Stances on Education

iVillage Member
Registered: 02-24-2008
Stances on Education
12
Tue, 10-14-2008 - 5:40pm

As far as I've seen, the campaigns have not talked much about their education plans (at least not in a whole lot of depth). I thought I would share that Obama and McCain's advisers are going to debate education on October 21st 4 to 6 p.m. PDT, on a live webcast by Education Week:
https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=122206&sessionid=1&key=F133A5219746027376C0662466473BDD&sourcepage=register.

In the meantime, here is a bit on the candidates viewpoints on education.

http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/19ce50b5-daa8-4795-b92d-92bd0d985bca.htm
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/education/

Thoughts?

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iVillage Member
Registered: 02-24-2008
Sat, 10-18-2008 - 9:22pm

Yay! Thank you for answering! For some reason I wasn't getting notified that people were responding and I was getting really depressed that no one cares about education.

I think McCain's plan is wrong-headed and pretty lame so I am glad to see some others feel the same way.

Merit pay is an interesting one to me IF it could be done in a way that tracked change over time (so you're not penalized for all of the poor teachers and impediments to learning that may have come before you) and accounted for the number of ELLs, absences, special education students, etc. in a class. Since I don't think that's possible and I think portfolios are often a better way of judging students' work than a standardized test, I don't think it'll work.

As for vouchers, I don't think that competition will work to improve schools unless, as a pp said, the make up of the student populations and the funding was equivalent to begin with.

I also think that McCain's plans to use programs like Teach for America to staff schools and not require credentials broadly is a mistake.

I'm curious what everyone thinks of Obama's plans?

iVillage Member
Registered: 01-12-2008
Sat, 10-18-2008 - 10:09pm

Well, a general theme I see in Obama's plan is encouraging districts to innovate their own solutions and providing the financial support they need to do that. I think that makes a lot of sense because different school districts will have their own unique challenges to deal with and may require different solutions for improving student performance. I also think that people who teach are filled with good ideas about how to make things better for their students. I especially like Obama's plans for expanding mentoring programs: pay the good teachers extra money to mentor new teachers. Provide paid planning time to enable teaching collaboration. I've seen those techniques work very well in the private school I attended (where my dad was a teacher).




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