded outstanding teaching with higher salaries. So, we actually work together toward the same goals.

PETERSON: Well, you know, one of the things that a researcher remembers Lamar Alexander for, and I teach this actually every year in my class to students at both the graduate and the undergraduate level, is the STAR experiment in Tennessee. I say this is the only example of a randomized trial to find out whether some kind of an educational innovation works. And it was done in Tennessee. And nobody’s ever done anything quite like that since then. Now, do you remember that? You were involved in that experiment, but I’m not sure whether this is such a minor thing in your career that you no longer remember it.

ALEXANDER: Well, I think that that was part of our master-teacher program. And I was arguing that we needed…our master-teacher program created 10- and 11-month contracts for teachers who wanted it. It was all voluntary and paid them up to $7,000 more a year if they moved up the career ladder, which in today’s dollars would be more like $20,000 a year, a lot of money. And added to that was, I believe the STAR initiative was about trying to see whether smaller class sizes had an effect on student achievement. I believe that’s what it was about.

PETERSON: Exactly. Yeah, that’s what it was. It was to find out if you had smaller classes. And what they found, I think, after many years of thinking about it, is that the impact was the greatest on the very youngest children; the children in kindergarten and first grade. And it doesn’t have such a big impact on the older children.

ALEXANDER: Well, that was the conclusion I came to as well, because if you’re a governor and you have a…even though I raised taxes to pay this merit pay program, I had to make a decision, well, do we want to spend the money on reducing class size in all the grades, which the teachers union wanted to do, or did we want to reward outstanding teaching, which I wanted to do. I thought it was more important to reward outstanding teaching because my goal was to try to keep those teachers in the classroom and keep them from moving to the principal’s office…to make more money or to go to work for IBM or some other place outside the classroom.

PETERSON: Well, you know, you are so interesting, so interesting to hear that from you right at this moment on this particular day, because this interview is occurring on the very day that the voters in the District of Columbia are choosing a new mayor. And one of the candidates is questioning the great teacher merit pay program that was put into place back in 2009, I think it was, that has proven to have a huge impact on the quality of education in the District of Columbia. But it may be abandoned if the leading candidate is, in fact, I think that person calls themselves a socialist, if that person wins the election.

ALEXANDER: Well, that would be a shame. That happened in Tennessee as well. We were very successful,10,000 teachers voluntarily went up our career ladder, and every five years they had to renew their contract. They were happy with that. But when I left office, the National Education Association didn’t like the idea at all, and they watered it down. So, it’s not as strong as it used to be. But I’ve reflected on it. I mean, if you get down to it, there are many different ways to make a school better. But basically, it boils down to parents, teachers, and the community and what they want to do. And I don’t know any way to pass a better parent’s law. And a better teacher’s law seemed to me to make the most sense. So, I put money and effort into rewarding outstanding teaching. And I’m pretty sure that that pays off.

PETERSON: Well, you know, I couldn’t agree with you more. I think the parent is the most important person in a child’s education next to the child, herself or himself. You know, if you want to learn, you’re going to learn. If you don’t want to learn, it’s going to be difficult. But then the parents are really critical. But after that, it’s the teacher that really is critical. So, for you to focus in on the teacher, I wish more of the education reformers that talk about education would do what you had in mind.

ALEXANDER: We also focused on the principal. We included the principals in the career ladders because…you’ve looked at schools for a long time. Usually when you find a school where students are learning, you find a very good principal. And so we had a career ladder program for principals as well to try to keep them in the profession rather than moving to some other non-education profession.

PETERSON: Well, you know, in 2015, you become the chair of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, HELP committee. And you work with President Obama to pass a piece of legislation that’s still on the books today. The Every Student Succeeds Act, which replaced the old No Child Left Behind Act. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about the political situation that made it possible to do something in that year, which couldn’t be done before that?

ALEXANDER: Well, there’d been an accumulation of grievances. And what had happened, Governor Bush, when he became president, Really, I thought he was a terrific education governor in Texas, but I thought no child left behind had too much federal control. And then the next two presidents, Clinton, Obama, increased that. So by the time we got to 2015, the federal government was basically not requiring, but almost requiring, a certain curriculum, Common Core curriculum in schools. It was deciding how to reward teaching, what is a good teacher, what is not a good teacher. It was saying what to do about a non-performing school. All these decisions were being made for 100,000 schools in a small department in Washington, D.C. I thought we had a sort of national-school board. And by that time, the teachers unions were upset with it. The governors were upset with it. And Newsweek said No Child Left Behind is a law that everybody wants fixed. So, of course, fixing an education law is like going to a football game and asking everybody in the stands to call a play. I mean, everybody’s got a different idea. They’ve had some education, they know what to do, and the odds of our succeeding weren’t very good. But we ended up with a bill that a committee that ranged from Rand Paul on the right to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on the left. We unanimously reported it out. It passed thanks to the work of Patty Murray, the senator from Washington, who was my Democratic cohort. President Obama signed it, and he called it a Christmas miracle in December of that year when he signed it. And the reason is, Paul, the reason it’s still on the books as you say, is because it was bipartisan. I mean, that’s the advantage of the filibuster. That’s the advantage of requiring the Senate to have 60 votes before we can move ahead. Because Patty Murray insisted that we write the bill together. I didn’t think that was necessary. I was the chairman. I was going to write the bill and let the Democrats amend it. But I did it her way. And because I did it her way, we worked together. The president signed the bill, and 11 years later, it hasn’t been amended, so people around the country can rely on it for federal education policy.

PETERSON: Well, one of the things that you agreed to do, according to your book; you say this in your memoirs, was to keep what you call the 17 tests that you thought the federal government was over-testing. But you gave in to that partly because the Obama administration wanted it and because the senator from Washington wanted it. So why did you agree to keep those 17 tests?

ALEXANDER: Well, my first instinct, as you indicated, was not to. My goal was to send all the decisions back to local school districts and states. But President Bush argued pretty persuasively that that was the one provision of No Child Left Behind we ought to keep. Because, number one, it’s not a federal test. It’s just a federal requirement for state tests. And as long as states develop the 17 tests and administer them, that was less bothersome to me. So, I kept it for that reason. One of the things you learn when you get in public life is that it may be inconvenient, but other people get elected too, and sometimes they have a different point of view. And you have to adjust your position to accommodate it if you want a result. So that’s what I did. In order to get a result, I agreed to keep the federal requirement for state tests.

PETERSON: Well, looking back on it now, many years later, and you can see what’s happened since, what do you think? Was it the right thing to do to keep those tests, or would you be better off without them?

ALEXANDER: I think it was the right thing to do to keep it. First, we wouldn’t have got the law, so the law… The Wall Street Journal said it was the biggest devolution of federal authority to the states in 25 years. So, we wouldn’t have got the law without it. That’s number one. And number two, what the tests really do is make it possible to tell whether children are learning. It keeps the schools accountable. And as long as they’re state tests and state administered, I think it’s okay. The more we looked into it, too, you mentioned over-testing. There was a lot of over-testing. In Florida, for example, we found in one school 80-something tests, not 17. But the federally required tests were 17. All the rest of those tests were required by the state board of education. So, once I discovered that a lot of the over-testing had nothing to do with the federally required tests, that made a difference to me as well.

PETERSON: Interesting. So, there was another concession you made, and that was to allow a preschool program. And I must say, preschool programs, they’re a hot topic today. I think almost in every election, somebody’s promising to expand the preschool programs. Did you do the right thing on that one? And why did you do it? And what’s your reflection on that?

ALEXANDER: Well, the answer is yes. And the reason I did it was to pass the bill. Patty Murray, the senior Democrat, was a former kindergarten teacher. In fact, she ran for the Senate when her opponent in Washington State described her as nothing more than a mother in tennis shoes. So, she ran against him and beat him and got elected to the Senate. So, she insisted on that. And what I did was ask her and Senator Isaacson of Georgia, who had a good relationship and an interest in preschool education, to see if they could come up with a compromise, and they did. The compromise didn’t do that much. It really just gave some federal funding to state programs. My view was that preschool education is the responsibility of states and communities, and that the federal government already was spending a lot of money through Head Start and a variety of other programs, child care, on education for children younger than six. So, you know, Senator Dirksen used to be criticized for being unprincipled when he came to a result. And he would tell his critics, one of my principles is flexibility. George Will wrote a column about my book. in which I said I detested being called a moderate. And he corrected me. And he said, conservatism properly understood includes patience and flexibility, which means you have to adjust your position to get a result if you’re an elected official.

PETERSON: Well, you know, there’s a famous study of the preschool program in Tennessee, called the Vanderbilt Study. It was done at Peabody, which I’m sure you’re familiar with. And they have looked at the consequences of the preschool program in Tennessee and found that it really had very few benefits. And by 6th grade, it looked like it might even be harmful. Maybe the children would have been better off home with their mothers than with bureaucrats in the schoolhouse. So, do you have any concerns about that?

ALEXANDER: Well, some. I think that probably was a study of Head Start, wasn’t it?

PETERSON: Well, the Head Start study showed the same thing. There was another study of Head Start, which wasn’t quite as high quality as the one in Tennessee. Tennessee knows how to do studies, I have to say. But yes, they both found sort of the same pattern.

ALEXANDER: Well, I have a background. My mother had a preschool education program in a converted garage in our backyard in Tennessee for 31 years, taught about 1,100 kids, nursery school and kindergarten. But she always said, I’m not a babysitting service, I have a program for the children. You know, I have objectives. I have learning objectives for them. So, she would have them for a couple of hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the afternoon for the older kids and try to do some of the things that parents might do as well. I think Professor Coleman once said that schools are for the purpose of doing things that parents don’t do as well. And I think it’s very possible that a good preschool program that is oriented toward learning and achievement and not just a babysitting service is a real advantage for children. I know that she had nowhere else to put me. So, for five years, I was in Mrs. Alexander’s nursery school in kindergarten. So, I got a sort of a head start of my own.

PETERSON: Well, you know…the research is very supportive of what you just said there, because they find that small-scale preschool programs work. very well if they’re designed correctly. And they’ve looked at a couple of these that have been just remarkable successes. The difficulty is going to scale. How do you get this high-quality experience nationwide through Head Start or statewide through a program in Tennessee? How can you get all these preschool programs to the high quality that you need to be better than the mother?

ALEXANDER: Wonderful question, because I’ve always been skeptical about taking K–12 education ideas to scale. You know, I think you, I’m sure, but I know that I’ve seen dozens of really terrific ideas, hundreds of really terrific schools. But just because one school is very good at improving student achievement doesn’t necessarily mean the school across the street is. Or just because Mississippi is doing a good job with a program to teach kids reading, which they are doing today, that doesn’t mean that Arkansas could do it as well. So, I don’t think K–12 education and preschool education scale very easily. I think they depend so much upon the parent, the classroom teacher, the principal, and the community support. And once you get much beyond that, you can’t order student achievement to happen.

PETERSON: Well, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you your opinion on the current movement to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. The employees who have been removed from office…and a lot of the funding is continuing but is being reallocated to other parts of the government. So, you have any observations on what’s happening at the federal level today?

ALEXANDER: Well, one, I’ve never supported, I’ve never seen the need for a U.S. Department of Education, number one. Two, if it’s dismantled, it has to be done by Congress. The president can’t do it by executive order. Three, the better arrangement, I think, there are only two things, maybe three, but two things the department mainly does. The federal grants and loans for college and the Treasury Department could do that. That’s just distribution of a voucher that students can spend at any… accredited college of their choice. The K–12 money, which is about 10 percent of all the K–12 money in the country, I thought should be given to states and allow them to distribute that state by following lower income children to public schools. I thought that would funnel a lot of money into the schools that are in low-income districts without a lot of bureaucracy. So, if it did those two things, you don’t need a department to do that. You could have an office. You need federal advocacy for excellence in education. You might have some federally supported research in education, but the federal government; you don’t need a department to give out federal grants and loans for colleges or to let the money, the K–12 money, follow students to the public school of their choice.

PETERSON: Well, you know, the activity that is the most intrusive today is really the interpretation of the equal opportunity clauses in the Constitution and how they apply to education and the legislation that’s been passed with the same purpose. And the…you know, the Biden administration had one interpretation, the Trump administration a completely different one. Do you think this attempt to impose a federal view of what is the right way to bring people of different kinds of backgrounds together is an intrusion on the educational system?

ALEXANDER: It is an intrusion. And I tried very hard to resist, you know, all across the board, Washington telling schools what to do. For example, one of my colleagues in the Senate thought students ought to wear school uniforms. And I said, there are 100,000 schools, so that might be a good idea in Dubuque, Iowa. It might not be such a good idea in Alaska or rural Tennessee. Why do we get wiser flying to Washington, D.C. about what to do, about what children wear to schools? And the same with the with many of the interpretations of the civil rights law in the Department of Education. Under the Biden administration, they were actually creating law, I thought. And then you’re right, once Trump comes in, why, they do the reverse. And that means that at the local school or in the local college, you hire more administrators to try to keep up with what the federal government is telling you to do. I think we’d be better off if we just let the Department of Justice decide how to enforce the federal civil rights laws and leave most of the rest of it to the local schools.

PETERSON: Well, you mentioned all the administrators that are being hired. And one of the things that’s happened in the 20th century or 21st century, pardon me, is that they hire more administrators than ever before; more non-teachers are being hired than ever before. In fact, we haven’t hired…the number of students hasn’t grown that much, and the number of teachers hasn’t grown that much across the country. But the number of administrators and the number of non-teachers in the school system has gone up by 50 percent. Can you account for why this is happening?

ALEXANDER: Well, part of it is schools are taking on go back to Professor Coleman’s idea of schools over the purpose of doing things that parents don’t do as well. A lot of families aren’t doing a lot of things well today, and schools are ending up with nutrition responsibilities, health responsibilities, a lot of things that don’t have that much to do directly with student achievement. Then there’s the need for more security at schools. So, there’s all of that. But there would be a lot fewer administrators, if in the K–12 area, the federal government just gave the K–12 money to states and the states then turned around and let it follow the probably the lower half of families with income to the public school of their choice. That would eliminate most of the need for bureaucracy.

PETERSON: Well, Senator, what will you say is the peak of your career? I was thinking, stepping away from education a bit, can you just share with our listeners, what was the moment in your career where you thought, you know, this has all been worth it? It’s such a struggle to do the things that you have been doing in public life. What do you, looking back on it, what do you gain the greatest satisfaction from?

ALEXANDER: Well, probably the greatest challenge is leaving public life with your reputation and your family intact. That’s probably the greatest satisfaction. But I had a little different experience than most people might expect. I mean, I got up every day as governor or senator thinking I might do something good to help my state or country. And I went to bed most nights thinking that I had. And of course, there are a lot of indignities that come with it. People say things; they criticize things, it’s an inconvenience on the family. But what I found is if you want to fix the schools, if you want to move medical miracles through the FDA, if you want to recruit the auto industry—There are a great many things that you have to be in public life to do. And so, the book I wrote is to inspire and encourage people to do that. I cite the example of Bill Frisk from Tennessee who gave up being a heart-lung transplant surgeon to run for the Senate because instead of saving one life at a time, he thought he could save a million lives at a time. And once he got there, he worked with George W. Bush to create PEPFAR and save 23 million people with HIV AIDS. So, I loved what I did, and I found it very satisfying. And I think if you have a sense of purpose and a sense of humor, you can ignore a lot of the unpleasant things that come along with it and do a lot of good to help the most people, and keep our republic from falling apart.

PETERSON: Well, I think you’ve answered this question, but I was going to say, how do you get the thick skin that it takes to put up with all of the nonsense that gets said about you in print and on television and everywhere else? How do you thicken the skin?

ALEXANDER: Well, two things. One is don’t read social media. I’ll let my staff read that. If there was something I had to respond to or deal with, they could recommend it to me. The second is, as long as I had a strong sense of purpose, you know, if I’m trying to pay teachers more for teaching well and want my state to be the first to do that, and I can see the difference that will make in the classrooms, the satisfaction of getting that done kind of makes all the other stuff unimportant. So, if you have a strong sense of purpose and a good sense of humor, you can wade through most of the indignities that come with public life.

PETERSON: And so you served with many presidents over the years. And which one do you think you enjoyed working with the most?

ALEXANDER: Well, I enjoyed a lot of, I mean, almost all of them. You know, H.W. Bush, I was in his cabinet, terrific, nice person. His son, George W., maybe the most normal of the 10 presidents I worked with. The one I thought fit the job the best was Reagan. I thought his demeanor, his communication skills, his executive background, temperament, character, and especially his willingness to draw to him, as Lincoln did, his rivals as his advisors. You know, H.W. Bush, who ran against him, was his vice president. Jim Baker, Bush’s campaign manager, was Reagan’s chief of staff. Then when Reagan got in trouble over a Irangate, he brought in Howard Baker, who had also run against him and who even brought down, helped bring down Richard Nixon, a Republican president. So, Reagan was able to accept, to recruit, accept advice from broad-gaged individuals and so he fit the job the best, the way I think the presidency should be. And among other things, he was the kind of person that I’d be happy to introduce my grandchildren to and hope that they would emulate him when they grew up.

PETERSON: Well, you know, President Reagan was a remarkable figure, and I did have a couple of chances to see him at a distance, nothing as close as you did, of course. But I do remember him, and I do remember Howard Baker becoming the chief of staff just for the last couple of years of the Reagan administration, when a lot of people said that the president was losing a little bit of his capacities which we know were declining after he left office. And I once wrote a piece about Howard Baker saying that he was actually acting as president of the United States for a period of time. And I’m wondering if I was accurate.

ALEXANDER: I don’t know about that. I didn’t hear…I knew them both pretty well. I know that when Baker, When Reagan called Howard to ask him to be his chief of staff, he got Mrs. Baker on the phone. They were in Miami with the grandchildren. And Reagan said, where’s Howard, and Mrs. Baker said, he’s at the zoo with the children, the grandchildren. And Reagan says, wait till he hears the zoo I have for him. And when Baker came in, Reagan’s new council. He said, we’re here to save the president if he deserves to be saved. So, Baker and Reagan met together every morning to begin the day. They told little stories to each other. I saw Reagan a fair amount during those years. That was 1987, 88. I saw him some. I didn’t hear Senator Baker say that he was declining in his ability to govern in those years. But as I look back on it, I was not governor after 86. So, in 87 and 88, I was out of office, not around him as much as I had been before. I couldn’t contradict what you said, but my sense was he was still pretty much in charge.

PETERSON: Well, you know, you said, in your book, that Howard Baker was one of the people you admired the most in public life, and he had a great influence on you. So, what was so wonderful about Howard Baker?

ALEXANDER: Well, he was very persuasive, very intelligent, and he understood the Senate, where he worked. He said, remember that the other fellow might be right. He taught me to be an eloquent listener. By that, he meant that what the other person, what you may be hearing the other person say may not be what he is really trying to tell you. He was very good at accommodating other points of view and working out as a result. When he was, when the Republicans won control of the Senate, he went to Senator Byrd’s office, who was shocked by the change of party and ask him if he would be willing to keep his office. Well, Byrd had this huge office, and of course he wanted to keep it and never expected Howard Baker would let him keep it. And then he said to Byrd, I make a deal with you. If you won’t surprise me, I won’t surprise you. Byrd said, let me think about it. But the next day they agreed, and for four years they ran the Senate with a great deal of accommodation. Everybody got their amendments. They passed a lot of bills. And so I learned with him that if you’re a principled conservative, if you want a result, you have to adjust your position to get it. And you best do that if you have good relationships with the people with whom you work and you listen carefully to them. Not brain surgery. Same thing you need to do in a family or a faculty or any other walk of life.

PETERSON: Well, that was then. And those were the days when people worked across the aisle. But the polarization that’s occurred in the subsequent decades is just very difficult to get your arms around. And I’m wondering, can we ever return to that day? Or are we irrevocably doomed to this bitter fighting between the two political parties.

ALEXANDER: Well, I’m hopeful. I’d like to say optimistic. I wrote my book, hopefully, to inspire people to try to do that. I don’t, you know, I haven’t been gone from the Senate that long, five years. During the 18 years I was there, I invited, my wife and I invited, 60 Senate couples to spend the week with us in our Smoky Mountain home. We didn’t talk politics. We talked about grandchildren and bears and rattlesnakes and told stories. And we didn’t invite just the Republicans, the McConnells and the Kyles. We invited the Schumers and Patty Murray and her husband. And I’m convinced that having that kind of relationship made it easier for me to work with people with whom I disagreed and to look for areas of agreement, which is what you have to do to get a result. So clearly, the next generation of leaders is going to have to tame the algorithm, to tame the digital democracy iPhone culture that we have that just sends us information that we already agree with so much that we don’t talk to people who we don’t agree with. But we’re going to have to do that because the country was built by builders who came to agreements about everything from, you know, Medicare to the National Institutes of Health, how to create a military body, how to create universities, all these things required compromises and agreements. And we’re going to have to elect people who know how to govern rather than just shout, scream, use coarse language and try to win primaries by out shouting the others.

PETERSON: Well, thank you, Senator, for your reflective comments, your wise words. And thank you for joining our listeners on the Education Exchange.

ALEXANDER: Well, thank you. And thank you for your [time].

PETERSON: I’ve been speaking with the former senator from Tennessee, Lamar Alexander. Senator Alexander’s memoirs have just been released by Post Hill Press under the title The Education of a Senator. This is the Education Exchange. I am Paul Peterson. Please join me every Monday when another Education Exchange podcast is released on the Education Next website at noon Eastern time.