Excerpted from the Chicago Tribune,”When schools fail our kids “.
August 17, 2008
When schools fail … their students are not the only ones who suffer. The rest of us pay the price: a less productive economy and more social ills.
Neither Obama nor McCain have done nearly enough to chart a path to better schools for all. Both have … taken refuge in vagueness.
On many points they display no real disagreement. Both endorse the federal No Child Left Behind Act; both favor spending money to help attract young people to teaching; both promise steps to make college more affordable. While each makes it clear No Child Left Behind needs changes, neither has spelled out in bold detail what he would do differently.
McCain deserves credit for being open to options that would weaken the bureaucracy of the public education industry. He wants to make it easier for people to enter teaching after spending years gaining knowledge in other fields.
McCain also favors expanding a voucher program available to low-income families in Washington, D.C.—the better to create real competition for public schools that lack enough incentive to steer kids toward better outcomes. These are the schools that lamely tolerate … the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
The Obama campaign … says that funding vouchers … “is hardly a strategy to fix schools throughout this country.”
So where is Obama’s pathbreaking strategy? In his recent speech to the NEA, he endorsed “more accountability” and “higher standards.” No one is against those principles; the trouble is how to achieve them.
He suggests he knows the way by saying, “When our educators succeed, I will not just talk about how great they are. I will reward them for their greatness with better pay and more support.”
But how about when our educators fail? Is he willing to demand not only incentives for good teaching but penalties—reasonably prompt terminations included—for bad teaching? Would he, for example, amend No Child Left Behind to demand that school districts make it less cumbersome to get incompetents out of the classroom or the principal’s office?
He’s given no sign of it. That’s a particular shame because Obama won in the primaries without the support of either major teachers union. Given that he’s not beholden to them, he should be free to embrace remedies that previous Democratic nominees treated as untouchable.
* * * * *
For full editorial:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0817edit1aug17,0,6811109.story
* * * * *
Want more from the Homa Files?
Click link => The Homa Files Blog
* * * * *
The Homa Files 
Leave a comment