CQ WEEKLY
March 10, 2012 – 12:43 p.m.
Political Economy: A Lesson in Growth
By John Cranford, CQ Columnist
It doesn’t take more than three minutes of talking with Delaware Gov.
In fact, “reasonable taxes” are No. 2 for Markell, a Democrat with a University of Chicago MBA who is now in his fourth year as chief executive of a state that has a longstanding reputation for being business-friendly.
To Markell, the most important requisite to provide for his constituents — by which he plainly means both voters and company leaders — is quality education. And he’s talking about kindergarten through college. The consequences of not improving the nation’s schools are dire; the potential benefits, he insists, are immense.
“Talent is the No. 1 thing people are interested in,” says Markell, whose bona fides on this score are plentiful.
He has been chairman of the board of a nonprofit organization that operates in 32 states to prevent at-risk students from dropping out. Two years ago, Markell was chairman of the National Governors Association committee on education, early childhood and the workforce. Currently, he is co-chairman of a joint venture between the NGA and the Council of Chief State School Officers to promote common standards for English and mathematics to be used by schools nationwide.
Aside from his background (Markell attended Brown University for his undergraduate work), he has come by this attention to education through experience. He was vice president of corporate development for Nextel, and since becoming governor he has done what all state CEOs do: He talks with companies. He says he meets with leaders of six companies a week to find out what they need — and want — from their state government. Most tell him that schools that can turn out well-prepared workers are their chief concern.
In that regard, Markell has lots of ideas. Two that stand out have a decidedly 21st-century, globalized-economy cast to them. Markell is worried that in spite of the attention to teacher and student assessments in the No Child Left Behind law, standards are too low and aren’t uniform across the nation. And he frets that Americans retain an insularity, epitomized by our lack of fluency in languages other than English, that will penalize us in the long run.
On the latter point, he cites as an example his conversations with Cigna Corp., the insurance company, which operates a 500-employee service center in Delaware for expatriates. Although they serve a multilingual world, the workers in the Delaware office on average are able to speak one language. At a similar Cigna facility in Belgium, the average fluency is three languages.
“If we want more of that kind of business, we’ve got to earn it,” Markell says, which is why he has promoted 20 language-immersion schools across the state. “Americans should be able to speak more than one language,” he says flatly.
As for setting educational goals and assessing progress, don’t get him started. Markell is adamant that companies need workers with a higher caliber of education. That isn’t new, of course. It’s a common refrain from business groups. Just last week, the Technology CEO Council, whose chairman is Dell Inc.’s Michael S. Dell, issued a report that echoed Markell’s main point. The top priority for high-tech companies is a bigger and better talent pool.
Current assessment efforts are the academic equivalent of teaching basketball players to shoot at an 8-foot-high basket, Markell says. When they get out into the real world, where the basket is 10 feet high, they can’t score. If there is a federal role for education, he says, it is that “we should be operating off the same set of facts.”
Solutions Trump Ideology
Markell is a Democrat, and that undoubtedly colors his views somewhat. But he pays attention to the desires of company chieftains — he knows they really are job creators — at the same time that he praises Education Secretary
Political Economy: A Lesson in Growth
Sitting in the shadow of the Capitol dome last week, Markell wasn’t so much dismissive of Congress as he was focused on finding solutions to the sort of problem that he sees both in his small state and nationwide, without relying so heavily on Washington.
It was as if he thought Congress was largely irrelevant to his goals, except perhaps when lawmakers talked about turning off the tap. Markell was not the only governor who was grateful for the extra money for retaining teachers that the Obama administration wrung out of Congress a few years ago.
Like many governors, he talks in terms of government programs that have a chance of working — and ideology doesn’t always come up in the conversation.
Markell’s chief point seems to be that it is all about results. And if anything distinguishes him from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, that might be it. He probably didn’t mean to sound dismissive, but when asked how he and other governors know when they are succeeding, he had a ready answer: “We’re not measured by the quality of our speeches.” Enough said.