Feel like voting Democrat next year? Via Joanne Jacobs, here are the official positions on education by the nine leading contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination.
A few bullet points:
* Sen. John Edwards, Sen. John Kerry, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman all supported NCLB originally; Senator Lieberman was instrumental in helping construct it.
* NCLB does not, however, seem to be very popular among the candidates as a whole (surprise, surprise).
* General Wesley Clark produced some impressive blather on why we can't use test scores to see how well students are performing:
Schools aren't businesses. Schools are institutions of public service. Their job--their product--is not measured in terms of revenues gained. It's measured in terms of young lives whose potential can be realized. And you don't measure that either in terms of popularity of the school, or in terms of the standardized test scores in the school. You measure it child-by-child, in the interaction of the child with the teacher, the parent with the teacher, and the child in a larger environment later on in life.
In other words, it doesn't matter if the parents prefer the school, or if the objective scores show that children at the school all learned a core curriculum. What matters is that the school prides itself on how teachers "interact" with parents and students, and it's apparently up to the school, rather than the parents, to decide what each child's potential is.
If you want to improve schools, you've got to go inside the processes that make a school great. You've got to look at the teachers, their qualifications, their motivation, what it is that gives a teacher satisfaction, what it is a teacher wants to do in a classroom. We've got to empower teachers.
I have no quarrel with his opinion that teachers are what can make a school great. I'm just amazed that this statement of General Clark's is followed by a criticism of the current NCLB-supporting Bush government, which is desperately trying to provide guidance to teachers whose "motivation" and "satisfaction" do nothing to actually educate their young charges. I'm all for supporting teachers, but at what point did we decide that teachers are the one who are supposed to be satisfied with educational outcomes, rather than their students, or the parents?
* Howard Dean is quite the nanny-state supporter, and vehemently opposes NCLB, but has "yet to roll out any detailed proposals for education."
* Sen. Edwards wants to make the first year of college free for all students. Those of you who are better versed in economics than I can write him letters explaining how making goods and services artificially "free" often makes them scarce, if not worthless. He's also anti-teachers-union, because he wants bad teachers to be tossed more quickly, and free college tuition for teachers who agree to serve in high-needs schools (despite what union rules might say on the subject).
* Rep. Dick Gephardt wants it all. Affirmative action in college. Smaller classes. A ROTC-like program that gets education students out of student loans based on a five-year teaching requirement (um, what about the rest of us?). Oh, and teaching reform that doesn't affect current tenure rules. Yeah, right.
* And then there's The Reverend Al Sharpton, who just wants us all to have a moment of silence in school so that kids can pray. Sen. Edwards can use that time to pray no one from the teachers' unions ever gets ahold of him.
Posted by kswygert at November 12, 2003 06:48 PM