ABSTRACT
When the state school system was “nuked,” the bombs did not fall on the tar-
geted state education agency or middle-level managers in the state bureaucracy.
They did not fall on the central office administrators in the local school districts,
or others (“ex-coaches and bureaucrats”) whom Perot had publicly blamed for
the poor quality of education in the state. The legislated reforms, and the mech-
anisms put into place at the state and local level to assure compliance with them,
fell instead on classrooms, on the teachers and their students. Teachers and stu-
dents suffered the “collateral damage” from Perot’s reform “nukes.”1 These
reforms included systems for testing teachers and for evaluating their classroom
performance. They included reinforcement of systems for prescribing curricu-
lum and for testing students. Together, they had the effects of de-skilling teach-
ers’ work, trivializing and reducing the quality of the content of the curriculum,
and distancing children from the substance of schooling. More important, the
“nukes” assured that this pattern of de-skilling and reduced quality would be
institutionalized: the legislated reforms emerging from House Bill 72 shifted the
locus of control over instruction away from those closest to the children. By try-
ing to do an end run around the state bureaucracy, Perot, knowing little about
education, ironically strengthened the very bureaucracy he and his committee
had identified as the source of the ills in public education. His attempted heli-
copter rescue of the teachers landed them right into the domain of bureaucratic
controls.2 Once these policies were in place, teachers would have difficulty
remembering that when Perot began, his charge from the governor and his own
expressed passion was to raise the salaries of overworked, underpaid teachers
and to nuke the bureaucratic system.
