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Education: That’s Hot

Posted by JAZZ SHAW, Assistant Editor in Politics.
Aug 13th, 2008 | Comments

What with all of the excitement swirling around the Olympics and the ongoing drama in Georgia, I’m sure that the prospect of another heavily wonkish discussion of domestic policy issues might have you checking to see if you couldn’t schedule a quick root canal. But that won’t stop me urging you to check out a recent piece at BlogHer written by Nancy Pfotenhauer on the subject of education. I’ve interviewed Nancy before and she’s a seriously hard hitting wonk from McCain’s team on domestic issues, particularly education.

She sums up the main thrust of McCain’s education policy in three bullet points. First, accountability and individual achievement should be the cornerstone of any metrics when measuring success in our schools and student performance. Second, parents need more options rather than less, and an increasing measure of control over their own children’s education. And last, government should be providing real incentives and training opportunities to get skilled, qualified teachers into some of our most-challenged schools.

I’ll leave it to you to follow the jump and read the full analysis, but there is some good, common sense material here, well worth your consideration. If you have any additional suggestions for government tinkering in the educational process, feel free to toss them out here. Cheers!

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Ricorun

Jazz:
First, accountability and individual achievement should be the cornerstone of any metrics when measring success in our schools and student performance.

Would you (or anyone else) care to share anything concrete as to what is meant by this?

Second, parents need more options rather than less, and an increasing measure of control over their own children’s education.

One of the major problems with NCLB is that private schools are outside any measure of accountability and measures of individual achievement. How does McCain intend to correct this, if in fact he does? To the extent that he doesn't, then any notion of any real control is a mirage, wouldn't you say?

And last, government should be providing real incentives and training opportnities to get skilled, qualified teachers into some of our most challenged schools.

I can get behind this idea with both feet. In fact, this is the soft underbelly of Obama's ideas. Okay, not Obama so much as the Dems in general. This idea requires battling very powerful teacher's unions. Both McCain and Obama have expressed a desire in that regard. But the reality as I see it is that Obama doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell in succeeding. McCain, only slightly more so. Either way (and especially if McCain is elected), this issue is likely to be left beyond the 2010 elections at the earliest.

superdestroyer

Whatever McCain says is irrelevant. However, Senator Obama has decided to throw children over the side to keep the teachers unions happy. No accounability, no teaching, and social engineering seem to be the corner stones of the coming Obama Administration.

What is really ironic is that Senator Obama is proposing to make public education less like the school where he sends his own children.

Jim_Satterfield

The day that they come up with a real, quantifiable way of determining how much of any given student's achievements or lack of same actually lies with the teacher instead of genetics and environment outside of the school the repetitious claims of wanting to hold the teachers accountable for the good of the children will mean something. But not until then.

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