Obama touts school reform
Barack Obama, after hammering Republican rival John McCain on the economy for weeks, turns today to another core Democratic issue: education.
In what's being billed as a major speech at a high school in Dayton, Ohio, and a new TV ad, Obama calls for school reform, including more charter schools and merit pay for teachers.
His proposals would cost $1 billion more a year, which his campaign says he would get from cutting unnecessary federal spending.
He also says for all his maverick talk of bringing change to Washington, McCain has marched in lockstep with Republican "ideologues" on education.
"If we’re going to make a real and lasting difference for our future, we have to be willing to move beyond the old arguments of left and right and take meaningful, practical steps to build an education system worthy of our children and our future," Obama said. "We have to."
"In the past few weeks, my opponent, John McCain, has taken to talking about the need for change and reform in Washington, where he has been part of the scene for about three decades," Obama continued. "And in those three decades, he has not done one thing to truly improve the quality of public education in our country. Not one real proposal or law or initiative. Nothing.
"Instead, he marched with the ideologues in his party in opposing efforts to hire more teachers, and expand Head Start, and make college more affordable. You don’t reform our schools by opposing efforts to fully fund No Child Left Behind. And you certainly don’t reform our education system by calling to close the Department of Education. That would just make it harder for us to give out financial aid, harder for us to keep track of how our schools are doing, and lead to widening inequality in who gets a college degree," Obama plans to say. "After three decades of indifference on education, do you really believe that John McCain is suddenly going to make a difference now?"
The TV spot makes the same point.
"When they grow up, will the economy be strong enough?" the announcer asks. "Barack Obama understands what it takes make America number one in education again."
Then, the color images of happy schoolkids turn into stark black and white with an image of McCain superimposed.
The announcer continues: "John McCain doesn’t understand. John McCain voted to cut education funding. Against accountability standards. He even proposed abolishing the Department of Education. And John McCain’s economic plan gives $200 billion more to special interests while taking money away from public schools."
"We can’t afford more of the same," the announcer concludes, over an image of McCain and President Bush.
The Republican National Committee responded earlier to Obama's proposals, citing an Education Week article that says Obama has not made a significant mark on education policy during his years in the Illinois legislature or the US Senate.
“Unlike Barack Obama, Senator McCain will do more than give speeches about education reform in this country, he will shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition, empowering parents, and remove barriers to attract and reward good teachers. Obama’s agenda answers first to unions and entrenched education interests, not the students and parents that Senator McCain puts first,” Blair Latoff, a RNC spokeswoman, said in a statement.
The McCain campaign responded to the ad as well. “Without a single achievement on education reform, Barack Obama has resorted to a desperate attack with absolutely no basis in fact. John McCain has proposed new education reforms to empower parents and students while reducing the influence of the unions and government bureaucrats that support Barack Obama’s candidacy. Nothing that John McCain has proposed would reduce funding for public schools, but in fact he has pledged additional funds to improve education -- and Barack Obama knows it,” Tucker Bounds, a McCain spokesman, said in a statement.
Obama has the backing of teachers' unions, and one quickly praised his plan.
“Sen. Obama gets it,” Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, said in a statement. “He knows that reform cannot take place overnight or by using quick fixes. Obama wants to invest in comprehensive strategies, both immediate and long-term, which will pay dividends for our children, our economy and our country.”
“Those of us in the education community can learn from charter school success stories and failures,” Van Roekel added. “The key is to identify what is working that can be sustained and reproduced on a broad scale so that as many students as possible can benefit.”
An actual issue? If it's not about Sarah Palin or Jeremiah Wright Americans WONT listen. Get it!?
Watch, there will be maybe 10 responses on here.
The headline of this article is "Obama touts school reform" well, what is it?? The way I read the ariticle it was more about McCain. What's up with that?
Charter Schools?!?!?!? Merit Raises?!?!?! He'd better not let the NEA hear about that. Doesn't he know that those things don't work?
Albuquerque teacher
I taught school for 46 years before retiring last year. I have seen a lot of ideas come and go in the school system, and I have yet to see anything that really works. The reason I taught so long was because no 1. I love kids never been married, and had any of my own and no 2. because in just plain talk our retirement "sucks". So I had to wait till I could draw Social Security. We are going to hear a lot of teeth bashing this year about education issues. As we should expect. At the risk of sounding un-American, I don't care who wins the election. Frankly the last election I voted in was for John F. Kennedy. All those little self appointed gods do not do a thing for me (call me un-American all you want). Lying is a pre requisite to being in politics. Some say it is the teachers fault that we have so many ("bad", as the news media calls them) kids today. Some say it is the parents fault. I say it is school, for ever letting the kids get so much power in the class room. I say it is the parents for being so apathetic. I say it is the kids themselves. There is obviously many causes. But I will say "no child left behind" is one of the main contributing factors, also the main factor in our American scores being so low. I know this is politically incorrect (I don't care, I am retired). When you hold some back for the sake of others, (don't give me that crap that it doesn't happen, if you are a school teacher you know d____ well it does). You have to have known metrics, certain quotas and guide lines before you can tell if anything works. With this system, you are hurting all parties concerned especially the kids in the long run. For crying out loud, let's be practical for once. Is everyone expected to have a PhD ? Where are the ditch diggers ? The construction people ? How will the nation survive ? If little Jose wants to follow in his father's foot steps and sell tacos on the corner, then who in the h____ is some politician to say he can't ? God bless America, but something has to happen before we are at the bottom of the world scale in education. And it had better happen P.D.Q.
I completely agree LM. And then all the other comments in the posts about non-issues will spew that Obama has no real plans. READ. LOOK IT UP. He has plans, good ones, but people will use any excuse to hide the real reason they won't be voting for him this election:his race.
If you don't think his ideas/plans are good, say so and say why. Do not sit here and just say he's an empty suit. He's not.
Tucker Bounds and the RNC, yet again, prove that the only way a republical can respond to to anything is dishonestly. Charter schools and merit pay are two things the teacher's unions are very much against (and with good reason), but the republicals just keep shouting out the same parrot calls of "They're slaves to the teacher's unions!" that they know their zombiefied followers will suck in and then spit out unquestioningly.
Obama, unlike McSame, is actually taking a stand for things that the majority of his party are against. But who do the zombies that vote republical think is the "maverick?" McSame.
It'd be nice to think that someday most Americans would actually get a clue, but too many times that's proved to be wishful thinking.
Republicans stand for vouchers to allow parents to use funding for public schools to send their children to private schools. In essence, schools that shouldn't get federal funds because they are private and charge tuition are taking federal money from the public schools, further widing the divide between the haves and the have-nots. Public schools, while currently not getting the funding they need now, will get even less when parents with vouchers start pulling their kids out and sending them to private schools. What you end up with is public schools with no money for anything, and the rich private schools getting richer with money from the federal government. Is that really what we need? What better way to further divide the classes then to start at the preschool level. Pretty soon, people will start being classified not as rich or poor, lower, middle and upper class, but rather as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta and Epsilon.....
hiyawathadan, nice huxley reference.
Merit pay maybe, but some of these charter school systems are really messed up, allowing religion into the classroom and allowing school districts in less savory areas to practice discrimination. It can be done well also, I know, but I'm not sure if it's an appropriate national-level solution.
My problem comes when the all-white private school schools get money that was originally earmarked for the money-starved, 97% black public schools in Mississippi. There are some old-school, abuse of the system, Jim Crowe laws still in effect there, and we need to remember that when proposing national systems.
hiyawathadan & Bryan Haddon......Finally people who make sense! I just don't understand how anyone can think that vouchers are a good thing. Pour the money into the public school systems, where it belongs. A good education is a right, not a privilege. Every American is entitled to a good public school education. The Republican Adminstration doesn't care about every day Americans. They don't have to worry about sending their kids to public schools. They can afford private schools. So, in other words, we can all fend for ourselves.
"Jim Crowe laws still in effect there"
What planet are you on? Jim Crow (not Crowe) laws are long gone. My kids attend school in a Mid Size Southern School System where African Americans make up the majority of students systemwide. The kids get an excellent education from a system where the majority of the administration (from the Superintendent on down) are black.
Liberals like you are the reason I chose not to return home to Mass. after my hitch in the service. You people think that Any white folks south of the Mason-Dixon are in the Klan.
JFK - I went to HS for a couple of years in a southern school district that was racially mixed. Segregation is rampant in the Boston area, neighborhood-wise. I also lived in CA and communities were much more diverse than here in Boston.
Oh, our count is at 11 (with 2 by me).
Obama you are so full of hot air... Who cares about education!!!! You're not a patriotic american hero!!!! I'm voting for McCain/Palin!!!
Obama is not good for education. Giving parents vouchers so their kids can go to any private or charter school simply because the student is not doing well in the public school system is a bad idea. In my day we didn't have vouchers you went to public school unless your parents could afford tuition for private education. Most private schools nowadays have a hard enough time with the amount of paying students but add to that students using a vouchers and the private schools will surely close. My theory on why students in the public school systems are failing has nothing to do with teachers who take the blame for students failing. Teachers aren't taking the SAT's or the MEAP's or any other standardized test but they are always blamed when it is the students and their parents or guardians who should be blamed for the failures.
The old John McCain? Which one:
1959 John: The wild man who partied like a lunatic and graduated near the bottom of his class.
1969 John: War hero. Got shot down; I'm not saying that he should have taken his training more seriously, but crashing 5 planes? Anybody can have bad luck in war, but you have to work hard first to make me feel sorry for you.
1979 John: Ditched his first wife to marrying into a powerful, wealthy, connected organized crime family so he could make a career change and go into politics
1989 John: After cavorting in the Caymans with Keating - of Savings and Loan Scandal infamy - gets caught pocketing $112,000 (and doesn't report it to the IRS). Gets off scot-free
1999 John: Uses campaign finance reform to whitewash his influence peddling sins and runs for President as a maverick
2008 John: Embraces Bush's tax cuts, the far right religious agents of intolerance, a right wing looney as VP who believes in using science to find the oil but not to clean up the mess from oil, who believes in using science to protect her personal health but not our shared planet.
McCain is a fraud who lies, cheats and steals
I agree with many of you on several points, but I've been doing my research lately on the reasons behind the "No Child Left Behind" program, and reading all of the rules about vouchers and how they can be used. First, let me say that I agree with the retired teacher who said that the administration has done nothing about the "control" the kids have over the classes. I had so many kids in the 9th grade high school where I worked my first year, and it was also the first year they began holding kids back. That meant that all of my students were the product of the "Social Promotion" program, one that had begun years ago as a "No Shame" policy. They couldn't even write a complete sentence -- and I could see by the way they just sat there ignoring me that they didn't believe I would fail them. Needless to say, I failed 30% of them that year. Several of them hadn't turned in "one" paper. However hard I tried to get parents involved, it didn't work. Kids are too smart to give you their parents' numbers at work, and they wait for you to call. I worked so hard trying to call parents after school when the students wouldn't mind, or when they refused to do any work, yet I seldom got in touch with any parents. The kids knew I was going to call, and they even tried to pretend to be their parents. Nothing intimidated them, not even my promise to fail them.
As for vouchers and the federal accessment tests, private school students do not have to take these tests. Since they don't get enough federal funding to qualify them as a "federally funded school," the "pass/fail" teacher/school doesn't even apply to them. Which leads me to the deception of the "No Child Left Behind" federal program reinstituted and signed by President Bush in 2002 after opponents had tried to end it. I think Bush knew that it wasn't working when the students had been trying it since 1998 in Florida, and these new tests were so hard that an entire graduating class in Florida couldn't get their diplomas in 2001. They were demanding to take it over and finally got to retake it, but back then, they only had a few chances to take it over before graduation. In spite of how many schools were failing, he restored the law anyway, but now they have 10 chances to take it over -- that is after they begin trying to pass it in the 10th grade and can take it several times before graduation.
I think this is sad especially since they can opt to get an attendance diploma to prove they've only missed a few days in four years. Florida students get attendance diplomas, but can't get a regular diploma in spite of the fact that they had almost perfect attendance..
I think this may be a great plan for the rich, but not the poor. Poor kids can get into a charter school or magnet school that accepts full payment with a federal voucher and meets the high quota in the number of students accepted in those schools, most of which are other public schools anyway. Now, those kids still have to answer to the "pass/fail" standards and take the same federally mandated tests. They are just moving to a passing school.
On the contrary, the parochial schools, company owned schools, or private schools that accept a few public school kids and partially federal funded vouchers -- that only cover part of the tuition per child ARE EXEMPT from taking the "pass/fail" accessment tests that the rest of the kids in the country are struggling to take all year.
To top it off, parents and the state get no real proof from the private and partially private schools of the students performance in the way of test scores, or even samples of student performance. The problem here is that McCain knows how the Bush Administration has falsely deceived the country into believing that these schools are better schools than the public ones failing these tests. What's more, they make it sound like kids can go wherever they want, knowing that most of them do not accept a voucher as full payment and most parents cannot afford to pay the difference.
Only private or parochial schools accepting a voucher as full payment and a lot of students get the full federal funding,in which case, the school must test their students using the standardized tests and prove student performance.
So, McCain's kids not only went to private schools, but they bought their diplomas from a falsely labeled"Passing School" with no proof of how well the schools or students actually perform.
I read an interesting story a few nights ago about how all of the reading portions in American tests had to be thrown out of our last international tests (an international test taken every three years that tests American student scores in several catagories against all of the other countries) because there was an error in the test booklet due to a proof reader error that put the wrong question across from the wrong article on the reading portion of all the subjects covered in that section of the test.. The math portion was left in because it didn't have the same error.. I found that convenient since we fared so much lower on the tests the last time they were given. In fact, the Bush Administration, who pays a lot of money to this company for the millions of tests and test preparation books every year had complained that the scores weren't fair because, according to one of disatisfied members of his staff, the only reason we failed is because "only the elite" kids represent the scores of many countries; however, I doubt that is the case of Japan, South Korea and China where the highest scores come from.
At the rate in which students are being failed and moved from school to school, since something like 29,000 students from New York qualified for vouchers this year when so many of the passing schools suddenly became failing schools, our elite politicians' kids (who haven't had to take the accessment tests) will be the only ones passing -- in schools not even taking the "passing/failing" tests. The sad fact is that kids who don't have to take these tests are the only ones really getting a full education. Could this mean that the politicians want only the elite in our country to have a good education? Maybe if only the "elite" kids could represent us on the international tests, and if we can raise the scores high enough, who knows, maybe we can bring more Japanese buisnesses, and corporations looking for educated personel, back to America.
Education is the cornerstone of our country. Educated children will have greater choices as adults, whether they want to sell tacos or continue on to a PhD. I believe the government, state and national, have got to do a better job on funding education. Whether that means higher pay for good teachers, building improvements, modern technology, whatever. I am against vouchers because I believe that it will take more money away from the public schools. Private schools will just raise their tuition anyway!
In this country, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. If we all want an improved economy and life style, then we must educate our children. All children: poor, rich, black, white, brown. Remember, children will become our doctors, bus drivers, scientists, teachers of tomorrow. And also remember, you rich people who make $5 million dollars, its the other 96% of the American population that are making you that rich. We buy your products, we clean your houses, we educate your children, we cook your food, and we buy your gas.
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