Presidential hopefuls offer various proposals on education
By Ellie Ashford
01/08 -- While education has not been among the top issues among those running for their parties’ presidential nominations so far, the following is a summary of what some of the candidates are saying about K-12 education.
The Democrats
Sen. Hillary Rodham
Clinton of New York proposes $5 billion in federal funding for the first year of a new voluntary, universal prekindergarten program.
At a campaign stop in South Carolina Nov. 28, Clinton said she would cut the minority dropout rate in half during the next decade by spending $1 billion on early childhood education, identifying at-risk children, and supporting teachers in high-need areas. She also proposes a $100 million investment in summer internships for at-risk youths.
During a meeting with teachers at an elementary school in Waterloo, Iowa, Nov. 20, Clinton called performance-based merit pay for teachers a bad idea, saying it “could be demeaning and discouraging,” the Associated Press (AP) reported.
Clinton also said she supports incentives for teachers who work in certain areas or teach subjects where there are shortages, according to the AP, and supports “schoolwide pay-for-performance programs,” because she said “the school has to be viewed as whole unit with everybody working together.”
Clinton supports reforming the No Child Left Behind Act but hasn’t released specifics. Her website says the law “represented a promise -- more resources for schools in exchange for more accountability -- and that promise has not been kept.”
Clinton, along with Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois and and Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, who also are in the race, are members of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which is developing proposals for reauthorizing NCLB.
Obama supports the overall goal of NCLB but says it has “demoralized our educators, broken its promise to our children, and must be changed in a fundamental way.”
Obama supports an accountability system that seeks to help schools improve “rather than focuses on punishments.” He says “such a system should evaluate continuous progress for students and schools all along the learning continuum and should consider measures beyond reading and math tests. It should also create incentives to keep students in school through graduation, rather than pushing them out to make scores look better.”
Those proposals are part of a comprehensive, $18 billion annual school improvement plan that also includes a $10 billion annual investment for children from birth to age 5 and initiatives to improve the nation’s teachers and principals, make science and math education a national priority, cut dropout rates, and close the achievement gap.
To improve the teaching force, Obama calls for a Career Ladder Initiative to provide higher pay to enable high-achieving veteran teachers to become teacher-mentors; free training for teachers who are willing to teach in a high-need field or location for at least four years; and $100 million to stimulate teacher education reforms based on school-university partnerships.
John Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, has proposed a detailed education plan that includes free preschool to lower-income children and federal funding to reduce class sizes.
Edwards promises to overhaul NCLB, which he says “has lost its way by imposing cheap standardized tests; narrowing the curriculum at the expense of science, history, and the arts; and mandating unproven cookie-cutter reforms on schools.”
Edwards would allow additional measures of academic performance, give more flexibility to small rural schools, and let states implement their own reforms in underperforming schools.
He would require highly qualified teachers to provide supplemental education services for schools that fail to make adequate yearly progress under NCLB rather than “private companies with unproven capabilities.”
Edwards proposes a “Great Schools” initiative to build and expand 1,000 schools over four years expand.
He also promises increased funding for Title I and, during a campaign stop in Des Moines, Iowa, Nov. 30, promised to “more than double federal spending on special education over the next few years.”
Edwards would upgrade the teaching profession by providing up to $15,000 in annual bonuses teachers who work in high-poverty schools.
New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson would scrap NCLB. He would reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act but replace the “punitive approach of NCLB” with a “fairer, more comprehensive and more supportive system of measuring progress.”
Among other elements of Richardson’s education plan: Pay teachers a national average starting salary of at least $40,000; oppose private school vouchers; increase public school choice; put the arts and music back into education; create 250 math, science and innovation academies; and provide universal access to high-quality prekindergarten.
Richardson proposes $2 billion a year to redesign high schools, $1 billion to increase graduation rates, and $1 billion to improve school safety.
Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware unveiled an education plan Nov. 27 that proposes a $2 billion investment to hire 100,000 new teachers to reduce class sizes to 18 students, particularly in the early grades.
He also wants to move from a 12-year to a 16-year public education system by adding two years of preschool and at least two years of education after high school.
The Republicans
Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, supports school choice and the rights of homeschooling parents.
“While there is value in the No Child Left Behind law’s effort to set high standards, states must be allowed to develop their own benchmarks,” he says on his website. He is also a strong supporter of music and the arts, calling them “weapons of mass instruction,” which will “help us to be competitive and creative.”
Huckabee would add music and arts to the subjects tested under NCLB and would provide federal funding to do so, the Des Moines Register states. And according to a report in the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier, he believes “creationism should be taught alongside evolution.”
Huckabee defended his efforts to allow the children of undocumented immigrants to compete for college scholarships, and said he would continue this policy, “even if it costs me the election,” the Washington Post reported.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney believes “closing the achievement gap in our schools is the civil rights issue of our time,” according to his website. He also believes “our education system works best when we have more local control of our schools.”
Romney supports school choice, federal tax credits for parents who home-school their children, and performance-based pay and other incentives to encourage high-quality teachers to work in high-need schools.
In a speech in Columbia, S.C., Nov. 7, Romney expressed support for vouchers but suggested such efforts should be handled by the states, the AP reported.
Rommey proposes improvements to NCLB “by giving states that meet or exceed testing requirements additional flexibility in measuring student performance” and “focusing more attention on individual student progress.”
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s website calls school choice “one of the great civil rights issues of our time.” According to the AP, he supports taxpayer-funded vouchers for private school tuition.
During a debate in October sponsored by CNBC, MSNBC, and the Wall Street Journal, Giuliani said, “It seems to me the thing that’s wrong at the core of NCLB is the enforcer of standard should not be the bureaucrat in Washington or the board of education. It should be the parent.”
“We should empower the parents,” he said. “They should decide -- private school, parochial school, public school, charter school, or home school.”
Fred Thompson, a former senator from Tennessee, supports giving parents more choices in education and a reduced federal role.
Thompson’s website says he favors “reviewing federal programs for cost-effectiveness, reducing federal mandates, returning education money to the states, and empowering parents by promoting voucher programs, charter schools, and other innovations that enhance education excellence through competition and choice.”
In an interview with the AP in September, Thompson said he had some problems with NCLB and that he would provide federal education funding with fewer strings attached.
Calling NCLB “a good concept,” he said, “I’m all for testing but it seems like now some of these states are teaching to the test and kind of making it so that everyone does well on the test; you can’t really tell that everybody’s doing that well. And it’s not objective.”
Sen. John McCain of Arizona is the only candidate that doesn’t list any education plans on his website.
In a speech to the Detroit Economic Club in October, McCain called for “improving the accountability of public education at the primary and secondary level, allowing competition, and helping provide parents with choices for their children’s education.”
At a campaign appearance at Clemson University in South Carolina Nov. 28, McCain called NCLB a “good beginning” and said it should be improved, not scrapped, the Greenville News reported.
Rep. Ron Paul of Texas proposes abolishing the U.S. Education Department and “giving educational control back to parents, who know their children better than any politician in D.C. ever will,” according to his website.
He also believes “The federal government has no constitutional authority to fund or control schools.”
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