Candidates Flip-Flop on Education
People used to complain that the two parties are Tweedledee and Tweedledum. But this year nobody can say the election doesn’t offer stark alternatives. The problem is keeping track of who’s offering which alternative, as the candidates continually flip-flop.
Take education, for example. Suppose I told you Candidate A has supported rigorous academic standards, has stood up to the teachers’ unions — even been booed by them at their convention — and proclaimed the free-market principles that schools should compete for students and better teachers should get higher salaries. On the other hand, Candidate B says that competition hurts schools, that kids should be taught a radical left-wing civics curriculum, that we should throw more money at teachers’ unions — excuse me, at schools — and that rigorous academic standards should be replaced with the unions’ old lower-the-bar favorite, “portfolio assessment.”
Candidate A is Barack Obama. So is Candidate B.
Meanwhile, Candidate C has made an alliance with the teachers’ unions, opposed school choice, thrown money at the unions — excuse me, at schools — and even helped undermine a badly needed reform of bloated union pensions. On the other hand, Candidate D has broken with the teachers’ unions, demanded that schools should have to compete for students, and endorsed the most radical federal education reform agenda ever proposed by a national candidate, including a national school choice program for all disabled students.
Candidate C is Sarah Palin. So is Candidate D.
Obama has embraced education-reform principles never before seen at this level in the Democratic party. He not only supports charter schools, he justifies his support by arguing that competition arising from parental choice improves schools. In the last presidential debate, he said: “I doubled the number of charter schools in Illinois despite some reservations from teachers’ unions. I think it’s important to foster competition inside the public schools.” Even most Republican charter school supporters don’t appeal so directly to free-market principles.
This seems to have slipped by largely unnoticed even by the world of education wonks, but it’s a big deal. And it will be a big deal even if Obama is just saying what he needs to say to get elected and never again lifts a finger for the cause of education reform.
For decades, the unions have argued that the whole idea of bringing competition to education is crazy right-wing ideology. Now we can respond by asking if Barack Obama is a crazy, right-wing ideologue.
That’s not going to end the debate over competition in education. But it’s going to help.
Obama also supports reform on the crucial issue of differential pay. In every profession except education, your pay depends on what kind of assignment you take on and how well you perform. One of the main dysfunctions in the current system is that teachers are paid on a factory-worker scale where they don’t make more for working in tougher school assignments (guaranteeing that teachers flee those schools) or for performing better (guaranteeing that the profession will not attract top performers). When Obama mentioned his support for differential pay while accepting the endorsement of the National Education Association, the union actually booed him.
I’ve been in the construction business most of my life and if something goes wrong often the foreman gets fired not the worker because the foreman was not doing his job. Same thing with education, if the children are failing fire the teacher. Make sense in my book.
We’ve already seen what Barack Obama will do for our education system: he’ll spend the money on radicals, who will focus on getting votes from adults for Democrats.
My observation has been that when the powers that be can’t get it together relative to the public schools, they tend to try to divert attention by piling on more regulations over home educators.
The reason for the confusion on this issue, is the federal government has no business in the field of education, other than maybe school loans. Just another layer of bureaucracy to waste more dollars.
What I’d like to see is the State governments collect the revenues for the schools, and give every cent on a per-head basis to the individual school districts. No layers of bureaucracy. No experts trying to find new, better ways to teach the three R’s. No new indoctrination programs. Just basic education. Average cost pre student this year? $10k. X 25 students per class. A quarter mil per class per year. Ridiculous. Amateurs.
One thing is that, if we continue to allow the kind of teaching prevalent in our public schools, we will completely destroy the idea of citizen controlled government.
We have seen what Barack Obama will do to improve education of schoolchildren: he will give money to radical organizations to promote “political organization” of adults. Annenberg. Annenberg. Annenberg.
“I’ve been in the construction business most of my life and if something goes wrong often the foreman gets fired not the worker because the foreman was not doing his job. Same thing with education, if the children are failing fire the teacher. Make sense in my book.”
Jude, I have been both a teacher and construction worker and the difference is that a good teacher can not get ride of the student who doesn’t want to be in school, and any average foreman can FIRE any worker for almost any thing.