Michele McNeil covered education and state government in Indiana for a decade before joining Education Week as a state policy reporter in June 2006. Alyson Klein, who reports on federal education policy, joined the staff in February 2006 after nearly two years at Congress Daily.
As the financial crisis continues to unfold, Sen. Barack Obama is renewing his call for a second economic-stimulus package that would help jump-start the economy.
The Democratic presidential nominee pitched his plan, originally unveiled in August, again today in a speech in Reno, Nev. Obama is renewing his calls for this second stimulus package, which would follow the first package that resulted in checks to taxpayers over the summer worth up to $600, as Congress continues even today to wrangle over a $700 billion Wall Street bailout.
In today's speech, Obama said:
As soon as we pass this rescue plan, we need to move with the same sense of urgency to rescue the families on Main Street who are struggling every day to pay their bills and keep their jobs. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we need to pass an economic stimulus plan that will help folks cope with rising food and gas prices, save one million jobs by rebuilding our schools and roads, and help states and cities avoid budget cuts and tax increases.
What exactly does Obama mean when he says he's going to save jobs by rebuilding schools?
According to his "emergency economic plan," Obama wants to create a $25 billion fund to fast-track construction projects, whether they be for highways or schools, which will lead to 1 million new jobs.
His plan will "ensure that schools can meet their energy costs and undertake key repairs starting this fall." The plan is very sketchy on how relief from energy costs fits into his overall $25 billion construction project fund.
To stress the urgency of helping schools rebuild and manage high energy costs, the Obama campaign cites these facts: 76 percent of school buildings have structural deficiencies and schools in at least 16 states are going to four-day school weeks because of high fuel prices.
Over at the Learning the Language blog, Education Week's resident expert on English language learners takes a look at Sen. Barack Obama's support of bilingual education by highlighting the debate over whether this method works better than English immersion programs.
And, interestingly, Mary Ann Zehr notes in her post that Republicans have not responded to repeated requests for more information on their endorsement of an "English First" policy as part of the official GOP platform. She wrote:
I've sent e-mail requests umpteen times requesting clarification and left voice mail messages several times for press officers with the Republican Committee. Still, no one has responded with further clarification.
During Friday night's debate, Sen. Barack Obama said that Sen. John McCain's plan to freeze domestic discretionary spending would amount to using a hatchet on the federal budget when a scalpel is called for.
To help Obama and his scalpel out, Mike Petrilli over at the Fordham Foundation has a list of programs that he says are ripe for elimination in the federal budget - although he says that some of them (like the "Exchanging With Historic Whaling and Trading Partners") have strong backers in Congress and probably aren't going anywhere.
And he says:
A “spending freeze” might be an empty political slogan, but so is this talk about wielding a “scalpel.” Until the president gets line-item veto authority (which would probably require a constitutional amendment), or until Congress gets serious about protecting taxpayer dollars, our federal budget is likely to be overloaded with all manner of wasteful excess. And there’s very little that the president—any president—can do about it.
But many of the programs on this list are absolutely, never ever going to be on the chopping block during an Obama administration and not just because Congress isn't likely to go along with the cuts, but because Obama himself has championed them.
The most obvious is the Teacher Quality Enhancement grants. Last year, when Congress was poised to slash the program by 66 percent, Obama took to the floor and urged his colleagues to go with a higher appropriation in a different version of the bill (it was cut pretty significantly anyway).
The TQE is the main source of funding for the teacher residency programs, which allow districts to partner with colleges of education to offer beefed up field experiences to prospective educators. The proposal is a cornerstone of Obama's education plan and part of his stump speech. So that's almost certainly out.
And it's tough to see Obama scrapping the Even Start Family literacy program, and not just because of it's "fuzzy" name, as Petrilli puts it. Obama seems to be a believer in education programs that target parents—he's got something in his education proposal about expanding home visitation and other services to first-time, low-income mothers. So even if Even Start is zeroed out (unlikely, I think) the funding would probably go to another program aimed at disadvantaged families.
I'd also be pretty surprised if Obama tried to use his scalpel on the Parent Information and Resource Centers, not when his education plan calls for schools to work with parents to set behavior expectations and "shared values." If Obama did get rid of the PIRC's it would probably be to set up some other program aimed at bolstering parental involvement.
Even in the face of a federal bailout of the financial services industry that could cost $700 billion, Sen. Barack Obama strongly suggested in tonight's debate that he would not want education to be sacrified because of it.
Moderator Jim Lehrer's question, which focused on how the uber-expensive bailout would affect their proposals, allowed the candidates to stake out their budget priorities. Sen. John McCain said he would further rein in spending--a spending freeze his advisers have said applies to education. Obama said some things would suffer, but not energy independence, health care, education, and electricty infrastructure.
Specifically, Obama--who listed education third in his list of priorities--said: "We have to make sure our children are competing in math and science." In addition, he said college must be affordable. In all, he wants to spend an additional $18 billion on education.
And a little later, Obama said he would prefer to see more investments in early education rather than subsidies to private companies that participate in Medicare.
Obama's answer tonight seems to put to rest--at least for now--the good question my co-blogger Alyson posed earlier this week in her post: "Would Bailout Affect Obama's Education Spending Plan?" Of course, making a promise in a debate and following through as president are two different things.
Although the issue of education isn't likely to come up with much significance, there's plenty reason for those interested in public schools to listen carefully to the presidential candidates when they talk about the economy. And that's because, just like so many parts of our lives, the health of the economy has a dramatic effect on school districts.
For one, school districts need the credit market to help pay for their construction projects. This week, as I was reporting a story about how the financial meltdown is affecting the bond market, I discovered the plight of Laurens County School District 56 in South Carolina, which is trying to finish building a new high school. Superintendent Wayne Brazell told me in an email that his district had to postpone selling its final, $28 million in bonds this week because of the upheaval in the credit markets. The district will try again on Oct. 1.
Secondly, the ups and downs of the stock market affect the investment portfolios of teacher pension funds, school districts' savings accounts, and individual teachers' supplemental retirement accounts.
And lastly, and perhaps most important, the overall health of the economy has a trickle-down effect on the amount of money school districts receive from local, state, and federal sources. Home foreclosures that are hitting some markets hard will threaten the stream of property taxes flowing into districts—money that's used to pay the day-to-day operations of many schools and pay off district debt. The sagging economy has depressed tax revenues coming into states, which has already threatened public school funding in some states.
Stay tuned to Campaign K-12 for coverage of tonight's debate, which is scheduled to start tonight at 9 p.m. EDT.
From guest blogger and EdWeek reporter Sean Cavanagh:
Barack Obama's presidential campaign brought out the brainpower this week in an attempt to sell the candidate as the one who would devote the most attention and resources to science education and innovation.
The Illinois Democrat arranged to have three Nobel Prize winners—Harold Varmus (who won in medicine), Peter Agre (chemistry), and Bob Horvitz (medicine)—speak on a conference call on Thursday with reporters about what he's dubbed his "science and innovation" agenda. The campaign also put forward a letter signed by 61 Nobel laureates in support of the senator's candidacy.
Obama released an 11-page document listing his science proposal to coincide with the event. Many of the ideas in there are things he's been talking about for some time. Many of them focus on increasing federal investment in scientific research by various agencies, and vowing to end what he sees as political interference in scientific study, on climate change and environmental issues.
But his plans also call for improving K-12 math and science teaching, through an expansion of scholarships for aspiring educators, and encouraging greater collaboration among federal agencies on "STEM" issuses. Many federal agencies sponsor programs in teacher training, though critics have complained that there's no way to judge whether those programs actually work.
A McCain staffer noted that the Arizona senator has offered several K-12 math and science proposals, including expanded financial incentives for teachers who agree to work in those subjects; and new support for online education math and science and Advanced Placement courses.
The scientists supporting Obama's proposals this week acknowledged that they carry a significant price tag, though they also say that spending is urgently needed. Congress' willingness to foot the bill for new science- and math-related programs is uncertain. Federal lawmakers overwhelmingly supported the passage of the America COMPETES Act last year, for instance, but many of the programs authorized in that legislation, including teacher training and curriculum support for K-12, haven't received funding yet. (And that budgetary tight-fistedness was evident long before the nation's economic woes appeared to become more dire.)
For a breakdown of the candidates' views on science issues, including some science education proposals, check out the answers they provided for "Science Debate 2008," a forum arranged by scientists, business leaders and others.
Sen. Barack Obama wants to spend $2 billion to eliminate the international "education gap" by 2015, which is, incidentally, one year after all American kids are supposed to be proficient in reading and math under NCLB.
In a speech he gave today via satellite to the Clinton Global Initiative, he said: "Above all, we must do our part to see that all children have the basic right to learn. There is nothing more disappointing than a child denied the hope that comes with going to school, and there is nothing more dangerous than a child who is taught to distrust and then to destroy."
Obama's pledge of $2 billion almost seems like a drop in the bucket as Congress considers a $700 billion plan to bailout the troubled financial markets.
In announcing this effort, Obama is borrowing from Sen. Hillary Clinton's Education for All Act, first introduced in 2004. (Obama gave her credit in his speech, calling her a "true champion for children.") Then, she estimated that the cost of universal, basic education for children throughout the world at $5 billion to $10 billion a year. As a presidential candidate, she proposed spending $3 billion a year by 2012.
2015, by the way, is the goal set by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to achieve universal free education worldwide. According to UNESCO, an estimated 72 million children worldwide were out of school in 2005, down from 96 million in 1999. Girls account for a large portion of those numbers: 66 percent of out-of-school children in South and West Asia were girls.
When Sen. John McCain addressed the meeting in New York earlier this morning, he didn't mention education, although he did pledge to lead the world in improving child and maternal health.
The headline above probably sounds very Dog Bites Man. It's no secret that the National Education Association is endorsing Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois for president, the Democratic nominee, and typically backs Democrats in federal, state, and local races.
The NEA had about 30 to 50 U.S. House races and 7 to 9 Senate races on its radar screen as of last week, Karen White, the union's director of campaigns and elections told me. (She warned that those number could change as the election approaches).
While the NEA is giving a boost to both Dems and Republicans in the House, the list of Senate candidates in tough races that the NEA is assisting includes absolutely no Republicans.
The NEA is helping out Democratic Senate candidates in Alaska, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Oregon. And the union is monitoring the Senate race in Virginia. But so far, former Gov. Mark Warner, a Democrat and champion of high school reform, has a 2-to-1 lead over Republican former Gov. Jim Gilmore, according to a recent Washington Post poll. Although the union supports him, he doesn't seem to need much assistance.
And in the race for a U.S. Senate seat from Colorado, the NEA is lending a hand to Rep. Mark Udall, a Democrat, who is running against former Rep. Bob Schaffer, a Republican. Interestingly, Udall voted for the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001 and Schaffer voted against it ...and Schaffer makes a big deal out of that distinction on his Web site. He also slams Udall for not supporting full funding for students in special education, citing a vote in 2000.
Udall has since introduced a bill, which he touts on his own campaign site, that would change the way states measure progress under the law, allowing schools to use multiple measures to demonstrate student learning. The NEA supports that bill.
The NEA's backing of Udall over Schaffer is more proof (if you needed any) that, when it comes to overhauling NCLB, the union likes the multiple-meaures-increased-funding-for-schools approach (more often championed by Democrats) more than they like some conservative Republicans' back-to-local-control stance. (White also mentioned that Udall agrees with the union on other issues, such as money for college access).
And in the House, the union is looking out for at least two Democratic freshmen on the education committee--Reps. Carol Shea Porter of New Hampshire and Jason Altmire of Pennsylvania. Others once considered likely to face tough re-election bids, such as Rep. Joe Courtney, D-Conn., seem to be in pretty good shape for now, White said. (The union will keep monitoring such races, though).
And the NEA is supporting some other House Dems in their re-election bids (including Rep. Paul Kanjorski in Pennsylvania) and hoping to get some new folks elected, such as Larry Kissell, a former teacher who narrowly missed edging out Rep. Robin Hayes in North Carolina in 2006.
But the union is supporting at least three House Republicans on the Democrats' target list: Reps. Mark Kirk of Illinois, Dave Reichert of Washington, and Jim Gerlach of Pennsylvania. White called them champions for public education.
Generally, NCLB doesn't seem to be much of an issue, so far, in most races, in part because education has taken a back seat to other issues this year, and in part because the law has become such a tarnished brand, according to White, whose organization is one of the most vocal critics of the law.
"Even Republicans aren't talking about NCLB," she told me. "No one wants to be associated with it."
Perhaps as important as the policies of a presidential candidate is the company he keeps. The candidates like to brag about such company when it suits them. For example, Sen. John McCain touts his frequent meetings with foreign heads-of-state to illustrate his national security leadership. And in response to the recent economic crisis, Barack Obama has made it a point to surround himself with folks like former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker.
But there's the flip side, too. Obama's brief association with Jim Johnson, former chairman of fallen giant Fannie Mae, became the subject of an attack ad. Meanwhile, McCain has been attacked for his ties with lobbyists.
So it shouldn't be surprising that Obama is catching more heat on his relationship—whatever it was—with the controversial figure Bill Ayers during their time together working in Chicago for the Annenberg Challenge. In an opinion piece titled "Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism on Schools," Stanley Kurtz writes in the Wall Street Journal that some original research he did shows the pair were far more intertwined than the Obama campaign would like others to believe.
Kurtz expands on the commentary even more in this piece in the National Review Online, in which he reprints a lengthier response from the Obama campaign.
His commentaries add to the existing work that's already been written about Obama and the Annenberg challenge. Education Week's David Hoff wrote about the subject in March 2007 and Mark Walsh wrote about Ayers in April of this year. Earlier this month, the New York Timesexamined Obama's role with Annenberg and Ayers.
Earlier this year, Sen. Barack Obama put forth a plan to provide an $18 billion-a-year boost in spending on early education and K-12 education, to help pay for a teacher-training initiative, leadership development, improved assessments, and other proposals. The Democratic presidential nominee said he would pay for the increase in a "fiscally responsible" way, by reducing earmarks, overhauling federal contracting procedures, auctioning off surplus federal property, and other measures.
But that was before the federal government was poised to spend some $700 billion--or even as much as $1 trillion dollars by some accounts--trying to avert a financial meltdown on Wall Street.
To put that number in perspective, the entire appropriation for discretionary spending by the U.S. Department of Education in fiscal year 2008 was $59.2 billion. So the proposed bailout is roughly 14 times the entire department's budget, which includes grants to districts to help educate disadvantaged kids, spending on students in special education, and money for Pell Grants and other college access programs.
Obama hasn't come out and said that the Wall Street bailout would put the kibosh on, or even signficantly curtail, his education spending plan. But this weekend, The Washington Post reported that it's tough to see how either Obama or Sen. John McCain would be able to push significant domestic initiatives if he is elected in November, given the likely price tag of the bailout proposal.
Obama is reported as saying that the bailout wouldn't change his plan to cut taxes for the middle class. But he didn't say anything about revising his domestic-spending proposals.
Even before the bailout was in the works, McCain said he would freeze most domestic spending, including education programs. Last week, the Republican nominee's top education adviser, Lisa Graham Keegan, cited the troubles on Wall Street as one of the reasons that education spending isn't likely to see big increases, at least during the early years of a McCain administration.
Jon Schnur, the co-founder of New Leaders for New Schools, a New York City-based nonprofit that places new principals in struggling schools, is taking a leave of absence from his job to spend more time as an unpaid adviser to Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign. He announced the move in an e-mail he sent to his organization, which was posted on Alexander Russo's This Week in Education blog.
Schnur has been a high-profile education surrogate for Obama throughout the campaign, most recently discussing Obama's views at an education policy forum at the Aspen Institute.
Clarification: A previous version of this item suggested that Schnur had become a full-time Obama adviser. The Obama campaign e-mailed me to clarify that Schnur has no paid role with the campaign, but he helps lead its education advisory group.
At 4:31 next Thursday, the Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign will get a big infusion of cash from education redesign-minded Dems. Or so Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform hopes.
The organization, which some view as an effort to help counterbalance to teachers' unions influence on Democratic Party politics, sent out an alert today to donors. The advisory asks contributors to go to the DFER portion of Sen. Barack Obama's fundraising site and give up to the maximum of $2,300 per person (the advisory helpfully reminds donors that their spouses can give, too). Then it urges them to head over to the DFER fundraising portion of the Democratic National Committee's Web site and give as much as $28,500.
Those who contribute more than $1,000 will get an invitation to an event featuring Obama adviser Jon Schnur, and Kevin Johnson, a former NBA player who is running for mayor of Sacramento, Calif.
The advisory doesn't say this ... but if the "education minute" results in a major cash bump for Obama and the DNC, it will help raise the profile of DFER, whose budding influence was evident during the Democratic convention in Denver last month, when Williams got to sit in the DNC's luxury box during Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's speech.
Memo to Sens. McCain and Obama: Big wigs at Fortune 1000 companies are worried that there aren't going to be enough engineers, researchers, scientists and other professionals to keep the U.S. competitive.
A survey of senior executives at some of the nation's largest chemical pharmaceutical, aerospace, and other science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (or STEM) oriented companies said the K-12 system isn't doing a good job preparing a pipeline of future STEM professionals. And 55 percent of them gave schools a D or F for getting women and minorities interested in STEM careers.
So far, STEM education hasn't seemed to be much of an issue in the presidential campaign. But maybe this survey will give Obama an opportunity to tout his STEM bill, which came out over the summer.
Voters need to keep children's issues, including health and social welfare, in mind as they head to the ballot box, a coalition of advocacy groups and professional associations said on Tuesday. (No, ED in '08 wasn't one of the groups. This time.)
The coalition of 30 organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Association of Social Workers, and Pre-K Now, launched "Step Up for Kids Day." The campaign included local events in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to get voters, policymakers, and candidates thinking about children's issues, including child abuse, infant mortality, childhood poverty, as well as the need to increase access to the Head Start preschool program and quality afterschool programs.
The groups are hoping that "the next two months will see the word 'children' interjected into the priority issues facing this country that the next president wants to address," said Michael R. Petit, the founder of Every Child Matters, a Washington-based youth advocacy organization. "We are looking for a kid friendly, family friendly federal budget to be submitted next February or March to the American people."
He said the organizations have contacted the moderators of the upcoming presidential debates to try and get questions on children's issues added to the mix. Here's hoping that effort succeeds; it will give Campaign K-12 something to write about.
I've been to a number of head-to-head policy debates between various members of Team Obama and Sen. John McCain's go-to-guru on education issues, Lisa Graham Keegan, a former Arizona schools chief. And they have always been very collegial, with a lot of 'my candidate would do this-and-so' as opposed to direct critiques of the other candidate's record or proposals.
But on Monday, during a dinner at the Aspen Institute's seminar on federal education policy in Washington, Keegan and Jon Schnur, co-director of New Leaders for New Schools, actually had something resembling a lively debate.
Instead of just talking about McCain's support of accountability and testing, Keegan criticized Sen. Barack Obama for failing to support performance pay tied to test scores. Schnur repeated the Democratic nominee's proposal to permit school districts to make merit pay linked to student achievement part of an alternative-pay plan. And he asked why McCain's plan didn't include any new resources for schools. Keegan explained that the sputtering economy would make it tough for the Republican nominee to promise big increases for education, but she said McCain would target resources to programs that are likely to be effective (such as merit pay).
Still, the debate remained very civil--and very much on the issues--a welcome change of pace from last week's attack ads.
During the event yesterday, I also got a chance to talk to another Obama adviser, Linda Darling-Hammond, an education professor at Stanford University. I asked her about the claim some folks have made that there are some major ideological differences among Obama's education advisers. She disagreed, saying that inside the campaign, work is very collaborative. Those who say there are disagreements are looking through "an external lens," she added.
I wonder if that spirit of cooperation would hold true under a President Obama administration.
Voter registration efforts are a key piece of many campaigns. Consider the decision by Barack Obama's campaign to have him accept his nomination at Invesco Field in Denver, packed by 80,000 people—many from the swing state of Colorado. He got more than just cheers—his campaign also got those folks' contact information for voter registration and get-out-the-vote efforts because they had to provide it in exchange for the ticket.
So it may be no small thing for the National Head Start Association and the League of Women Voters to mount a voter registration drive at the 2,600 Head Start programs across the country, which has the potential to reach the parents of 1 million children.
The voter-registration drive is permitted by language in the legislation signed in December 2007 that reauthorized Head Start. The national Head Start folks, in a press release announcing the voter drive, said: "The specific provision allows 'nonpartisan organizations' to use Head Start facilities 'during hours of operation . . . to increase the number of eligible citizens who register to vote in elections for Federal office'."
The release went on to say that these voter efforts are also supported by Congress through the intent of the Motor Vehicle Registration Act, which increases access to voter registration opportunities for in "locations accessible to disenfranchised populations."
This voter-registration drive—if it is executed—is nonpartisan but would likely help Barack Obama, because Head Start centers typically serve low-income, urban, and Democratic areas. Plus, Obama's education plan calls for boosting funding for Head Start and quadrupling the number of children in Early Head Start (for kids ages zero to three). Sen. John McCain's early education plan, however, doesn't call for an expansion of Head Start that isn't already in law.
Sarah Palin told Charles Gibson of ABC News in their extensive interviews that questions about whether she can be both a mother and a high-powered politician are irrelevant, in part because she grew up under, and benefited from, the federal law that bars sex bias in public education.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits discrimination based on sex in federally funded education programs. The law is widely credited with increasing girls' and women's high school and college athletic opportunities.
Asked by Gibson last week whether it was sexist for someone to ask whether Palin could manage a large family and the vice presidency, the Alaska governor said:
"I don't know. I'm lucky to have been brought up in a family where gender has never been an issue. I'm a product of Title IX, also, where we had equality in schools that was just being ushered in with sports and with equal opportunity for education, all of my life. I'm part of that generation, where that question is kind of irrelevant, because it's accepted. Of course you can be the vice president and you can raise a family."
The interview transcript is here, with this exchange under the heading "Sarah Palin on sexism."
Gibson accompanied the Republican vice presidential nominee on a walk through Wasilla High School in Alaska, where in 1982 Palin was a member of the girls' basketball team that won the state championship after she hit a crucial free throw late in the game.
Palin also ran track and cross country at Wasilla High, and she is still an avid runner in addition to being a "hockey mom," the Anchorage Daily News reports here.
The controversial attack ad John McCain launched against his Democratic opponent—which says Sen. Barack Obama's one accomplishment is a bill that would have taught sex ed to kindergartners—has been labeled dishonest, misleading, and off-base by many newspapers and fact-checking web sites.
But that didn't stop former New York City Mayor Giuliani, representing the McCain campaign, from defending the ad on Sunday's Meet the Press, even declaring the ad gave Obama too much credit. And Giuliani takes a line from the ad: "Education Week said that he basically had no record on education, which is why maybe Senator McCain's idea of an accomplishment in that ad goes a little bit too far." (The link takes you to page 3 of the transcript, and scroll down about one-quarter of the way to see the EdWeek reference.)
No, not quite. As we've detailed on this blog, the McCain campaign and its supporters continue to cherry-pick a quote and take it out of context.
Writer and fellow blogger David Hoff wrote: "In his eight years in the state Senate and two years in the U.S. Senate, Mr. Obama hasn’t made a significant mark on education policy." But he also wrote in the next sentence: "In Illinois, his biggest accomplishments were in reforming state ethics rules and capital punishment. He did promote early-childhood initiatives that advocates considered 'innovative and progressive'."
And EdWeek has said plenty else about his education policies besides this one story back in 2007.
EdWeek has also examined the record and proposals about John McCain, and has pointed out that McCain's track record on education isn't anything to write home about either.
So Sen. John McCain has some ideas for pre-K that are sure to generate broad support in Congress ... because lawmakers have already passed them.
On his campaign Web site, McCain said he thinks that there should be "Centers for Excellence" for Head Start programs to hold out certain programs as models for best practices.
While there are some excellent Head Start centers that can serve as models for leadership and best practices, far too many Head Start centers have fallen prey to the same institutional flaws that have undermined the larger public education system. They lack quality instructors; they lack accountability to parents; and they are focused on process, not outcomes. We should build Centers for Excellence in Head Start that actually leads to excellence in all of the pre-K and early learning programs that taxpayers support.
McCain's colleagues in Congress obviously agree with the idea, since they included the Centers for Excellence in the Head Start reauthorization that President Bush signed into law last fall.
So ... way to go out on a limb and think outside the box there, senator. Still, an advocate told me that the fact that McCain has proposed the Centers for Excellence means he would probably provide funding for them.
But some of McCain's other proposals aren't likely to be as popular because lawmakers have already dissed them, again during the years-long debate over Head Start reauthorization.
McCain's plan says that federally supported programs--including Head Start--must use "meaningful, measurable standards designed to determine that students are ready for school by measuring their school readiness skills."
That sounds suspiciously similar to the National Reporting System, a Bush administration initiative to test Head Start students. Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle said the test wasn't fair, in part because it's tough to design assessments to measure learning outcomes for kids that young. Lawmakers got rid of the tests during the reauthorization, over the administration's objections.
It makes me wonder if McCain was too busy campaigning for president to pay attention to the Head Start renewal. Neither he nor Sen. Barack Obama showed up for the final vote on the bill (it passed the Senate 95-0 anyway).
But one part of McCain's pre-K plan could lead to a big change that won kudos from an advocate. McCain's plan implies that he'd like to see Head Start and other pre-K instructors receive pay that's comparable to their K-12 counterparts with similar education levels. The advocate said equal pay and benefits for pre-K teachers could go a long way to improving program quality.
But the advocate was also dismayed that the McCain campaign's language seems to suggest that the $25 billion the federal government spends on pre-K is sufficient. Many Head Start and other federally funded programs serve a relatively small percentage of eligible kids, the advocate said.
Meanwhile, in case you were curious, McCain's running mate on the Republican ticket, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, isn't a huge supporter of state-financed pre-K plans. (Not sure yet what she thinks about federal ones).
During her 2006 gubernatorial race, Palin came out against creating a state-financed pre-K system, saying that the private sector was already doing a good job of providing services.
Just because Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama promised not to do any politicking on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks doesn't mean they weren't drawing attention to their campaign proposals.
Both candidates today touted (in emails to reporters at least) their plans to bolster community service. McCain's plan calls for using AmeriCorps and SeniorCorps volunteers to serve as tutors and mentors to "address the high school dropout crisis" and for improving civics education through volunteers who are able to teach or tutor "with a teaching certification equivalent."
And his plan, which obviously borrows from his education proposal's emphasis on alternative certification, also calls for "creat[ing] a realistic teaching certification requirement for outstanding individuals with years of service and work" so that they can teach or tutor "without jumping through unreasonable bureaucratic hoops." Read more about his plan and record here.
Obama's plan calls for significantly expanding the AmericCorps program (to 250,000 slots from 75,000) and creating a "Classroom Corps" that would enable engineers and scientists to help teachers develop curricula and tutor students. It would also give local business and faith leaders, parents, and others a forum to serve as mentors and tutors, or help out in classrooms. And Obama calls for national guidelines for service-learning and community service programs.
Obama would also like to expand Youth Build, a program that helps disadvantaged teens gain job skills, to 50,000 slots over the next eight years from 8,000 slots. Check out the rest of his plan here.
A day after this blog took issue with Sen. John McCain's new ad, which hits Barack Obama on a committee vote he cast five years ago on sex ed while in the Illinois State Senate, two big newspapers are agreeing with us.
The Washington Postdeclares that his ad is "dishonest, deceptive." In the ad, the McCain campaign pulls out a quote from an Education Week story from early 2007 that says Obama hasn't made a "signficiant mark" on education. The Post correctly points out that the EdWeek story, however, was "generally favorable" to Obama and detailed his grassroots efforts while in the Illinois legislature, and his push for early education. The Post also takes issue with the attribution of two other statements in the ad—that's he's been "elusive" on accountability and that he's defending the "public school monopoly." These come from opinion pieces in The Post and the Chicago Tribune, but you wouldn't know that if you're not closely paying attention because the attribution quickly flashes on screen. "A casual viewer or listener could easily get the impression that all the quotes came from Education Week," The Post said.
The Post further wrote:
It implies that its critique of the Democratic presidential nominee has been endorsed by the nonpartisan journal Education Week, when in fact it is a hodgepodge of quotes from a variety of sources stitched together to form a highly partisan political attack.
Meanwhile, the New York Times finds in its "Check Point" feature that McCain's ad "distorts Obama's policy." The Times essentially says that the ad distorts the coverage of Education Week, saying:
The same publication has also criticized Mr. McCain, in language that was perhaps even stronger. Early this year, in an article titled “John McCain Where Art Thou?” it complained that he offered “a laundry list of fairly vague answers” on how to improve schools and did not make education a priority.
“McCain is a campaign-finance, foreign-relations, anti-abortion, tax-cut candidate,” the magazine said. “Education is not his thing. Depending on your perspective, McCain’s relative silence on education may be a good thing. If you think the federal government has grossly overreached into the state business of education, then he may be your guy.”
But a little fact-checking of the fact-checkers finds one flaw with the New York Times: they elevate my mere blog post to an "article." "The publication" didn't write those words—I did. As a reporter who writes both blog posts and "articles," I can assure you there's a big difference. My blog posts have a lot of voice in them as I strive to bring perspective and attention to the issue of education in this election year. They're short, written in sometimes a few minutes' time, and are part of an ongoing dialogue and back-and-forth about the issue of education—and need to be taken in that context. Our stories are far more heavily edited, are much more comprehensive, and don't take on the same voice as our individual blog posts do.
Yesterday, I calledthe Obama ad attacking McCain's record on education "misleading."
Well, the ad that the McCain campaign struck back with took similar liberties with Obama's record.
The ad says that Obama's only significant accomplishment on education was a bill in the Illinois state Senate on sex education. The Huffington Post has reported that the bill was meant to encourage programs to protect kids from sexual predators.
And I'm not sure what yardstick the McCain was using for "legislative accomplishments." But it seems that Obama has done more than that, even just in the past year.
For instance, Obama introduced a bill authorizing money for grants to create "teacher residency programs," which allow universities and districts to partner to give prospective teachers beefed-up field experiences and support. The legislation was included in a renewal of the Higher Education Act, which passed earlier this year. Obama has proposed expanding residencies even further, as part of his education platform.
Obama took the lead in ensuring the program made it into the bill, Jane West, the vice-president for government relations at the non-partisan American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education, told me. (West is a former aid to Senate Republicans). Sure, the program didn't pass as standalone legislation and was folded into a much larger bill. But that's pretty much how things work in Congress ... and McCain, who has been there for over a quarter century, knows that.
Second, the ad says that Education Week said that Obama has a scant record on education. You can read the story for the broader context, but it details Obama's work for an Annenberg Foundation-funded effort on teacher quality. And, as some folks have already pointed out, we've also said that McCain doesn't have much a record on the issue either, and that he hasn't talked about it very much on the stump. Even folks in his own party aren't sure where he stands on the issue.
As for the other two articles the ad cites, both are editorials. One is written by Steve Chapman, a syndicated columnist. And the other is a Washington Post editorial that says that McCain hasn't released a detailed plan on education. It was written before his speech to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in July, in which he sketched out his education plan. But that speech didn't even mention the main federal lever for school policy, the No Child Left Behind Act.
And he's hit back hard. (I've pasted the video below.)
The commercial slams Obama for not making a "significant mark" on education, for being "elusive" on accountability, and defending the "public school monopoly." And then there's the kicker: The ad says Obama's one accomplishment is "legislation to teach comprehensive sex education to kindergartners" before they learn to read.
The ad, in effect, singles out a vote Obama cast a member of an Illinois state legislative committee, which approved a bill that would allow schools to teach sex ed to students younger than 6th grade.
And, if you caught the first two words of the commercial, you'll see that it cites Education Week for declaring that Obama "hasn't made a significant mark on education." Of course, there's more to the story than that, and you can read David Hoff's entire piece from 2007, early in the Democratic primary race, here.
The Obama campaign, meanwhile, has decried the ad as "shameful."
John McCain and Sarah Palin were originally scheduled to hold a rally at in Fairfax High School in northern Virginia. tomorrow. But they canceled - not because some folks raised questions about whether the building should be used for a political event while school while school in session - but because the school's gym is too small, apparently. It holds about 6,500 people, according to the Associated Press.
A nice side benefit: In switching locations, the campaign is side-stepping what looked like a potentially sticky squabble over whether the school can hold a political rally during academic hours at all. It's against district policy, but superintendent Jack D. Dale was willing to let it slide, because he thought the event would be a great learning opportunity for students.
Dale and the mayor of Fairfax, a Republican, said that the school allowed the Obama campaign to hold a rally at another school in the district in July. School wasn't in session then, but an arts program and some other activities were going on.
Still, this WashingtonPost story quotes some teachers saying that they felt squeamish about the political message the event would send. And a Democratic state delegate said she thought the rally could be very partisan, since an e-mail advisory announcing it encouraged folks to show up wearing something red, to show that Virginia will stay in the GOP column in November.
But as an education reporter who lives and works within driving distance of the school, I'm kinda bummed they switched locations. It would have been fun to check it out and see if any kids came to school dressed in head-to-blue or in "Yo' Mama for Obama" t-shirts.
While Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has only recently vaulted to the national stage, she's been on the radar screen for awhile here at Education Week, which covers the education angle of legislative sessions, governors' State of the State addresses, and any other big policy developments in the state capitals.
In fact, EdWeek's "Capitol Recap" of Alaska's 2008 legislative session, an eight-paragraph account written by our Alaska beat reporter, Sean Cavanagh, is now being invoked by Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign in defense of charges that Palin cut special education while in office.
Last night, the Arizona senator's campaign press office sent out an e-mail blast titled: IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: FactCheck.org: "Sliming Palin." In it, the McCain campaign brags about an entry by Factcheck.org, which uses Sean's recap to point out that Palin actually boosted special education funding. The Annenberg Political Fact Check is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
Roy Romer and Marc Lampkin must have been high-fiving over their breakfast cereal. Or whatever it is that the leaders of ED in '08 do to celebrate a prominent place for education in the presidential campaign.
Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois released the first (in my memory) TV ad on education of the general election. So it's becoming an issue, sorta! Finally!
The ad is mostly an attack on Sen. John McCain's record on education issues. It doesn't go into detail on Obama's own proposals for schools. You can check out the ad on Obama's Web site here.
I've e-mailed the McCain campaign, and am planning a more thorough fact check, but at first glance, I would say that at least parts of this ad are misleading or don't represent McCain's current campaign rhetoric.
The ad says that the Arizona senator and Republican presidential nominee is "against accountability standards." It's possible that McCain voted against accountability at some point during his quarter century in Congress. In light lettering that's very difficult to read, the ad cites votes that appear to have occured as late as May 2001.
Still, I've never heard McCain, or any of his advisers, say that he's against educational accountability on the campaign trail. Quite the opposite, in fact. McCain voted for the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001. The nominee and his advisers have said that he still supports the law and its principles of accountability, and that it needs to be "fixed."
McCain has been pretty non-specific about exactly what he would change about the law besides broadly calling for expanding school choice without going into much detail about how he would do that beyond the federal voucher program for the District of Columbia, and allowing Title I money for tutoring to flow directly to parents, not districts. But he's never said he was against accountability or standards.
The ad also says that McCain "proposed abolishing the Department of Education." Again, that's news to me, at least in the context of the campaign. To back up this claim, the ad cites a news story from December of 1994 - nearly 14 years ago. I've never heard McCain call for scrapping the department on the trail. It's possible, of course, that he supported that idea over a decade ago when it was part of the Republican Party platform. But it's not something he has said he would do as president.
The ad also claims that McCain's economic plan "gives $200 billion for special interests while cutting funding for schools." I haven't looked in detail at his economic plan, but McCain has said he wants to freeze discretionary spending, and his top education adviser, Lisa Graham Keegan, said that would apply to education programs, such as Title I. Folks like the Committee for Education Funding's Ed Kealy would certainly say that level-funding amounts to a cut, since inflation and increasing enrollment means less money per kid. So, many would call that a fair criticism, although I'm sure the McCain campaign would take issue with it.
The ad also says that McCain "voted to cut education spending" citing votes as recent as 2005. I'm going to check into those.
Sen. Barack Obama will walk straight into the lion's den when he uses a campaign stop in Dayton, Ohio, this morning to pitch a plan to double federal funding for charter schools.
There's perhaps no other state where the teachers' union (part of Obama's base) has so vehemently opposed these public schools, which operate free from many of the regulations that govern traditional public schools.
UPDATE: The Teacher Beat blog details a somewhat surprising reaction to Obama's charter school proposal from the NEA. Meanwhile, the Democrats for Education Reform, which touts charter schools as a school reform tool, are cheering Obama on.
And Ohio's charter schools have certainly given the Ohio Federation of Teachers and the Ohio Education Association ammunition, as leadership, management, and oversight of many of the state's charter schools have been called into question. The state attorney general aggressively sued to shut down three in the Dayton area, where Obama was scheduled to deliver his speech this morning.
Although the Democrats' official party platform embraces public charter schools (so long as they are "accountable"), Obama's education plan makes no mention of these even though he's said he generally supports them. Yet it's clear from Education Week'scoverage of the Democratic Convention that some powerful forces within the party are pushing charter schools, even though they may not be popular with the teachers' unions.
Details I've seen so far this morning are sketchy on his funding pledge, and who would benefit from the money. But Obama seems to be sending a message to voters—in a battleground state that he'd like to win in November—that he's willing to stand toe-to-toe with the teachers' unions and embrace something they've often worked against.
UPDATE NO. 2: The Rev. Al Sharpton and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein of the Education Equality Project have praised Obama's speech, but they're also interested in hearing the details.
The American Society of Quality wants educators to weigh in on what the next president should have on his "to-do" list.
The group, which puts on the National Quality Education Conference for teachers, administrators and support personnel every year, wants educators to fill out a five-minute, three-question survey to help them compile this list, which will be delivered to either Barack Obama or John McCain after the Nov. 4 election.
The survey asks respondents to rank nine education issues in order of importance, rank seven things that American students need more of in their education, and to identify one thing the president should do to improve education.
What would rank first on your to-do list for the next president?
Education Week launched a convention blitz by sending two teams of reporters to the Democratic and Republican conventions, armed with smartphones, laptops, video, and still cameras, with the goal being to deliver engaging, up-to-the-minute, and useful news . Response from readers was terrific, as gauged by the numerous comments we got.
A sampling of the best reader comments from the convention:
"Parents do have a choice. They elect a school board and can run for that office. Don't slay public education. It is the glue that holds education together." -- Don, John McCain Talks a Good Game on School Choice.
"I find this very amusing that just because she [Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin] was part of the PTA people assume that she understands school policies. It may make her a qualified fundraiser but anyone can sell skittles at a table in the front hall of the school." -- Paul, Delegates Praise Palin's Grace and Grit.
"I am also disappointed that Obama is parroting the mantra of the so-called reformers, 'higher standards and accountability.' I don't know about your state, but I think in my state, the higher standards are there. That's not the problem." -- Diane, Obama: Education is a 'Moral Obligation'.
"I'm a life long Democrat who believes that my party still doesn't understand that we can recruit great teachers to the schools that need them most, but we must, simultaneously, offer the highest quality professional learning for those already teaching." -- Ellin, ‘New’ Voice Speaks About Teachers at Convention.
"If teachers are not to blame for the sorry state of inner city education then maybe it is the urban Democratic mayors and other elected officials who are responsible." -- Rich, Union Tensions at DNC.
For a guy who came late to the game with an education policy plan, Sen. John McCain seemed to talk longer about education than Sen. Barack Obama did during his acceptance speech.
But what really stood out about McCain's speech was that he portrayed school choice as the bedrock of his education plan. But it's really not. McCain's education policy plan is far more complex as it tackles the issues of teacher quality, accountability, and school technology, and although choice does have a role, it's a limited one.
In that regard, McCain's school choice rhetoric is disconnected from his policy proposals.
In his acceptance speech, he said:
When a public school fails to meet its obligations to students, parents deserve a choice in the education of their children. And I intend to give it to them. Some may choose a better public school. Some may choose a private one. Many will choose a charter school. But they will have that choice and their children will have that opportunity.
That's similar to what he said to the NAACP in Cincinnati, when he pledged "school choice for all who want it."
But he hasn't explained how the federal government would operate such school choice programs. What's more, in June, his chief education and adviser, Lisa Graham Keegan, told reporters that McCain doesn't want to use Title I money for private school vouchers.
What McCain's education plan calls for is a continuation of the existing District of Columbia voucher program. And, he says he supports choice within No Child Left Behind (but even there he's vague, and seems to support making the existing parental choices of tutoring and public-school transfers available to parents earlier.) It doesn't explain how to offer school choice for "all who want it."
As I was watching cable TV network coverage last night, at least two commentators held up his school choice rhetoric as an example of how he's telling the GOP what it wants to hear. And one pointed out that McCain's line about "education is the civil rights issue of this century" is a carbon copy of a President Bush line from 2000.
Of course, school choice makes for better speech material than ideas like accountability, data, and technology.
Sen. John McCain called for a shakeup of "failed school bureaucracies" and greater parental choice in education as he accepted the Republican presidential nomination Thursday night.
"Equal access to public education has been gained. But what is the value of access to a failing school?" Sen. McCain said at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul., Minn. "We need to shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition, empower parents with choice, remove barriers to qualified instructors, attract and reward good teachers, and help bad teachers find another line of work."
The crowd gave those lines one of the loudest roars of approval of the nominee's lengthy acceptance speech.
Calling education "the civil rights issue of this century," the Arizona senator said that parents deserve to choose a new school for their children a public school "fails to meet its obligations to students."
"And I intend to give it to them," Sen. McCain said. "Some may choose a better public school. Some may choose a private one. Many will choose a charter school. But they will have that choice and their children will have that opportunity."
The Republican nominee portrayed his Democratic opponent, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, as beholden to the existing school system.
"Senator Obama wants our schools to answer to unions and entrenched bureaucrats. I want schools to answer to parents and students," Sen. McCain said. "And when I’m president, they will."
Julie Harris, an Arkansas delegate and mother of six children, cheered as Sen. McCain delivered the education segment of his speech.
The Springdale, Ark., resident homeschools three of her children, one attends a private school, and her two teenagers take courses at a local community college instead of their neighborhood high school. They had been homeschooled as well.
"I am all for parental choice," Ms. Harris said after the speech. "We actually have relatively few private schools in Arkansas. I really want to see more charter schools."
"I thought he hit the nail on the head," said Eric Happala, a Minnesota delegate and a business consultant from the town of Dassel. "I liked that he said schools should be accountable to students and parents."
And he praised Sen. McCain's call to expand school choice. "I think that's really going to resonate with the African-American community," Mr. Happala said. "They're often the ones whose children are stuck in failing schools."
Charges are flying around the Internet that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee who has a four-month-old son with Down syndrome, cut special education funding in her state. But a close look at budget documents by my colleague Christina Samuels shows that Palin actually increased state spending on special education.
Christina writes in On Special Education that these false charges spreading throughout the Web are driven by a misreading of the state's budget documents.
While at the Republican National Convention, Education Week reporters Mark Walsh and Alyson Klein spoke with school administrators, teachers, and parents about their views on Sen. John McCain and the GOP's education platform. Here is a sampling of what they said:
If Sen. John McCain wins the White House, he'll have an ally for his education agenda in Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon of California, the top Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee.
McKeon was very "on message" in an interview with Campaign K-12 yesterday. Much of what he said about the future of the No Child Left Behind Act and school policy mirrored what Lisa Graham Keegan, McCain top education adviser, told me Tuesday about McCain and the Republican agenda.
Like McCain, McKeon supports federal accountability and assessment, but also stressed state's rights and local control, at least rhetorically. When I asked him how he might square those priorities with the federally driven accountability system at the center of the NCLB law, he mentioned a bill he introduced that would give states more flexibility in spending federal education funds—something McCain hasn't mentioned yet. (But it wouldn't surprise me if it became part of his education agenda.)
Like McCain, McKeon wants students in struggling schools to have more immediate access to supplemental services and school choice. He said he tried to get those provisions into a draft NCLB reauthorization bill that he crafted with Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee.
And like McCain (and most Republicans) McKeon spoke enthusiastically about the need for performance pay for teachers.
McKeon also said that McCain and his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, differ on how much of authority the federal government should have over education—something Keegan told me on Tuesday.
"John McCain understands the office of the presidency," McKeon said. "He would not try to become school board president. He would become president of the United States. He would not try to tell us what time we should have recess and what books we should read at what time. When I hear the Democrats talk, it's more the getting into the details and more micro-managing out of Washington."
If McCain is in the White House, McKeon said the reauthorization bill would look "much like it would have been if we hadn't lost the majority" after the 2006 election. If McKeon had kept his job as chairman of the House education committee, he would have included growth models and flexibility for states in measuring the progress of students in special education and English-language learners in any plan to reauthorize the law.
Rep. McKeon complained about the lack of bipartisan cooperation in crafting that draft bill, which was released last August and faced immediate criticism from every corner of edupolicyworld. McKeon said he had a few major points he was trying to get Rep. Miller to sign onto, including on tutoring services. Miller did not "move one iota" on those proposals, he said.
"We just got to the point where we couldn't make any more progress," he said.
McKeon said he isn't sure that the bipartisan coalition that came together to pass the NCLB law in 2001 will stay intact if the Democrats remain in charge of Congress (almost all political experts predict they will). Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., the chairmen of the education panels, weren't able to get a bill passed this Congress because "the unions hamper what they can do," McKeon said.
I reminded McKeon that NCLB faces opposition from some folks in his own party, including Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan, a member of the education panel, who has introduced a bill that would permit states to opt-out of NCLB's accountability requirements. McKeon said that he is still unwilling to support that approach.
Hoekstra "wants to take off all the regulations and just give [school districts] the money," McKeon said. But, he said, as long as the federal government is using taxpayers' money to finance public education, it has a right to ask for results.
McKeon acknowledged that President Bush isn't going out with the highest approval ratings, but he said he believed that history will vindicate him—and the NCLB law.
"If an objective person were to go back and really look at" the rise in test scores, they would have to admit the law is working, he said. "The problem is it takes so long to evaluate" its effectiveness, since a student spends 13 years in elementary and secondary school.
He said NCLB has become a punching bag especially for the Democrats because "it was the GOP that did it, and they don't want to give us credit for it," he said.
McKeon wasn't always such a big McCain guy. Back during the primary, he was a huge supporter of Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, who, perhaps more than any other candidate in the Republican party, championed NCLB and accountability on the campaign trail.
Sarah Palin cast herself as the PTA and hockey mom with bite on Wednesday night, using her much-anticipated speech before the Republican National Convention to define herself as a Washington outsider who will vigorously attack the Democratic presidential ticket.
"I was just your average hockey mom who signed up for the PTA," the Alaska governor said in accepting the GOP nomination for vice president. "I signed up for the PTA because I wanted to make my children's public education even better."
The speech was well-received at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul.
"This was a home run," said Crystal Kennedy, an Alaska delegate and a member of the Anchorage school board. "The country knows she means business."
Phyllis Gorman, a retired teacher and small-business owner from Edmond, Okla., seconded that sentiment.
"I think she spoke from the heart," Gorman, an Oklahoma delegate, said of the Alaska governor. "And she showed us she knows about being tough."
Gorman said she didn't know much about Palin's record on education issues. But on Topic A of the week—the pregnancy of Palin's daughter Bristol—the Oklahoman said the candidate was handling the situation "with grace."
"We would all prefer the daughter to be married or not be pregnant," Gorman said. "But that's life."
Palin’s service on the PTA gives her hands-on experience with school policy, said Cyndi C. Mosteller, a delegate from South Carolina.
“What other presidential candidate do you know that’s been in the education trenches like that?” Mosteller said.
And delegates lauded Palin’s pledge to serve as an advocate for children with special needs.
After acknowledging her infant son Trig, who has Down syndrome, the Alaska governor said, "Children with special needs inspire a special love."
"To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters," Palin said. "I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House."
“I would say that her experience gives her insight” that most people don’t have, said Geneva Taylor, a Colorado delegate and a retired banker from Steamboat Springs.” She’s going to make sure that those types of children are taken care of.”
That's what my colleague, Mary Ann Zehr, wants to know over at her Learning the Language blog.
Republicans made subtle, yet meaningful, changes in their party platform on whether English should be the official language of the United States, according to Mary Ann.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, right, will seek to define herself tonight as the vice presidential nominee of the Republican Party.
The party's convention here in St. Paul has become defined by Sen. John McCain's surprise choice for a running mate, with her relative inexperience, the revelation of her daughter's pregnancy, and her views on sex education and teaching creationism all providing fodder.
Delegates at the Xcel Energy Center appeared firmly supportive of the Alaska governor.
Jerry Bowen, a Republican delegate and real estate agent from Franklin, Tenn., said he thinks the pregnancy of Palin's 17-year-old daughter makes the Alaska governor an excellent spokeswoman for abstinence-only sex education, a policy that Bowen supports.
“I think Gov. Palin is the poster child for that message,” he said. “We can not condemn her daughter for being human and making a mistake.”
When McCain selected Palin, Michelle Steel, a delegate from Los Angeles, said she was “shocked, because I didn’t know who she was.”
But now she is excited by the Alaskan—particularly by the prospect of having a woman on the ticket.
Ms. Steel, who serves on the state Board of Equalization in California, said she isn’t troubled by Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy.
“You don’t know what [teenagers] are going to do,” said Steel, who has two young adult children. “You can’t follow them everywhere. … I think it’s time to drop it and move on.”
That hasn't happened, as the media has used the pregnancy news as the launching pad for stories on Palin's support for abstinence education (and just how her daughter's pregnancy is or isn't relevant), whether Palin could juggle the vice president's job with her family situation, and whether the governor was thoroughly vetted by the McCain campaign.
In an interview on Monday before Palin announced her daughter's pregnancy, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was slightly off-message from the McCain campaign's effort to portray Palin as experienced.
"I don’t really know her personally, and I look forward to getting to know her better," Spellings said. "She’s only been there in office for a year and a half or so."
The secretary said she was familiar with Alaska's record on education, including during Palin's tenure.
"They have done some really interesting things up there," Spellings said. "They have one of the best data systems in the country. They're one of our growth-model pilot states, one of 10. They applied for differentiated accountability, and they’ve got one of our [Teacher Incentive Fund] grants."
"They’ve got a long way to go, no doubt about it," the secretary added. "Their standards are fairly low, and their achievement lags the national average. Beyond that, I look forward to meeting her."
While attending the Republican National Convention on his first day as president of the National Education Association, Dennis Van Roekel spoke with Education Week reporter Mark Walsh about why he was at the RNC and how the NEA feels about Sen. John McCain's education agenda.
As president, Sen. McCain will champion assessments and accountability, and he will be able to persuade the more conservative wing of his party, which disparages the No Child Left Behind Act as an unprecedented overreach of federal authority, to support those policies, Lisa Graham Keegan, McCain's top education adviser told me in an interview today.
She participated in the meetings last week during which the GOP hammered out its education platform and said she was surprised by the level of agreement in the room.
"I was amazed at how much coalescence there was around Sen. McCain's education agenda," she said."His agenda is the party's agenda."
But it was hard to pin her down on what kind of changes McCain would seek to the NCLB law. She mentioned growth models, which permit states to measure individual student achievement, rather than comparing different cohorts of students to one another. Okay ... but that the U.S. Department of Education already permits states to use approved growth models in their accountability systems.
And when I asked her how Sen. McCain's education policy would differ from President Bush's, she said that, "We've learned a lot from No Child Left Behind" and that McCain would seek more immediate help for students in failing schools.
"If we find out a child is not doing well, that child immediately gets tutoring, that child gets an option for a new school," she said.
I wonder if that means the prospective McCain administration would speed up the law's timetable of sanctions. Or would it just make it easier for parents to access the choice and supplemental services provisions of the law? Either way, that could be a tough sell to a Congress that in all likelihood will remain under Democratic control.
When I asked Keegan about that, she touted McCain's record working with Democrats on issues such as campaign finance reform.
"McCain is the right guy to do that," she said.
Phil Handy, who served as chairman of the Florida state board of education under Gov. Jeb Bush and is another top education adviser to the McCain campaign, was also on hand. He and Keegan told me that McCain sees the role between the federal government and the states as a partnership.
Keegan said that's a contrast from his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who has a more top-down approach, in her view.
"He has not taken a reform position at all," she said. "He's proposing a myriad of small [federal] programs."
And Handy reminded me that McCain has signed onto the Education Equality Project's statement, which seeks to advance the idea that schools are primarily responsible for student achievement and promotes greater accountability for teachers and public school choice. Obama has not signed that statement, a move McCain attributed to union opposition in a speech last month. So I guess they're still trying to get some mileage out of that.
Later that evening, Keegan addressed the convention. I was all primed for a speech on education policy, but she barely mentioned schools at all, except to say that McCain had supported her when she ran for Arizona school's chief.
"When I decided to run for state school superintendent in Arizona, folks were pretty skeptical," she told the delegates. "Nobody had ever run for that position before as a committed advocate for school choice. But John McCain was there for me. He even offered to be my campaign chairman."
The rest of her speech urged delegates to support hurricane recovery efforts in the Gulf Coast.
In another public appearance yesterday, at the forum sponsored by the American Solutions for Winning the Future, a nonprofit organization started by Newt Gingrich, Keegan positioned herself as a champion for accountability through testing.
"We are in serious denial in our country," Keegan said. She told a story about how she had "walk[ed] into a wealthy suburban school" and heard the principal say of the state math test for accountability, "you know what I couldn't have passed this test. And my response was 'shame on you.' They had to take me out with armed guards."
Rep. Michael N. Castle, a key moderate member of the House education committee, says that President Bush dropped the ball on education policy after the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act. But he expects that either Sen. John McCain or Sen. Barack Obama will support retaining the federal law's commitment to accountability if elected president.
"I believe very strongly we need a president of the United States who is focused on education," Rep. Castle, a Delaware Republican, said Tuesday at an education forum in Minneapolis. "I do not believe we've had that president of late."
Education requires a president who is willing to "bang on the table" to bring about major school improvement, said Castle, who is the ranking Republican on the early childhood, elementary and secondary education subcommittee of the House Education and Labor Committee.
"President Bush did that for a year or two with No Child Left Behind, but there wasn't the focus after that, and I have a problem with that," Castle said.
Asked whether opposition to the NCLB law would be enough to scuttle the law's accountability provisions, Castle said, "I don't think either candidate for president is going to let that happen."
In an interview, Castle said neither Sen. McCain, who will become the Republican nominee this week, nor Sen. Obama, the Democratic nominee, has discussed education enough thus far.
"These individuals need to elevate that aspect of their campaign," he said.
Castle said the election of McCain would bring a possibility of bipartisan action on renewing the NCLB law and other education legislation.
The Arizona senator "is a person who has always worked well with other people," Castle said. "I'm sure he would call in George Miller and Ted Kennedy to his office and whatever Republicans are there and say, 'How can we work this out?'—if he has the focus on education."
Don't expect to hear the federal school law cited much at the Republican convention, said Castle, who in July introduced his own bill to renew the law that would, among other things, allow all states to use growth models to measure individual student progress over time as the means of accountability under the law.
"You’re not going to hear it here," Castle said. "Politically, it’s not popular."
"If you look to Congress, you're going to find a lot of experienced members who support No Child Left Behind, Republicans and Democrats alike, relatively newer conservative Republicans who will not support it under any circumstances, a number of conservative Republicans who won’t support it, and a number of liberal Democrats who won’t support it," Castle said. "I think a majority of Congress would support the right changes in No Child Left Behind, but a very bare majority. Therefore, I don’t think you’re going to see it much in the campaign."
President Bush isn't the only Republican who believes in high academic standards and aggressive accountability. That's the message that came across at today's event put on by American Solutions for Winning the Future, a nonprofit organization started by Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. The Education Equality Project and ED in 08 were among the co-sponsors of the event.
Gingrich's group used the issue of global competitiveness to galvanize support for policies, including alternative pay for teachers and rigorous curricula benchmarked against international standards. For education redesign efforts to succeed, they will have to be championed by Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, Gingrich said.
"If you're going to get this to scale, it's going to have to be a tripartisan effort," Gingrich said. "What we're going to have here today is some people you've probably traditionally thought of as Democrats and some you've probably thought of as Republicans."
Gingrich especially seemed to get a kick out of sharing a stage with the Rev. Al Sharpton, the co-chairman of the Education Equality Project and a 2004 Democratic presidential candidate. Gingrich made sure that the two posed for a photo with the other panelists, including Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings; top McCain education adviser Lisa Graham Keegan; and ED in '08's Roy Romer.
"Most of you didn't come here so that you could go home and tell your friends how much Al Sharpton impressed you," Gingrich joked. Sharpton and other members of the Education Equality Project had similar criticisms of unions at last week's Democratic National Convention.
Sharpton's speech garnered loud applause from the largely Republican crowd, particularly when he emphasized parental responsibility and took teachers' unions to task for what he perceived as their failure to embrace accountability.
"You cannot say schools must be improved but that we can not judge the performance of teachers," he said. "We cannot have any sacred cows in the room when our children are behind in math and science."
In his speech, ED in '08's Roy Romer subtly urged the more conservative wing of the Republican party to embrace the idea that, early in the next administration state school chiefs, governors, and the new administration should sit down together to craft high standards. He said that presidential candidates are often afraid of talking about education policy because they're worried about offending proponents of local control.
And Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who until was last week was widely speculated to be McCain's veep pick, talked about his own record on education redesign, particularly the need for merit pay, something he has championed in Minnesota.
In her speech, Secretary Spellings said that advocates for federal accountability need to do a better job selling their proposals, particularly to suburban voters.
"We haven't fully made our case to the American people," she said, adding that some voters have criticized the law for taking resources away from one school's "gifted flute program" and steering it towards inner city schools. "People don't get what's at stake for this country."
Part of the problem, she said, is educational policy lingo. When officials used terms such as adequate yearly progress and international benchmarking, "parents don't know what we're talking about," she said.
Keegan, who moderated the panel, didn't give a speech. But she did emphasize McCain's and her own support for accountability. "I'm proud to be working for [someone] who backs NCLB and its accountability requirements," she said. Which sounded pretty Spellings-esque, at least to me.
Every four years, it is a surprise to some people that the National Education Association has a presence at the Republican National Convention.
After all, the nation's largest teachers' union usually endorses the Democratic candidate for president, including this year, when it is backing Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois. And the union is a regular punching bag for many Republicans and conservatives.
But the NEA always has delegates at the Republican convention, though always far fewer than member-delegates at the Democratic Convention.
This year, there are 40 NEA members among the almost 2,400 delegates at the GOP convention. At the Democratic convention, 200 NEA members were among the more than 4,000 delegates.
Dennis Van Roekel, who was in his first day on Monday as the new president of the NEA, pointed out that his union has some 1 million Republican members—nearly a third of the union's 3.2 million members.
"We want to encourage our Republican members to be active in their party," Van Roekel said at a downtown Minneapolis jazz club, where several unions led by the NEA were hosting a "labor salute to Republican supporters."
Days before the start of the Republican convention, the NEA invited some of its GOP members—four from every state—to a leadership conference in Minneapolis to train them in political activism.
"I know there will be criticism" of his union at the GOP convention, Van Roekel said, "but there are also voices of support among Republicans."
One of the participants in the leadership conference was Jerome Hoynes, a social studies teacher at Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook, Ill. At the labor luncheon, he was wearing an "I am the NEA" button.
"I am proud to be an NEA member, proud to be a teacher, and proud to be a Republican," said Hoynes, who is not a convention delegate but says he would be an elector for Sen. John McCain should the Republican win the Illinois in November.
Hoynes said he was gung-ho for McCain because of the Arizona senator's "lifelong track record" and his status as a war hero. The teacher was less enthusiastic about McCain's support for private school vouchers.
"I'm sure that when he's elected, John McCain will be the type of president who listens to us," Hoynes said, meaning NEA members.
Van Roekel is a former Arizona teacher and an ex-president of the state's NEA affiliate. He said he has known McCain for 30 years and interviewed him for the state union's endorsement when McCain first ran for Congress.
Van Roekel said he was disappointed McCain declined to participate in the NEA's endorsement process for the presidential race. (Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was the only Republican who did.)
"We don't agree with a lot of his positions" on education issues, especially on vouchers, Van Roekel said of McCain.
"And he supports No Child Left Behind pretty much the way it is," Van Roekel said—something the NEA does not.
Now that the GOP convention is underway, the Republican party has given its official stamp of approval to an education platform that mirrors many of the K-12 proposals of Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the nearly nominee.
The platform calls for merit pay for teachers, and for permitting principals to recruit the best educators "without regard to collective bargaining agreements." And it supports school choice options, including expanding charter schools and giving families access to private school vouchers that can be used at both secular and religious schools. It commends efforts by local school districts to recruit professionals from higher education, business, and the military to serve as adjunct instructors, if they are needed.
McCain has advocated a top-to-bottom review of all federal programs and the platform repeats this call, saying that policymakers must examine all programs at the U.S. Department of Education to make sure they are effective. It says that K-12 spending at the Department of Education has "shot up almost 41 percent to $25 billion" in less than a decade even though "the constitution assigns the federal government no role in education." And, in a nod to small government conservatives, it says that the federal government must "respect the role of states" and "better meet state needs."
McCain didn't mention the No Child Left Behind Act in his speech when he laid out his education proposals to the annual meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in Cincinnati in July. And the GOP platform is just as vague about the federal school improvement law—the education portion also doesn't mention the measure by name. Instead, it calls for "accountability for student achievement; periodic testing on the fundamentals of learning especially math and reading, history and geography; transparency, so parents and the federal government know which school best serve their students."
That language isn't inconsistent with NCLB, but it definitely opens the door to changes in the law, which calls for testing in reading and math in grades 3-8 and once in high school.
The platform also takes traditionally conservative views on issues that McCain hasn't mentioned much on the campaign trail. It supports "English First" instruction, apparently as opposed to bilingual education. And it says that the party will "energetically assert the right of students to engage in voluntary prayer in schools." The document also calls for replacing "family planning" programs for teenagers with increased funding for abstinence education.
U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is glad that the No Child Left Behind Act wasn't reauthorized as scheduled last year, because "where we were headed would have been a bad reauthorization," she told Education Week today.
Her comments, in an interview on the opening day of the scaled-back Republican National Convention, were an apparent reference to a draft bill crafted by Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee. That measure would have permitted some states to use local assessments in their accountability systems, among other changes that were largely criticized by supporters of the current NCLB law as an effort to weaken accountability.
Secretary Spellings said over coffee that the additional time to craft a renewal of the school improvement law will help give the coalition that came together to pass NCLB a chance to regroup and continue to build support for the law's central principle of accountability.
Ms. Spellings agreed that education has taken a back seat to other issues, such as the economy and energy, in the presidential campaign. But she sees the lack of discussion of the No Child Left Behind Act on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Denver as a positive development.
"I usually operate in the no-news-is-good-news realm," she said. When asked why Sen. Barack Obama's criticism of the law on the campaign trail frequently met with enthusiastic applause, she said, "It's not a secret that lots of interests groups have spent millions tarnishing the [NCLB] brand."
Unsurprisingly, Secretary Spellings said she thought that Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the soon-to-be-official Republican nominee, would make a better education president than Sen. Obama, who officially became the Democratic nominee last week.
"I do not think he's going to be worried about the teachers' unions and the equities of grown-ups," she said of Mr. McCain. "NCLB was a necessary first step, and I think he recognizes that."
She said it's her impression that Sen. McCain, like President Bush, is "a different kind of Republican" on education issues, as opposed to some GOP conservatives who have sought to significantly scale back the federal role in education by allowing states to opt out of NCLB's accountability requirements.
But she also had kind words for the Democratic nominee. She said Sen. Obama "seems to understand the civil rights community and their equities," as shown by many leaders who favor strong accountability for schools, "versus the unions and their equities." She added: "I think it was bold for him to speak out on merit pay. Let's see it happen."
Hurricane Gustav has prompted a major shake-up of the GOP convention schedule here. But Secretary Spellings appeared to be going about her schedule as planned, although she said she had been in touch with Paul G. Pastorek, the Louisiana schools chief, to see if he needed any help. "Of course, we're prepared to do what's needed," she said.
When Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast three years ago, the U.S. Department of Education helped ensure that students from New Orleans and other affected areas were able to temporarily enroll in other school districts.
Strong American Schools, the group behind the ED in '08 campaign to boost debate about education in the presidential campaign, has a full-page ad in this morning's St. Paul Pioneer Press that bluntly says, "Our schools are failing."
The ad, in the newspaper's special news section on the Republican National Convention, displays a ranking of national flags showing the United States as 21st in the world in science. (The fine print cites several assessments, including two from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.)
"The countries with the best schools attract the best jobs," the ad says. "If jobs move to countries like Finland and South Korea, your child's opportunities dry up. And so does our economy."
The ad calls for rigorous national standards, performance pay for teachers, and more learning time and support for students.
"Wake up the school board in your town and the politicians in Washington," it says.
Strong American Schools chief Roy Romer, a former Democratic governor of Colorado, is scheduled to take part in an education forum for convention participants on Tuesday. Romer and Strong American Schools also participated in the Democratic National Convention last week in Denver.
Meanwhile, also in today's Pioneer Press, University of Minnesota education policy expert Joe Nathan has this opinion essay, headlined: "Minnesota schools rank high, but are challenged by myth and complacency."
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