Do Bad Grades Mean The Governor Is Dumb? Or; Why Am I Defending Rick Perry?

August 8, 2011, 11:38 am

Haskell County, Texas, pop.3,332, home of Governor Rick Perry

When we are arguing education policy, do the Governor’s college grades really matter?

On Friday, Jason Cherkis at the Huffington Post leaked Governor Rick Perry’s undergraduate transcript from Texas A & M. Highlighting the C’s, D’s and F’s, Cherkis speculates that Perry’s desire to run higher education on a business model is a revenge narrative that Perry is playing out because of his own failure to thrive in the system. As Cherkis explains:

A source in Texas passed The Huffington Post Perry’s transcripts from his years at Texas A&M University. The future politician did not distinguish himself much in the classroom. While he later became a student leader, he had to get out of academic probation to do so. He rarely earned anything above a C in his courses — earning a C in U.S. History, a D in Shakespeare, and a D in the principles of economics. Perry got a C in gym.

Go here to view the transcript yourself: actually, the guy got a bunch of B’s too, although he seems to share the Tea Party academic weakness in U.S. History.

Much as I detest Rick Perry and his policies, a barrel full of bad grades doesn’t necessarily mean a person is stupid. The C in gym, for example suggests that he simply didn’t go to class much, maybe because he was desperately trying to catch up in organic chemistry.

Bad grades also don’t mean a person is lazy or has character flaws. Does Perry have a learning disability? My own governor, Daniel Malloy, is severely dyslexic and without tremendous support throughout his schooling and career would not have had the opportunity to make the most of his intelligence.

Perry may have been ill prepared for college work, having attended a small, rural high school that probably did not offer the advanced courses that would have given him a good grounding in any subject, much less the science courses that were required for his major. According to the transcript, Perry attended Paint Creek Rural High School in Haskell, Texas (pop. 3,332) and matriculated at A & M in the fall of 1968. The Paint Creek ISD is still so small that they play 6-man football. If Perry struggled in school, he wasn’t alone: only 40% of Haskell County residents have a high school diploma, and fewer than 18% have attended college. Currently 0.0% of Haskell County residents are enrolled in graduate or professional school, and 39% of Haskell households have an annual income of less than 25K. Employment seems to be split between agriculture and energy extraction.

Why am I making excuses for Rick Perry who, I am dismayed to say, wants to do to the entire country what he has done to Texas? (After the last round of cuts to education, several school districts, in addition to laying off teachers and raising class sizes, are now charging students to ride the school bus.) Because somehow I think our national press has lost its grip. The popular liberal press has adopted the tactics of mockery that Lee Atwater brought to politics back in the 1980s, and by doing so helps distract us from anything that resembles substantive debate. Exposing people’s errors and flaws is not, in itself, critique. Furthermore, if a reporter wanted Rick Perry’s transcript, he should have obtained it through an FOIA request. Being passed such a document, one that contains no evidence of criminal or other wrongdoing, that would otherwise be considered private, does not compel a reporter to publish it — particularly if, by doing so, the point is made that grades matter more than anything else a person might accomplish in his or her lifetime.

Rick Perry ‘s education policy is not some weird revenge, or the irrational response of a stupid and lazy man. It is part of a conservative effort to gut the public sector that he thinks will take him to the White House. We don’t need a psychodrama, or a stolen college transcript, to tell us that, and it detracts from the real point: we need to stand up for public education, we need to do it now, and — since we are years beyond the time when Abraham Lincoln scratched out his school exercises on the hearthstone with a piece of charcoal — we need to affirm the fact that more money does buy a better educated population, not that you are qualified to make education policy (or not) depending on how well you did in college forty years ago.

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http://twitter.com/rhandofnixon Jeff Binder

I think that you are misinterpreting that chart. Since the numbers above the red bars add up to 100% and are not strictly decreasing, they would appear to be based on the highest level of education attained. What the chart says, then, is that 40% of the male residents in the county _stopped_ at a high school diploma. If we add in the figures for higher levels of education, we get a much less shocking (if not particularly comfortable) figure: 89% of the male residents of the county have attained a high school level of education or better.
vw1978

I think all politicians education records should be made public, similar to the their tax records. If they want to create accountability systems based on performance (both in public education and other public/private sectors) then the public has the right to use the same, or similar criteria.
Guest

Claire,

Thanks so much for this even-handed essay! I have been overwhelmed by the partisan myopia of many Chronicle columns lately and it’s great to see you showing common sense irrespective of party. I’m a conservative but I’m a Claire Potter fan for today. :)

By the way OF COURSE his grades are not relevant at this point, especially since he hasn’t officially announced his run and Obama never released his transcripts. Going to Harvard or teaching there doesn’t mean you know how to reduce deficits or conclude a war on terror honorably — as we have witnessed with Bush and Obama both graduating from Harvard and surrounding themselves with Ivy League wunderkinder, and both flopping around and making the same puerile mistakes. Book smarts and competency are not so intertwined, though it pains us to think so.
physioprof

I agree with you in one respect. I have always considered the arms-length psychological and psychiatric diagnosis of public figures to be highly misleading and morally bankrupt. Accordingly, the relevance of Perry’s shitty grades is not that they tell us why he supposedly resents higher education or whatever. However, I don’t consider his shitty grades irrelevant per se. Rather the relevance is that he is not the type of person who was able to get good grades, for whatever reason that might be.
physioprof

Bush and Obama both graduating from Harvard and surrounding themselves with Ivy League wunderkinder

Bush did not surround himself with Ivy League wunderkinder. He surrounded himself with low-grade hacks educated at religiopartisan indoctrination mills like Liberty University and Regent University School of Law.
austinlonghorn

This has nothing to do with Higher Education policy in Texas, none at all. It is however an attempt by those in Higher Education to try and paint him as stupid to try and get a few cheap political points.

Texas needs competent workers, mainly because Texas is the only state that is still creating jobs in the US. In order to continue to attract companies here we need to have a skilled workforce. The best way to accomplish this is to have Higher Education focus on giving students a quality and worthwhile education at an affordable price. Having top professors teach 5 students a year is not doing this. Having tuition continue to skyrocket isn’t do this either. College needs to be affordable, and the classes need to be taught by the top talent. Until Higher Education focuses on the students instead of how easy they can make professors’ lives, then this will continue to be an issue.
dcenglish

It is questionable whether grades matter or not, granted. But your
excuses for his grades seem bogus to me. I graduated from Gladewater
H.S., Gladewater Texas, a small town in East Texas. I went on to one of
A&M’s rival schools (some would say a school more difficult that
A&M) where my grades were good enough to get me into Harvard for
grad school. Preparation in a small school is what individuals make of
it. Overall I’d say it’s an issue of character and desire. How much
does one want to do well, how much is one willing to sacrifice to do
well.

tenured_radical

Well god forbid I should be defending Rick Perry, whose policies on practically everything have been ruinous for Texas. But my point is, we don’t know why Perry had bad grades: assuming that bad grades =bad character is entirely unproven, as is the assumption that people who got bad grades in college are not capable and intelligent forty years later. As a left-progressive, I also think it is utterly pointless to assume that conservatives believe the things they do because they are just “stupid.”

http://twitter.com/JoVanEvery Jo VanEvery

I agree. I also propose other reasons for less than stellar grades. For example, he may have been spending a lot of time in political activities. Given where he is now, whether you agree with his politics or not, you might say that was a good career move. Certainly I have known and taught very bright students who got mediocre grades because getting As was not their priority. Bs would be fine. And the university experience gave them opportunities to do a lot of other things which, when combined with a university degree from a reasonably prestigious institution, would get them a long way. As are only important if you want to get into grad school. If you don’t, no one cares what grades you got as long as you graduated. And the experience you got doing all the other things (sports, part time job, political activism, etc) may be MORE important to most employers.
dcenglish

God forbid I get into a rumble with you about character, good and bad. I admit I was a bit cavalier in my use of the word. And I didn’t expressed an assumption that people who got bad grades in college are not capable and intelligent 40 years on. What really got my goat is your assumption that small Texas high schools can’t produce well-prepared students. To my mind, that is just more of the Northeast provincialism that those of us who slip into the rarefied air stream encounter ad nauseam. I thought it was beneath you to pull that kind of stunt, and I should have been more straightforward about it. If you want to slice and dice the role that character plays in success–and what do we communally mean by character anyhow?–we can take that up another time. Meanwhile, here are some photos of your man James R.:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/17/rick-perry-college-yearbook-photos_n_929264.html
A&M is a otherworldly place.

tenured_radical

I didn’t say that they can’t produce good students, or that it had anything to do with Texas specifically — that was over reading on your part, and obviously touched a nerve, but that isn’t my responsibility. Connecticut — in a region of the country that is running with prep schools — also has some of the godawfullest high schools in the country, large and small, and I shouldn;t have to say that for you to know that I’m not “provincial.” Part of what my post is about is the turn to name-calling rather than reasoned argument about ideas.

What I was presenting was a range of other possibilities that actually looked for some context — income inequality, education trajectory more generally in the region — other than “character” and “morality” which explains nothing. The right invented this stupid language to talk about success and failure in order to mask the effects of abandoning millions of people to poverty and stripping their economies of anything that might support a sustainable life (which *is* happening in Texas, which has always had a boom-bust economy, and has been since the 1920s.) For liberals to adopt this unquestioningly is a lousy direction for politics. That’s the point of the piece.