Newt Gingrich - Education

Last Updated: Dec 13, 2011

Summary

Congressman Gingrich is a strong supporter of school choice, but also a strong supporter of national education programs. In the 1970's, a newly elected Congressman Gingrich voted in favor of creating the Department of Education.

Congressman Gingrich was not in office during the 2001 vote on No Child Left Behind. In a 2006 interview, Congressman Gingrich stated that the jury was still out on No Child Left Behind. He stated that the educational system was a failure and that new systems should be established instead of trying to alter a flawed system. In 2010, Congressman Gingrich toured the nation with Reverend Al Sharpton and the Secretary of Education in support of President Obama's Race to the Top Program.

In 2006, Congressman Gingrich wrote an article calling for eleven actions to be taken to address a number of problems in the US. Concerning education, Congressman Gingrich stated that federal funds should only go school districts that have implemented a national testing standard for teachers to ensure that teachers were competent in the subjects they are teaching. Congressman Gingrich was criticized by the right for supporting another layer of bureaucracy in the education system, and criticized by the left for blaming teachers.

The friction between Congressman Gingrich and the teacher's unions was not new. In another 2006 interview, Congressman Gingrich stated that unionized education is a form of intellectual child abuse, and that the problem of education should be tackled at that level.

Congressman Gingrich has been a vocal supporter of school choice for a number of years. In 2008, he stated that the merits of home-schooling were obvious and that home schooling exemplified the very things that the public school system was meant to promote, such as academics and civic education. Congressman Gingrich also supports school vouchers and school choice within the public school system. He has stated that every parent should have the right to put their child in the school that they believe will work for their child, and that means an open-ended charter school system where you can create a series of competitive schools, different models, different approaches, different structures, not trapped by the union contract, not trapped by the traditional state curriculum model.

Department of Education

In the 1970s, Congressman Gingrich voted in favor of creating the Department of Education. This move was largely opposed at the time, and many people have since cited that the creation of such a department was one of the items called for in Socialist writings to help create a Socialist takeover of the US.

The American Eleven

In September of 2006, Congressman Gingrich released an article through the Human Events website titled The American Eleven and detailing eleven items that he believed should be pursued. One one of those items was education reform, and one item that he stated should be enacted was national teacher competency standards.

Tie Education Funding to Teacher Accountability. A major result of the No Child Left Behind legislation has been the clear revelation that a number of schools systems are crippling and destroying children. When the Detroit school system only graduates 21% of entering freshman on time, it is clear the children are being cheated. The American people strongly support reforms designed to save the children. The first step would be to insist that federal funds only go to school systems which require teacher competency and accountability. A clear choice between those who want to save the children and those who want to save the bureaucrats would mobilize the country in favor of dramatic education reform.

Real Clear Politics Interview

In September of 2006, Congressman Gingrich was interviewed by Real Clear Politics and asked about No Child Left Behind. He equated large bureaucracies in education to abuse, and noted that the jury was still out on the program.

Back to George W. Bush, has the No Child Left Behind Act furthered the cause of conservative education reform?
The jury's out. Modern, bureaucratic, unionized education is a form of intellectual child abuse. We ought to tackle it at that level. In a lot of directions, the administration's heart is in the right place, but it doesn't think through the implications of its values. They keep trying to find a way to improve the failure as opposed to finding a way to invent the alternative.

Reaction to Home Schooling Ruling

In March of 2008, Congressman Gingrich wrote an article for Human Events noting his opposition to a recent California ruling that home schooling was not a right in the Constitution.

A Big Win for Judicial Supremacy, a Big Loss for Government Language Lawyers and Another Example of Real Change
by Newt Gingrich
03/25/2008
Parents "do not have a constitutional right to homeschool their children."
So wrote a California judge in a case that has ominous potential for the estimated one million-plus American families who have opted out of the public education monopoly and choose to educate their children at home.
Although the ruling is being appealed to the California Supreme Court, as it now stands, the 166,000 California children who are home schooled are truant, and their parents are criminals. Welcome, as the Wall Street Journal editorialized, to a "strange new chapter" in the "annals of judicial imperialism."
No Teaching Credentials? No Home Schooling.
For background, you should know that although California's compulsory education law requires that all children between the ages of six and 18 attend a full-time day school, the state law also contains provisions for parents to legally teach their children at home. Under these provisions, homeschooling by unlicensed moms and dads has flourished in California, as it has across the nation.
But all this began to change when the Los Angeles Department of Children and Family Services recently investigated a claim of abuse by a homeschooled child. Lawyers representing the child invoked the California compulsory education statute to send the child to a public school and a judge eventually agreed, ruling that homeschooling by an unlicensed parent teacher is illegal. Thus, writes the Journal, "a single case of parental abuse is being used to promote the registration of all parents who crack a book for their kids."
The long and short of it: A California court has ruled that if you haven't spent four years attending a teaching college and getting the proper licenses from the state, you can't homeschool your children.
Another Case of a Special Interest Using the Courts to Do What It Can't at the Voting Booth
The merits of homeschooling speak for themselves. Homeschooled children dominate academic competitions and get superior scores on standardized tests. They excel at all the things compulsory education laws are meant to promote, such as school attendance, academics and civic education.
But the California homeschooling decision is important in another respect -- even those of us who don't homeschool our kids should be outraged and concerned.
The decision represents yet another case of a special interest -- in this case, the education unions and bureaucracy -- using the courts to get what they can't get through the popular vote.
This is yet another example of judicial supremacy: Rule by an out-of-control judiciary rather than the will of the people. It joins court rulings such as the removal of "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance on a long list of usurpations of the freedom and self-determination of the American people.

2009 Tour - Meet the Press Appearance

In 2009, Congressman Gingrich toured the nation with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Reverend Al Sharpton to promote the Race to the Top Program and school choice. President Obama had given the Department of Education large discretionary funds and the trio were looking at various successful programs that could be emulated across the nation.

Politico Interview

On May 17, 2010 Congressman Gingrich was interviewed by Mike Allen of Politico and discussed his new book on education reform. He discussed charter schools and numerous other items.

MR. ALLEN: Your new book is called To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular Socialist Machine, and you have a chapter in here, "Solving the Education Crisis."
"Crisis" is a strong word.
MR. GINGRICH: Well, I think when young Americans realize that they're going to be competing their whole life with China and India. You know, it's not about Indiana competing with Illinois. It is about what do you have to learn in order to be able to have—earn a good living, to be a good citizen, to understand the challenges of your lifetime.
And we have got to fundamentally rethink our school systems, in particular for our poorest children who are truly trapped who are in bad bureaucracies doing a bad job, and as a result, the kids are more likely to end up in prison than they are in college, and—and that's a national tragedy.
MR. ALLEN: Now, charter schools have helped, and vouchers have helped a lot of lower-income students. You talk about a "no limits" charter school system. What's that?
MR. GINGRICH: That's actually something I talked with President Obama about, and I spent time going around the country with Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, and with the Reverend Al Sharpton. We made sort of an unusual trio.
But I believe, first of all, that every child and every parent has the right to know how is the school doing—
MR. ALLEN: And you've—you've—-
MR. GINGRICH: —how is it performing.
MR. ALLEN: —praised the President for that.
GINGRICH: Absolutely. This is the one zone where I would say he and I are the closest to being in the same general direction.
The second point I'd make is that every parent should have the right to put their child in the school that they believe will work for their child, and that means an open-ended charter school system at a minimum, which is where the President is, but nonetheless it's a big idea, an open-ended charter school system where you can create a series of competitive schools, different models, different approaches, different structures, not trapped by the union contract, not trapped by the traditional state curriculum model.
I would go a step further. I think we ought to have a Pell Grant for everyone from K through 12. People talk about vouchers and vouchers is a bad word, but liberals love Pell Grants once you get to college, so why wouldn't they love Pell Grants to get you to college. And I think if—you know, both the Netherlands and Israel use a system where parents have—it's public education. It's paid for by the public, but you as a parent have the right to pick the school you want to go to, and if that happens to be, for example, a Catholic school, that's okay. If it happens to be a school that focuses on math and science, that's okay. If it happens to be a school that focuses on ballet, that's okay. But you have certain standards to meet, and then I think you have a very wide range of how you get to those standards.
MR. ALLEN: And how do you police someone who would have either a shoddy school or would be just trying to milk the system for this money?
MR. GINGRICH: I think you have to have some sense of peer review and some sense of outcomes, but frankly, I would have the peer review be much more parents and--and people outside the bureaucracy, because the bureaucracy will always be opposed to anything that--which is innovative.
Let me give you a minor example that--that--I talked to the former head of Intel who has a Ph.D. in physics.
MR. ALLEN: Who is this?
MR. GINGRICH: This is Craig Barrett.
MR. ALLEN: Okay.
MR. GINGRICH: Who pointed out that he could not teach high school physics. So, he couldn't just say, I'm willing to go back and teach high school physics. He'd have to go get certified and then he'd have to join the union.
He also couldn't go to a local school and say, you know, I'll come in one hour a day for free and I'll teach high school physics, but I'm not going to do homeroom, I'm not going to go to the football game. I'm not going to be part of your--you know, I don't want to be a full-time part of the bureaucracy, I just want to teach physics.
MR. ALLEN: Yeah. You've talked about this concept also for accountants, pharmacists--
MR. GINGRICH: Absolutely.
MR. ALLEN: --that they come in as part-time teachers.
GINGRICH: Imagine you're a small town somewhere in America and you have somebody who runs the pharmacy and knows a lot about chemistry, and the current teacher of chemistry doesn't know anything about chemistry--which is true, by the way. The number of science teachers who are not qualified to teach science is very sobering.
Well, one--you know, people keep trying to figure how you're going to improve the quality of the current teaching population. I want to figure out how you can flood the current population with all sorts of experts and experienced people from all--from other ways of life.
I had--when I was in the 7th grade we had a retired Marine, a colonel, who was teaching us. We were in--
MR. ALLEN: As long as it wasn't PE. That's--
MR. GINGRICH: Yeah. We--we--we were in Oregon, France, and he was tough, but it was real--particularly for the young males, it was really good to have a very strong male figure who wouldn't take any bologna.
MR. ALLEN: So, why are school systems resistant to this?
MR. GINGRICH: It violates all of the ethos of the teachers union, and all of the ethos of the schools of education. I mean, first of all, if you actually have substantive knowledge, most of the schools of education would be shocked at the concept.
Second, if you're going to bring in part-time talent, they're not going to pay union dues, they're going to have a whole new set of attitudes. We have dumbed down the process of bureaucracy in a way that's tragic. Teaching is a missionary experience. The greatest of all teachers love knowledge, love learning, and love young people.
MR. ALLEN: Yeah, you talk about enthusiasm.
MR. GINGRICH: Yeah, I think it's very important.
You know, I have such great admiration--I have a sister-in-law who is a third grade teacher. I have another sister who was in charge of home economics in Pennsylvania for years, and we have a deep tradition in our family--I'm a product of public schools. I've taught in a public high school. Both my children went to public school. My wife went to public school. So, we love the concept.
And yet, I look around in places like New York where they had rubber rooms where--you could be under threat of firing for seven years, and it took that long under the union contract. And what was doubly outrageous is not only were you being paid to do nothing, you were actually increasing your pension 2 percent a year while you were waiting to be fired. So, if you held on, you got a 14 percent higher pension for the rest of your life. I mean, that's just crazy, and it's bad for the kids.
CHAPTER ONE CLOSE
CHAPTER TWO OPEN
MR. ALLEN: Now, you've praised President Obama for courage in the transparency. He's also taken some different positions from teachers unions. Do you think he's gone far enough, or how would you grade him in that area?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, look, I would give him probably a B.
MR. ALLEN: That's really good from you, for him.
MR. GINGRICH: Yeah, well, no, it's the one place where I think he came to grips with how really bad it was and where he really--I think even when he was campaigning against Hillary and when the teachers union really mattered, because they're a power in the Democratic Party, he still stuck to the position that we had to improve schools, and that's why I agreed to go with Secretary Duncan, who I think has been pretty sincere in trying to get to a bipartisan bill. And I know that it unnerved some conservatives to have Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich wandering around the country together, but I thought it was really good--
MR. ALLEN: It unnerved some liberals, too.
MR. GINGRICH: --and we go into city schools--well, that's right. Al Sharpton probably had more to answer for than I did.
MR. ALLEN: [Laughing]
MR. GINGRICH: But we would go into some inner city schools where I had no meaning. Nobody there--but they identify with Sharpton.
MR. ALLEN: Mm-hmm.
MR. GINGRICH: And suddenly, they're listening to the Secretary of Education and former Republican Speaker of the House, and an activist civil rights leader, and we got a level of attention to our message that I don't think any one of the previous could have gotten by themselves.
MR. ALLEN: Now, one of the toughest calls this Administration has made in any area is that, in March, when they announced their first Race to the Top grants. They only give them to two states, Delaware and Tennessee. Like, what do you think is going to be the consequences of that and how did you feel about that decision?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, look, I--I hope that Secretary Duncan is backed up by the President all the way.
MR. ALLEN: Well, the President did back him up on this.
MR. GINGRICH: I'm just saying, with--but--give him more pressure, you watch. They'll be various congressmen trying to slip things in. They'll be efforts to rewrite the bill. They'll be appropriations, set asides, and I hope the President will be able to stand up and veto them if necessary.
MR. ALLEN: Now, how do you feel about the Race to the Top Program which offers money to schools that have innovative plans.
MR. GINGRICH: I think it's--it's--it's a serious effort. I will say this about having spent a good amount of time with Arne Duncan: He is a serious innovator trying to break up the old order and trying to find ways to get American schools to work. He's very respectful of the unions. He's more willing to work inside the system than I would be, but his determination to put the kids first is very admirable, and I have certainly found, in my experience in working with Secretary Duncan, that he is somebody that I have respect for, somebody who I believe is honestly trying to find a way to get a bipartisan bill at a time when it's very hard to do, and somebody who had the guts to say no.
I mean, think about the number of schools that--that did not get money because the old time politics wasn't being honored, and I think that's--that speaks well of both he and the President.
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CHAPTER THREE OPEN
MR. ALLEN: Now, in your new book, To Save America--you've always been a man of modest goals--you talk about the revolution in learning, technology, brain science. Can you tell us about that?
MR. GINGRICH: Yeah. What I'm fascinated by--I met with some brain scientists from Berkeley, for example, who have a computerized learning system for reading, and have had--they had a woman in her 20s who was illiterate who learned one year of reading skill of week because they--they have a totally new way of organizing the knowledge.
We just discovered--I'll give you an example--we just discovered with Alzheimer's, which is a project we work on at the Center of Health Transformation, that there are experiments right now where music actually improves Alzheimer's patients because the music interacts with the brain and helps the brain reorganize itself in ways you can't quite imagine.
There are pretty good studies that indicate that children that grow up with classical music actually have more complex brain patterns. And we do a lot of work on brain science at the Center for Health Transformation because of our passion about Alzheimer's, and you can see whole new layers of learning about how do you actually--you know, what is it that happens in your brain when you learn a new language or you learn math or your learn to solve a problem?
So, my point has been--we were out at Apple last year looking at the iPhone and looking at the concept. What if--you know, MIT and Duke now put their courses online at Apple for free. You can take an undergraduate course at MIT and take all the knowledge on your Apple--on your iPod--or rather your iPhone. And so, ma--and Governor McDonnell, for example, has proposed that every child get a Kindle rather than textbooks, and the savings over the course of your educational career would be breathtaking, and you could upgrade science texts in real time. So, you could literally--instead of having a three, or four, or five-year-old science text, you could have immediate text.
The last thing I'd say is, you don't know when you're going to need to learn things, and I think you probably had this experience in your life when all of a sudden you actually need a fourth grade level of introduction to some topic because you've never done it before.
MR. ALLEN: Right.
MR. GINGRICH: And I think we need to find ways to have a pull-forward, 24/7, wireless system of learning that then allows you to connect to mentors but that also has lots of things that help you learn autonomously so you get to learn when you need to learn the things you want to learn.
MR. ALLEN: Speaker Gingrich, are you personally iPad, Kindle, what is your...
GINGRICH: Well, I use a Kindle rather than an iPad; I use a Blackberry instead of an iPhone. My wife is an iPhone fanatic. She has an iPhone, she has a Mac, she's totally--Apple is her future.
But I'm also--I'm very interested in every aspect of how we use social media and how we maximize the ability to learn.
MR. ALLEN: So, you personally use a Kindle.
MR. GINGRICH: I use a Kindle.
MR. ALLEN: And do you read books on it or news or both?
MR. GINGRICH: I read books mostly. I actually get almost all my news through e-mail.
MR. ALLEN: Okay. And--and--
MR. GINGRICH: Including, by the way, your column.
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CHAPTER FOUR OPEN
MR. ALLEN: Now, you've talked about a pilot project to pay kids to learn math and science.
MR. GINGRICH: My--my younger daughter, Jackie Cushman, actually ran a project where we talked about--I described it as earning by learning. It's something I had done when I was a--a congressman. I took my speech money and we went into public housing projects in the summer and we paid kids two dollars a book, and we learned a lot.
MR. ALLEN: Mm-hmm.
MR. GINGRICH: I mean, the first thing we learned was that they didn't trust us, because poor children are used to being ripped off and they assume-- somebody is going to take advantage of them. So, we said, all right, we'll pay every Friday. So, in Douglas County, Douglasville, Georgia, in the public housing project, the first week only a handful of kids showed up. The next week, there were a lot more. The week after that, there were even more.
And what happened was the ice cream truck would pull up--we paid them every Friday, cash--the ice cream truck would pull up and this one kid would have money to buy ice cream, and his friends would say, well, how come you have money, and he said, well, I read, you know.
And so, we were--you know, we were shaping--
MR. ALLEN: And how did you find out if they actually read the books?
MR. GINGRICH: They had to bring the book in to an adult and answer questions--
MR. ALLEN: That's cool.
MR. GINGRICH: --about the book. Now, these are kids books, okay?
MR. ALLEN: Mm-hmm.
MR. GINGRICH: The very first year we did it in Villa Rica, we had this young girl who read 83 books. She earned $166. This was one of--one of the really big breakthroughs in my mind. She earned $166 as a poor child in public housing, read 83 books, went back to school that fall and promptly got in trouble, because she was bored. She was a "ratebreaker." She wanted people to pay attention to her.
MR. ALLEN: Boredom is the biggest problem—there’s no question about that--
MR. GINGRICH: And it hit--it just--it just vividly said to me everything was wrong with the way the system was working out.
MR. ALLEN: That's very true. Now, another area you talked about applying free enterprise to education is promoting competition among schools, teachers, administrators. How would you do that?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, let me start and say that--that--my first step towards competition is simple. I have proposed that every year you graduate ahead of schedule, you get the cost of that year as an automatic scholarship.
MR. ALLEN: So, this would be K to 12?
MR. GINGRICH: K through 12.
MR. ALLEN: Okay.
MR. GINGRICH: So, then--and I go in and I ask college students, and the students who are watching this can apply it to themselves, but I ask college students, how many of you could have gotten out in three years from high school?
MR. ALLEN: Oh, that's a great question.
MR. GINGRICH: Every hand goes up.
MR. ALLEN: Yeah, that's a great question.
MR. GINGRICH: And then I say, how many can get out in two years. About a third of the hands go up. And I say, okay, how many of you can get out in one year. I once had a kid that yelled from the back room and said, how big is this reward, again.
But think about, virtually every child who makes it to--every young adult who makes it to college is saying they could have gotten out in three years. So, we're running an extraordinarily expensive social networking service called high school which is actually diluting the rate of their learning and giving up one or more years of their life that they could be--
MR. ALLEN: How many years do you think should be standard for an American child?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, first of all, I think you ought to--excuse me--you ought to learn at the rate you can learn.
Bob Compton reports that 2mminutes.com he's posted the Indian math system, which is in English, and which is, kids in India take, I think, four years of physics--I mean, four years of calculus before they graduate from high school, and it's an amazingly different program from ours. And he's had 12-year-olds in America doing calculus because they got online, they found the coursework, they liked it, and they grew very rapidly. So, I would start by saying, I don't worry about education in America, I worry about learning in America. I want to accelerate learning for every young American of every background and every neighborhood. And then, I'd want to think about, at what point are you able to go do things.
But I would be inclined to say, if what you want to do is productive, I'd like to encourage you to do it as early in your life as you can, and if that means you start making money, I think that's actually good, not bad, because we're in the opposite. Most of our child labor laws were designed for a world of coal mining and textile mills and steel mills where you literally ran the risk of destroying children by putting them to work early. Now, you've got 12-year-olds who are computer wizards who could be making a tremendous amount of money writing software who are told--
MR. ALLEN: Right. Or doing somebody's web page for them or--
MR. GINGRICH: That's right. Oh, don't do that. You're not old enough, yet.
MR. ALLEN: Right.
MR. GINGRICH: I think that's exactly backwards. We need to engage every young American to pursue happiness at the earliest possible time.
My daughter, Jackie Cushman, I mentioned, runs a program on--on--on--she calls it Learning Makes a Difference, and they pay--they ran an experiment of paying kids to do their homework and had a tremendous--a very positive response. She also co-authored with a book called Five Principles for a Successful Life, and basically they are, dream big, work hard, learn every day, enjoy life, and be true to yourself.
MR. ALLEN: Excuse me, the last one, "be true to yourself"?
MR. GINGRICH: Be true to yourself.
MR. ALLEN: Okay.
MR. GINGRICH: And--and I always--because I always tell young people, if you don't have the courage to dream big when you're young, you probably won't get the courage to do that later on. But if you do dream big, you better plan to work hard. I know of no successful person who doesn't work hard. And it's not--it's not enough just to work hard, you've got to be smart. You've got to learn every day. And I don't know anybody--I mean, I'm 66 years old and I find myself learning every day.
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CHAPTER FIVE OPEN
MR. ALLEN: You've talked about your concern about the socialization of student loans. Can you talk about that?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, you know, my brother used to be head of the student loan recovery program in the State of Pennsylvania.
MR. ALLEN: But first tell people what they--you mean by that.
MR. GINGRICH: Okay. What I mean by that is that the federal government--they put into the health bill a provision which basically took over all of the bank-based student loans and paid them in government program.
MR. ALLEN: And what they would say is that that is cutting out profit from--
MR. GINGRICH: Right, absolutely. And what I would say is, first of all, the idea that the only major lender in America is the federal government is not healthy, and anybody who believes that the federal bureaucracy is going to track down the student loan program very effectively is deluded.
And I'll give you two examples. I started to say my brother was in fact the head of--of student loan recovery, because you have doctors and others who graduate owing hundreds of thousands of dollars and then they decide not to pay. Well, guess what? The banks who charge a higher price actually collect the money. The government charges the taxpayer for its incompetence.
And the place that I'll refer you to is not student loans, although it's going to be true in student loans. The place I'm re--I would refer you to is a book we published at the Center for Health Transformation by Jim Frogue called Stop Paying the Crooks which outlines between $70 and $120 billion a year in money paid by the federal government through Medicare and Medicaid to crooks, because the government is such a bad manager.
So, the idea that the federal government is going to manage this program well requires a level of socialism in your--I mean, you have to really believe genetically in a deluded world view to believe that the federal bureaucracy can run this program.
CHAPTER FIVE CLOSE
CHATER SIX OPEN
MR. ALLEN: When you became Speaker in November 1994, there was a 54-point swing in the House toward Republicans. This year, more of a swing, less of a swing?
MR. GINGRICH: I think this year could be somewhere between 40 and 65 or 70 seats--
MR. ALLEN: So, you're--
MR. GINGRICH: --it depends--
MR. ALLEN: So, you're predicting a Republican pickup no matter what?
MR. GINGRICH: I believe John Boehner will be Speaker in January.
MR. ALLEN: Okay. Any chance in the Senate?
MR. GINGRICH: I think they--if they can beat Barbara Boxer, I think that McConnell is going to be the Senate Majority Leader.
MR. ALLEN: The President's chance of reelection in 2012?
MR. GINGRICH: He has about one chance in five of getting reelected. He is the closest thing to Jimmy Carter I've seen. They completely misunderstand the economy. They completely misunderstand the core nature of the American people.
Arthur Brooks has a new book coming out called The Battle. It will be out in June, and he indicates clearly from Gallup data we are a 70-20 center-right country.
MR. ALLEN: One chance in five, that's the opposite of what almost anyone else would say.
MR. GINGRICH: Well, it could be. I mean, I spent a long time in my life looking at elections.
I mean, you project ahead, you look at the unemployment rate; you look at the risks in Iran; you look at the risk with terrorism; you look at the scale of the deficit. You say to yourself, when young people realize that we're going--we're going to leave them with all of the interest on their parent's debt--the average 20-year-old today will pay twice as much in taxes in their lifetime to pay interest on the debt as they're going to pay for national security.
MR. ALLEN: Just yesterday, there was a poll, NBC/Wall Street Journal that showed that the majority of the people disapproved of the President's policies, but he's still personally--
MR. GINGRICH: Sure, look, look--
MR. ALLEN: --popular. Do you think that's going to erode--
MR. GINGRICH: He's a very--he is a very--
MR. ALLEN: --or do you think that'll last.
MR. GINGRICH: --pleasant person with a very attractive fan--
MR. ALLEN: We tend to vote for people we like.
MR. GINGRICH: No, not if we decide they have failed us.
MR. ALLEN: And how--and what would be the tipping point? How--
MR. GINGRICH: Jimmy Carter didn't collapse until October of 1980.
MR. ALLEN: Okay. All right, in May 2007, before the last presidential election, on Good Morning, America, you told Diane Sawyer there was a great possibility you'd run for President. Would you say now there's more of a possibility then there was then, or less?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, since I didn't run then, there's more of a possibility now.
MR. ALLEN: Okay. And you've been saying February of 2011--
MR. GINGRICH: Yeah, Callista will look probably in February--certainly between February and March, but in that cycle.
MR. ALLEN: And--and what will make you decide?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, I think it would be a couple of things. Is--is the case for basic change clear enough and powerful enough that articulating it and carrying it is a legitimate part of my role as a citizen? Is there a potential to raise the resources to be a serious, major candidate. And I think those will be the two biggest things that we'll look at, and I think--you know, this is a decision that will change all the--the entire rest of our lives, and I think we're taking it with our daughters and our son-in-laws and our grandchildren--we're taking this very methodically and very seriously, and we--we're very--it's very daunting. We're very sobered by--I mean, the whole point of my book is to say, we have to have a decade of really profound, deep, change, and it has to be in the right direction to compete with China and India and to defeat terrorism, and if we don't get those, we are in deep trouble.
Now, to be willing to stand up, okay, and I'm prepared to try to lead the movement that would achieve that--which can't just be the presidency--that's where Obama didn't get it--it can't even just be the Congress. It's got to be school boards, city council, state legislature, county commission, governorships. I mean, you have to have a wave of change in this country for us to be able to compete with China and India.
MR. ALLEN: And you've talked about, you would run if there was a requirement that we as citizens run. What would that requirement be or what would be that time--
MR. GINGRICH: I--well, I think part of it is we have a very, very dear friend in Michigan, Joan Jackson, who has known Callista for over 20 years and been a political activist all her life, now in her late 70s, and we had dinner with her last night. And I turned to Callista late in the evening after we'd gone home and I said, okay, if we decide no, you have to call Joan. I mean, there are thousands of people around the country who walk up and say, we have to have leadership that will get this done, and I think we'd have to decide either that somebody had emerged who could do that or that we were in incapable of building a campaign.
MR. ALLEN: Mr. Speaker, thank you for having us in.
MR. GINGRICH: Thank you.
MR. ALLEN: I appreciate it.
CHAPTER SIX CLOSE

edbreakthrough.org

In December of 2010, Congressman Gingrich released a video in support of edbreakthrough.org. That video is shown below along with the group's summary of itself from their website.

Our Cause
Welcome to the Education Breakthrough Network, and the reality of emerging school choice in America.
Our ever expanding network is a living library of the individuals and organizations who are advancing school choices nationwide. What happens next can mean the most exciting time in the nation's history of education. Because emerging in the shadows of its moribund and desperately underperforming big sister, comes a baby the nation can be proud of.
This is the world of school choice, the nation's private schools, public charter schools, home schools, online schools, and special needs schools ... schools tailored for the students they serve, and paid when a student chooses to attend. This is the fastest growing, most efficient and undeniably the most effective sector of American education.
In this world, teachers are not patronized and treated like fragile automatons. Instead, they are the fiery engines behind entirely new school models. These teacher leaders have fought the system valiantly in order to invent schools where students from formerly uneducated families routinely graduate high school and enroll in college. They've invented hybrid schools where online learning and master teachers combine to create new and previously unimagined learning communities.
This is a group of Americans who believe that striving to be the best truly matters. Because our children only get one shot at an education.
Everything about school choice is right for this moment in history: it is the most efficient use of money, because money follows students directly into schools. It allows inspired and inspirational teachers to bring their talents in to the education marketplace and overcome the failures of the past. And it welcomes innovation in teaching via sophisticated online technologies into both homes and schools.
American education gets better when genuine educators are made free to do the work at hand. Education Breakthrough Network exists to identify and amplify the voice and effects of the school choice sector.
If you are already part of the Network, make sure we are connecting to you. If you are simply a fan, or curious about the best American education has to offer, please visit the Network often as we try to keep up with it!

Reagan Debate

In September of 2011, Congressman Gingrich participated in the Republican Presidential debate at the Reagan library. He talks about his support for charter schools and his plan to have a pell grant for K-12 to allow every student to attend the school of their choice.

Speaker Gingrich, this reminds of "Race to the Top," the Obama administration education program. You supported it, Governor Perry opted out, some people don't like it. What did you like about it?
GINGRICH: I liked very much the fact that it talked about charter schools. It's the one place I found to agree with President Obama. If every parent in America had a choice of the school their child went to, if that school had to report its scores, if there was a real opportunity, you'd have a dramatic improvement.
I visited schools where, three years earlier, there were fights, there were dropouts, there was no hope. They were taken over by a charter school in downtown Philadelphia, and all of a sudden the kids didn't fight anymore, because they were disciplined. They were all asked every day, what college are you going to? Not are you going to go to college, what college are you going. And so I would -- I am very much in favor of school choice.
My personal preference would be to have a Pell Grant for K-12 so that every parent could pick, with their child, any school they wanted to send them to, public or private, and enable them to have the choice.
I don't think you're ever going to reform the current bureaucracies. And the president, I thought, was showing some courage in taking on the teacher's union to some extent and offering charter schools, and I wanted, frankly, to encourage more development towards choice.

Fox News / Google Debate

On September 22, 2011 Congressman Gingrich participated in the Fox News / Google debate. He spoke about his support for voucher type systems and state education programs.

BAIER: Speaker Gingrich?
GINGRICH: I think you need very profound reform of education at the state level. You need to dramatically shrink the federal Department of Education, get rid of virtually all of its regulations.
And the truth is, I believe we'd be far better off if most states adopted a program of the equivalent of Pell Grants for K-through-12, so that parents could choose where their child went to school, whether it was public, or private, or home-schooling, and parents could be involved. Florida has a virtual school program that is worth the entire country studying as an example.

Huckabee Forum

In December of 2011, Congressman Gingrich participated in a forum that was moderated by Mike Huckabee. He states that he supports returning education back to the states and elaborates that he wants to return control to the people, not just the states. He voices support for vouchers and parental choice. He is also asked about Race To The Top and the federal intrusion into the states.

Michigan Economic Debate

In November of 2011, Congressman Gingrich participated in the Michigan economic debate. He discussed his views on the student loan industry.

GINGRICH: You know, this is a good place to talk about the scale of change we're about to live through. We're at the end of the welfare state era of dependency, debt, distortion, and dishonesty.
The student loan program began when Lyndon Johnson announced it, I think, with a $15 million program. It's an absurdity. What does it do? It expands the ability of students to stay in college longer because they don't see the cost. It actually means they take fewer hours per semester on average. It takes longer for them to get through school. It allows them to tolerate tuitions going up absurdly. By 2014, there will be one administrator for every teacher on college campuses in the United States.
Now, let me give you a contrast that's very startling. The College of the Ozarks is a work-study college. You cannot apply to it unless you need student aid, and they have no student aid.
You have to work 20 hours a week during the year to pay tuition and books. You work 40 hours a week during the summer to pay for room and board. Ninety-two percent of the students graduate owing no debt, the eight percent who owe debt owe $5,000 because they bought a car.
Now, that is a model so different, it will be culture shock for the students of America to learn we actually expect them to go to class, study, get out quickly, charge as little as possible, and emerge debt free by doing the right things for four years.

2012 Presidential Campaign Website Statements

PROTECTING LIFE AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY
"There is no liberty without religious liberty” – Newt Gingrich
The revolutionary idea contained in the Declaration of Independence is that certain fundamental human rights, including the right to life, are gifts from God and cannot be given nor taken away by government. Yet, secular radicals are trying to remove “our Creator” – the source of our rights - from public life. Newt has an aggressive strategy to defend life and religious liberty in America.
Principles to protect life and religious liberty

Nominate conservative judges who are committed to upholding Constitutional limited government and understand that the role of the judges is to interpret the law, not legislate from the bench.

Combat judicial activism by utilizing checks on judicial power Constitutionally available to the elected branches of government.

End taxpayer subsidies for abortion by repealing Obamacare, defunding Planned Parenthood, and reinstating the “Mexico City Policy” which banned funding to organizations that promote and/or perform abortions overseas.

Protect religious expression in the public square such as crosses, crèches and menorahs.

Protect healthcare workers right to conscience by making sure they are not forced to participate in or refer procedures such as abortion.

Protect the rights of home-schooled children by ensuring they have the same access to taxpayer funded, extra-curricular educational opportunities as any public school student.

Protect the rights of teachers to use historical examples involving religion in their classroom. Nor should they be discouraged from answering questions about religion or discussing it objectively in the classroom.

Protect the frail, infirm and the elderly from the state’s arbitrary decision to terminate life.

Voting Record

DC Scholarship Program

In 1998, the House voted on an amendment to the yearly appropriations bill to Washington D.C.. The amendment allocated $7 Million dollars to a program for scholarships to low-income children. The amendment was ' agreed to with the support of most Republicans and most Democrats. Newt Gingrich voted in favor of the DC Scholarship Program.

Newt Gingrich voted in favor of the DC Scholarship Program.

Education Savings and School Excellence Act of 1998

This 1998 legislation would have allowed people to take money from their IRAs to pay for qualified elementary and secondary education expenses, including home schooling expenses. It increased the annual contribution limit from $500 to $2,000. It permits corporations to contribute to education IRAs. Although the bill passed both the house and the Senate, it was vetoed by the President. Newt Gingrich voted in favor of the Education Savings and School Excellence Act of 1998.

Newt Gingrich voted in favor of the Education Savings and School Excellence Act of 1998.

References

[1] Website: Politico Article: POLITICO Interview: Newt Gingrich Author: Mike Allen Accessed on: 05/12/2011