Campaign K-12

The only sitting governor in the presidential race—and the campaign's loudest NCLB naysayer—is calling it quits. Though New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson hasn't made it official, every media outlet in town is reporting it. (Update: He just made it official, a little before 3:30 p.m. today).

This means Gov. Richardson, a Democrat, can stop thinking up more verbs he can use to describe what he wants to do with NCLB. "Scrap it", "junk it", "get rid of it", "throw it out", and the list goes on...While that may have resonated with the education community fed up with all of the testing and accountability, Richardson never said what he would replace NCLB with.

The leading Democrats left in the race have slightly more moderate approaches to No Child Left Behind (although former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, who supports better testing and broader measures of student learning gains, has said that it may be necessary to ditch it.) New York Sen. Hillary Clinton has called it a great promise that's resulted in an unfunded mandate. And Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois wants to improve assessments and provide more resources to low-performing schools.

Posted by Michele McNeil at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Boosting teacher pay is a hot education reform topic on the presidential campaign trail, especially for Democrats. Barack Obama even talked about it last night during his second-place-finish speech in the New Hampshire primary, saying, "We [need to] stop talking about how great teachers are and start rewarding them for their greatness."

It's a popular message with unions, whose members are a key voting bloc. Teacher pay is relatively easy for voters to understand in short sound bites. Plus, many voters find it hard to argue with the need to pay teachers more money for the vital, and difficult, public service job they perform.

But if the end game is, indeed, to recruit and retain new teachers, then EdWeek's new state-by-state "Quality Counts 2008" report suggests the solution is far more complicated than anything that can fit in a 15-second sound bite.

And this means the teacher-pay proposals of the candidates merit more scrutiny. For the most part, this scrutiny is limited to Democrats, who are the only ones seriously talking about teacher pay issues.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's plan to make the average starting salary for teachers in America $40,000 could be seen as overly simplistic. And that's because, according to Quality Counts, teacher pay varies widely by state and is a bigger issue in some parts of the country than others. Montana and Rhode Island, for example, have median teacher salaries that are above those for comparable jobs. But teachers in North Carolina and Missouri make far less than peers in similar jobs. So the solutions may be different for different states.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, of New York, has been rather vague on teacher pay issues, except to make it perfectly clear she thinks merit pay for teachers is "demeaning." Though she may not like merit pay, it is clear, from what the Quality Counts researchers found, that good teachers now have little hope of making big salary gains, which could hurt efforts to retain the best educators.

And speaking of money, former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards' plan calls for giving teachers $15,000 bonuses for teaching in high-poverty schools. But money may not be enough, as explained in the Quality Counts story, "Working Conditions Trump Pay." Teachers also want good building leadership, support from their colleagues and bosses, and classroom resources.

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois has one of the most comprehensive plans, which touches on everything from supporting mentoring programs and common planning time to recruiting teacher-candidates for high-needs schools. But even he overlooks a common problem for states: data quality. Quality Counts revealed that only 20 states have, and can verify, their ability to track the number of highly qualified teachers overall, and the number in high-poverty schools.

Without good data collection, it will be hard to gauge the effectiveness of any new teacher programs. But try getting the words "data quality" or "data collection" in a voter-friendly, 15-second sound bite.

Posted by Michele McNeil at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Despite some Republican success in courting Hispanic voters over the last decade, it appears that hard stances by a number of high-profile GOP politicians and presidential candidates on illegal immigration are, predictably, causing a big political U-turn.

That's according to a study released today by the Pew Hispanic Center, which finds that the percentage of Hispanics who say they're Republicans is at its lowest point since at least 1999 —at 23 percent. That's down from 28 percent in 2004 and 2006. That's good news for Democrats: 57 percent of Hispanic voters now say they're Democrats, up from 49 percent in 2006, but still shy of the 58 percent high in 1999.

Interestingly, only one in six Hispanic voters were aware that one of the presidential candidates—New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat—is Hispanic.

The potential sway of Hispanic voters is not to be overlooked. They will make up about 9 percent of the voting population next year, when the country elects a new president. More than one-third of the country's estimated 45.5 million Latinos are school-age (under age 18).

Education and illegal immigration have intersected on the campaign trail. Most recently, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has deflected criticism from fellow Republican presidential candidates on his support of a bill in Arkansas (which eventually failed) that would have granted academic scholarships to children of undocumented immigrants if they meet all other requirements.

Even though immigration is a top concern for Hispanic voters, it's not the top, according to the report.

Education is.

Update: Check out the Learning the Language blog for an interesting item from my colleague Mary Ann Zehr on U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Republican from Colorado, who is sitting out an upcoming debate. Why? El se opone a que le traduzcan sus comentarios al español.

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That's the opening line of New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's new television ad that's running in Iowa. I question the "only" and the "bold" part of his claim.

His "bold plan," if elected president: getting rid of the No Child Left Behind Act, expanding prekindergarten, paying teachers more, and expanding math and science academies. Hardly original ideas, since most of those proposals are shared by every other Democratic candidate in the race. Webster's dictionary defines bold as "readiness to take risks, daring, fearless," and although he goes a step further than other candidates by calling for an all-out elimination of NCLB, I'd still be hesitant to call his plan bold since proposing to expand pre-K and boost teacher salaries are safe bets for a Democratic presidential candidate these days.

Still, I kept watching his ad, which further directs viewers to see what he "did" for New Mexico schools by going to www.risingschools.com.

The site details a list of education accomplishments in New Mexico, and mentions that Education Week's Quality Counts gave his state an A for assessments and accountability. I thought this merited some fact-checking.

Richardson is right, we did give New Mexico an A in 2006, and gave the state other high marks for improving teacher quality and allocating resources equitably.

However, Richardson understandably left out an important fact: More recently, in the 2007 Quality Counts, New Mexico ranked dead last among the 50 states and the District of Columbia for providing children with chances for success from cradle to career.

There is a bright side to this dismal ranking for Gov. Richardson. Christopher Swanson, the director of the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, which produced the report, told me that New Mexico officials didn't shrink away from the story—that they instead used it to bring more attention to the importance of education and funding in their state.

Update: Check out this on-point cartoon, which appeared in the Baton Rouge (La.) Advocate this year shortly after our Quality Counts report debuted. Thanks to the cartoonist, Frank Mulhearn, for his permission to reprint this here.

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In last night's Democratic debate on CNN, the seven presidential candidates were asked whether they were in favor of the very controversial issue of merit pay for teachers, which is generally fiercely opposed by some of the Democrats' biggest supporters—the teachers' unions.

None of the candidates came out in favor of the kind of merit pay in which individual teachers are paid more based on their results in the classroom. Interestingly, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, who is the only Democratic candidate to openly support and talk about merit pay for individual teachers on the campaign trail, didn't jump in to tackle the issue during last night's debate. You can read the transcript here.

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton said she favors "school-based" merit pay, which would reward all teachers and staff members in a high-achieving school regardless of their individual abilities. That's very different than rewarding individual teachers for excelling in their jobs. "The school is a team, and I think it's important that we reward that collaboration," she said. When pressed about whether bad teachers in a school that is otherwise excelling should be given merit pay, she said those bad teachers should be "weed(ed) out." Opponents, of course, say that's easier said than done when teachers' contracts and unions make it very difficult for school districts to do just that.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, of Connecticut, the first to answer, said he would be in favor of a pay system for teachers who go into poor, rural, or difficult schools and make a difference—but didn't want a merit-pay system that rewarded teachers who taught in "better neighborhoods."

Sen. Joseph Biden, of Delaware, whose wife is a community college English instructor, said teachers should be judged and rewarded by what they do outside of the classroom — such as get advanced degrees.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson didn't really answer the question, but used his time to bash the No Child Left Behind Act and declare that he would be the next education president.

The general message from Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich is that, if he is elected, the teachers' unions would have a very good friend in the White House, which he said would be a "worker's White House." When asked whether he disagreed with the teachers' unions on any issue, he didn't name a single one.

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