The Bite On Teachers

Remember this scene? San Diego, 1996. Bob Dole steps up to the podium for his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention. He looks lean and hungry, the faithful are cheering, so midway through the speech, Dole stares into the cameras and decides to uncork. "To the teachers' unions, I say, when I am President, I will disregard your political power," he bellows. "If education were a war, you would be losing it." Dole says he is not talking "to the teachers, but to the unions," but it doesn't matter. Democrats seize on Dole's screed and cast him as a rabid teacher hater, an enemy of education. The two largest teachers' unions pour more millions into the Democrats' campaign war chest. President Clinton vows that he, at least, will stand by America's teachers. You remember the rest.

So do Republicans. Since the Dole disaster, the mantra around Washington has been simple: Don't mess with the teachers. Last year G.O.P. consultant Frank Luntz declared that Dole's attack was the least popular sentence of the entire 1996 campaign and instructed Republican candidates to "find common ground with public school teachers." As fed up as many Americans are with the sorry state of the country's public schools, they have generally regarded teachers as the good guys: the ones who stay late, who buy textbooks out of their meager salaries. So while Republicans still detest the two formidable teachers' unions--the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers--for their fealty to the Democrats, they know better than to sound anti-teacher. "When it comes right down to it, people like teachers," boasts A.F.T. president Sandra Feldman. "And they think they deserve to have unions."

So with voters rating education as the campaign season's top priority, the Republicans have come up with a more subtle strategy: they're focusing on how to improve teaching without taking on teachers. So far it seems to be working. g.o.p. polls show that Republicans have gained 10 points over the past six months in surveys asking which party is best able to address the education issue. In New Mexico's special house election two weeks ago, Republican Heather Wilson coasted to victory, largely on the strength of a single pro-education TV spot using a teacher to promise that "Heather will fight for higher standards for teachers." In Georgia, gubernatorial front runner Guy Millner has run commercials pledging to beef up teaching standards in the state without putting teachers down. Texas Governor George W. Bush, who is testing the presidential waters, is also going at the issue indirectly by condemning "this business of passing children through our schools who can't read." The subtext: this Governor can insert himself in the classroom but won't push teachers out of the way. New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato is the exception to the rule: while his campaign for re-election this November has embraced traditional Democratic causes as varied as the environment and health-care reform, he's nonetheless stuck to the Dole approach on education. He ripped teachers' unions early this year for "protecting the perks and privileges of their members" and called for replacing tenure with renewable five-year contracts.