Bob Wise: "I definitely have some unfinished business"

Bob Wise is proud of his time in the West Virginia Governor’s Office. As chief executive of the Mountain State from 2001 to 2005, a time of intractable economic strife, the career politician nonetheless found a way to preside over significant education reforms, including the creation of the PROMISE scholarship program. In a state where nearly one in five people live below the poverty level, the program allows many students to attend any state university free of charge.

Wise also pushed for early childhood education initiatives to increase the number of children who were competing on grade level through elementary school.

But Wise believes he failed in one key way.

“We focused quite rightly on early childhood and we focused on college access. But you know something? We missed the middle,” Wise told NoDropouts.org. “What we did was we loved our kids up until about the sixth grade. Then we said to them, ‘now you’re in middle school and you can take it from here.’”

That could be part of the reason why one in four West Virginia students fails to graduate on time. And it could help explain Wise’s post-political career choice — as president of the Alliance for Excellent Education.

“I definitely have some unfinished business,” he said.

Through his work with the Alliance, Wise said, he’s learned that education reform cannot be addressed as a “segmented process.”

“It is a continuum,” he said.

That might be why Wise — who has teamed up with fellow former governor Jeb Bush to launch the Digital Learning Council — has trouble picking a “favorite reform” out of a list of 10 policy recommendations the council released a few months back.

“This is like a symphony,” said Wise of the list of suggested reforms, from advancing students only upon demonstration of proficiency to giving students multiple pathways to access a publicly funded education. “A trombone by itself might sound OK, but what you really want it to have it playing with all the other instruments.”

Wise said the Council’s recommendations have been warmly received, noting that communities across the nation have recently sworn in hundreds of federal, state and local legislators, many of whom seem to understand quite well the educational mess their nation is in.

“I call this our General Motors moment,” Wise said. “One day GM woke up and said, ‘Whoops! Our product hasn’t been that good and now we have to greatly improve that product but we have far less money to do it.’”

The bottom line, Wise said, is that things have got to change.

For instance: “Seat time” policies that require a student to spend a specific amount of time in a classroom with a teacher rather than taking advantage of online lessons and other programs.

In the modern educational paradigm, Wise said, such rules are beneficial only “if you sell chairs.”

Do you have questions for Bob Wise? Do you know someone who is a thought leader or foot soldier in the fight against the nation's dropout epidemic? Leave a comment here or contact us at NoDropouts.org.