The Candidates And Education

There is no cliche more correct every time than "Education is the great equalizer". With American being a society which has moved away from agrarian and even industrial work forces, the education of the populace becomes even more critical.

Politico recently ran a column detailing the media's three presidential candidates' positions on education. Here is a summary of the positions and an opinion on each.

John McCain
-Supports "No Child Left Behind" and private school vouchers, accountability and testing
-Does not support the COST of universal pre-K or teacher merit pay
-Has not put emphasis on higher education, supports expanding grants
Barack Obama
-Supports merit pay for teachers, charter schools and reform of NCLB
-Promotes Pre-K and younger age education programs
-Supports community service requirement for college students
Hillary Clinton
-Wants an end to NCLB, supports teachers unions and increased funding
-Supports universal pre-K and anti-poverty programs for younger kids
-Supports higher education financial aid in exchange for service

To critique each of these positions, let's take the education lifetime in chronological order.

There is a lot of talk about the cost of universal pre-K, and to this extent McCain has a point, it is going to be expensive. But where McCain is foolishly misguided is that in no other part of the education lifetime will America get more return on investment. There are too many studies which show the biggest growth in intelligence is from birth to year five, with the greatest growth being from birth to two years of age. There might be room to complain about the cost if we weren't throwing away billions monthly in Iraq, but in essence McCain is asking to delay educating our children because war takes up too much of our resources. Clinton, on the other end of the spectrum, wants to pay for universal pre-K, and then throw more money at poverty programs in hope that a few more parents may get involved in the lives of their children. I'm sure such programs would enjoy the funding, but it sounds more like just hoping something will change. Although Obama will also increase funding for universal pre-K, his willingness to pursue education in even younger children, where it will actually do the most good, puts his pre-K ideas ahead of the other two.

On secondary education, one thing that should be obvious is that there needs to be alternatives than simply the same status quo neighborhood educational situation. In many ways, this setup works, but there are too many instances where it does not, and with graduation rates falling toward almost 50-60% in some areas, this cannot continue. The candidates views are a mixed bag here. Clinton, again wants the status quo as far as funding and control, with more money going to schools with little outside the box ideas. It was a formula that worked forty or fifty years ago, but can't cover how many different challenges there are today. Obama supports merit pay for teachers, but as is always the case, who determines what earns merit pay. In many cases under measured achievement, particularly in larger districts, favored schools begin to show tendencies to pick and choose higher ability children and children from favorable backgrounds while relegating other schools to handle the rest. How then is merit pay defined for the teachers who are told to teach these children, because the other schools simply don't want them. McCain's support of private school vouchers remains just a sideways wink at those who wish to put public money into religious schools. School choice on the surface isn't a bad thing, but drawing students and funding from public schools in order to let them wither and die is, and that is what most proponents of vouchers are trying to accomplish.

I've left the unmitigated disaster that is No Child Left Behind for last intentionally. Not only once of the worst education concepts to come along in my memory, but that any candidate wishes to continue this fabulous promotion of homogeneous mediocrity is stupefying. NCLB is an unfunded mandate which forces schools to use significant amounts of scarce resources to often focus on failing student as the expense of the motivated and interested. A more appropriate name for the program would be No Child Allowed To Achieve. In this case, as much as it pains me, I have to support Clinton here. The NCLB boondoggle need to go away.

There isn't really enough on post-secondary education to go on, there are some ideas from the candidates out there, but the key to college and university education is to get government to stay away. There are some issues to address such as the loan industry and rising tuition costs, but overall McCain has the right idea to expand grants and leave colleges and universities to make decisions themselves.

All told, the Politico article is correct in that there isn't enough focus on education and all the candidates have a long way to go to serve the public well in one of the most important areas.