November 14, 2003, 8:51 a.m.
The Clinton Snipe Hunt
Twenty years later, Arkansas is still poor.

Twenty years ago the Clintons sent the people of Arkansas on the equivalent of a snipe hunt, linking economic and income growth to the largest tax increase in state history. The plan promoted by Gov. Bill Clinton also included recommendations developed by an Education Standards Committee chaired by his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

"To put it bluntly and get right to the point," Mr. Clinton said in September 1983, "we've got to raise taxes to make Arkansas competitive with the nation and the world economically." He asked the Democrat-controlled legislature to raise the sales tax 33 percent from three to four cents to fund K-12 public education, and they did.

Mr. Clinton claimed the plan "is not just a tax increase that's a tax increase. It's an investment in the future of our children and in the economic development of our state." Mrs. Clinton, appointed by Mr. Clinton to chair the Standards panel, declared: "If implemented, it will do what the governor thinks it will do to improve the state's economy and the education system" (Sept. 20, 1983). Panel recommendations were approved by the state Board of Education in February 1984.

Today Hillary Rodham Clinton is a U.S. Senator from New York. In her recent book, Living History, she recalls her stint as panel chair: "Arkansas was a poor state, last or close to last by many measures, from percentage of college graduates to per capita personal income" (p. 93).

Mrs. Clinton is correct: Arkansas ranked 49th in per capita income in 1983, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. But the Clintons were wrong to claim their 1983 plan would lead to economic growth and its corollary, income growth. BEA data for 2002, the most recent year available, show Arkansas still ranks 49th in per capita income two decades after the Clintons promised deliverance.

Tragically, the poorest and most disadvantaged region in Arkansas has been left holding the proverbial gunnysack. In the ten-county Delta region of southeast Arkansas, 94 percent of K-12 districts have at least one "academically troubled" school under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. Every school in 17 of these districts is failing under the act's accountability provisions; five have 100 percent college remediation rates, according to the state Department of Education's school information site.

No Child Left Behind is one of the Bush administration's greatest domestic policy triumphs. It has brought accountability to the failing K-12 system in Arkansas, which should have been declared in "a state of emergency" two decades ago. The act requires states to track minority, low-income, limited-English, and special-education students, requiring that each subgroup within a school meet standards. A school is considered academically troubled if one subgroup fails to achieve reading or math goals. This has occurred across Arkansas. Thirty percent of the state's public schools are academically troubled, including 31 of 50 in Little Rock.

Courts in Arkansas are also taking a dim view of this tragedy, which Mr. Clinton's successors — Democrat Jim Guy Tucker and Republican Mike Huckabee — have also failed to correct. The 1983 tax increase was Gov. Clinton's response to a state Supreme Court decision upholding a lower court ruling that found the state's formula for distributing aid within the K-12 system unconstitutional (Alma v. Dupree). Gov. Huckabee and the Democratic-controlled legislature face a January 1, 2004, deadline set by the Court, which last year upheld a lower court ruling that found the system "inadequate" and "inequitable" (Lakeview v. Huckabee). Huckabee has proposed a sales tax increase from 5.125 to 6.125 cents. Some Democrats want sales and income tax hikes. Earlier this year, in response to a budget shortfall, the legislature passed an income tax surcharge supported by Huckabee.

The most striking, if unchallenged, claim made by the Clintons in 1983 and others today is the equivalent of hunting snipe: More K-12 spending leads to economic and income growth.

Bill Clinton linked a tax increase for public education to the economic future of Arkansas. By doing nothing, he said in August 1983, the state would ensure that it would remain in the "economic backwater" of the country. Nothing was more closely tied to the state's chances for economic development, he claimed, than a better-funded K-12 system.

In her book, Mrs. Clinton called the Education Standards Committee's work successful, but others have been less charitable. Education Week, in "Quality Counts: Rewarding Results, Punishing Failure," a 1999 report, found: "Arkansas has very little to show for its nearly 20 years of education reform efforts." According to the report, "The poor showings fly in the face of reform efforts in Arkansas dating to the early 1980s. Under then-Gov. Bill Clinton, the state poured new money into its schools by raising teachers' pay and, at the same time, requiring teachers to take competency tests." Arkansas earned a C- for standards and assessments in the 1999 survey because it did not "fare well on the ratings of state standards by the American Federation of Teachers."

The Clinton plan raised the sales tax, spent more on schools, and enacted Hillary's recommendations. The Clintons ignored other factors like tax rates, infrastructure, and labor-force competitiveness in promising growth. Two decades later a poor state remains poor: Arkansas still ranks 49th in per capita income.

Snipe is always an elusive quarry.

— Greg Kaza is executive director of the Arkansas Policy Foundation , an economic research group in Little Rock.

*   *   *

YOU’RE NOT A SUBSCRIBER TO NATIONAL REVIEW? Sign up right now! It’s easy: Subscribe to National Review here, or to the digital version of the magazine here. You can even order a subscription as a gift: print or digital!