TheApple

“Pen is mightier than sword.” Our great inheritance from our parents is their basic obligation to send us to in school. Learning and acquiring more knowledge to be used in future employment career or even in normal daily life for us to get educated. The key ingredient to success is Education. As Americans emerge from the afterglow of the recent presidential election, while president-elect Barack Obama prepares to take the reins of the country, education is an issue that’s lingering on the minds of many. According to an article at The Apple, No Child Left Behind will be Obama’s first priority when it comes to education. He is not looking to snip the program, but he does intend to reform it, particularly when it comes to standardized testing. He does not support preparing students all year to “fill out bubbles.” Referencing schools, both Obama and vice president-elect Joe Biden support charter schools, as long as they perform up to standard. Teachers at charter schools and others are pleased with Obama's incentives like Teacher Service Scholarships and various pay rewards – this will certainly be a great help. Furthermore, part of the president-elect’s main concern is to boost Early Head Start programs and provide tax credit for college education. The course to repair faith in the American educational system through these ideas and more will definitely lead to the kind of credit repair the country needs. Click to learn more about Credit Repair.

Here's a link to Education Week's article on "The Privatization Infatuation."

http://epicpolicy.org/files/EPRU-0802-408-OWI.pdf

Dear tanarur,
I'd be interested to read where you disagree with these comments

"For those who don't follow the education debate closely, there are two main philosophies that currently dominate the field: one is that market competition (choice) among schools gets kids learning more, and one is that more learning means investing more and earlier in kids and better teachers. Each candidate has aligned himself with one of those camps.

With that as a backdrop, I'll give you the quick rundown on where both candidates stand and what their key policies are, with some brief analysis of their positions. While education policy may not be the key deciding point for most voters, at least you'll know what the candidates propose on this important issue.

1. McCain and Milton (Friedman)
McCain is a school choice man, and he takes his message directly from the new Republican orthodoxy's playbook. That playbook is drawn from Milton Friedman's 1955 proposals for school vouchers. Friedman claimed that government funding (through vouchers) for families who wanted to send their children to private school would generate two big payoffs: lower-priced education through competition and greater parent satisfaction through choice. The McCain platform goes a step beyond Friedman: it lumps charter schools in with private school vouchers as part of the market solution to improving education. But Friedman's case was mostly ideological -- he had no direct evidence that educational markets worked better than a public school system, or that privately run schools could deliver a better product for the same or lower price as public schools.

2. It doesn't work but its cheap
The upside for McCain's position is that Americans generally like the idea of school choice. They lump notions like choice and competition into the same category as apple pie and motherhood. Another advantage is that it's cheap. The downside is that, despite what Milton Freidman may have believed, school choice does not make for better schooling. Careful research evaluating voucher plans and charter school education shows that vouchers and charters do not raise average student test scores, not even in inner cites where better schooling alternatives should make a big difference. Competition among schools doesn't work either: studies show that the presence of charter and voucher schools in neighborhoods doesn't improve the performance of students in "competing" traditional public schools.

3. Obama's "better resources" strategy
Obama's approach to improving education is the polar opposite of McCain's. McCain assumes that public school efficiency is the problem and more choice will solve it. But Obama reasons that you can't build a Lexus from Yugo parts. His platform focuses on making better educational resources available to kids before and during their school years. That includes investing more in childcare and preschool, raising the quality of teachers, and investing in out-of-school activities to reduce dropouts.

4. Charter light
Obama likes charter schools, but in a different way from McCain. For good reason, he rejects McCain's premise that charter school choice can "solve" American students' achievement problem. Instead, Obama sees space in the public system for "good" charter schools that innovate or attract creative social entrepreneurs into education, and he wants to regulate mismanaged charter schools out of existence, like happens in his home state of Illinois.

5. Is it worth the price?
The political downside to Obama's plan is that it means spending more now, but the payoffs are 15-20 years down the road. Another disadvantage is that some Americans don't believe spending more on schools actually makes them better. The upside of Obama's plan is that the data are beginning to show more spending works, especially when it goes into pre-schools and incentives to attract better-prepared young people into teaching. A major Rand Corporation study shows that investing early (as early as pre-natal) in poor kids has a large payoff -- about four dollars for every dollar invested. Other good research shows that having a teacher who knows more math or science or English and how to teach it effectively helps students do better in those subjects.

6. A tale of three cities: Milwaukee, Washington, D.C., and New York
Thanks to a Wisconsin Supreme Court decision in 1998, Milwaukee's experimental voucher program expanded to private religious schools. By 2007, 15 thousand voucher students attended more than 100 private schools. Milwaukee also has full public school choice, including charter and magnet schools. The bottom line is that with all this choice and competition, Milwaukee's test scores have not increased since 1999-2000, after a modest rise followed the initial announcement of the voucher program expansion.
Similarly, In Washington, D.C., charter schools and vouchers were supposed to raise dismal student performance in a school district many considered the most inefficient in the country. About a third of DC students shifted to non-traditional, publicly funded charter and voucher schools. Yet, after more than five years of choice, students in charter and voucher schools do no better than students in public schools, and students in public schools are doing no better because of competition from charter and voucher schools.

In contrast, New York City went for the teacher improvement strategy. The City raised starting teachers' salaries and promoted teaching fellowships and the Teach for America program to bring more high achieving college graduates into City schools. Expanding the pool of good teachers has raised the quality of teaching for low-performing students, and this seems to have had a major impact on overall test scores, especially increasing learning gains at the bottom of the achievement distribution.

7. Numbers don't lie
If choice is supposed to be the answer to improving schooling for underserved children, McCain needs to show why it has not worked for students in two major cities with showcase programs. The New York results support Obama's case that attracting increasing numbers of talented young people into teaching will improve student achievement. Combined with other data showing large gains from spending more on kids before they ever get to school, Obama's investment strategy looks like a much better bet than school choice.

8. Economic policy also impacts school achievement
Kids' economic and social situations have a major impact on their success in school. Differences between McCain and Obama's tax policies may be as important in influencing educational outcomes as differences in education strategies. Whether we get McCain's plan of continuing to use government tax policy to favor the wealthy versus Obama's to shift public resources to the middle-class, the working poor, and the socially disadvantaged would affect millions of children's economic conditions at home, thus their school performance. Data show that when a country's income distribution is more equal, average school achievement is higher.

9. The real school choice
You've probably figured out by know that you have a real choice in November between two very different education proposals. One would mainly shift some public school kids into similarly performing private and charter schools. For all but these few, not much else would change. The other proposal could bring lots of kids into childcare and pre-schools, recruit more math majors into teaching, and might make a big difference in the lives of the next generation. It could start kids in quality programs early and keep many more from dropping out and out of prison. Not as hot an issue as Iraq or gas prices, but maybe much more important for defining who we are twenty years from now."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martin-carnoy/mccain-and-obamas-educa...

Dear tanarur:

Thank you very much for your humble response! I would love for you to respond further! You seemed to dance around the question and not give me a direct answer… Are you suggesting that vouchers are a FAIR (again, don’t dance around it – you can define fair for me if you’d like) approach to our system! I define fair as “free from obstacles…” or otherwise, equal distribution… and I’m sure if I simply google the word “fair” there is only one definition and if you find another one, please direct me where you find it.

Vouchers do not serve the economically disadvantaged!!! While researching McCain’s continuous plan (there is a voucher system in Washington), there are many families left out! The system was imposed by Bush and it seems to be a complete mess! This wonderful system only pays a fraction of what it would take to cover full tuition costs, transportation, books, etc… at a private school. MOST economically disadvantaged can not afford the difference! This system may meet the needs of certain groups, and yes that’s a good thing; but, is this system fair? Obama is not a socialist, but just wants a fair distribution in foreign and domestic issues which has been obsolete in the last 8 years! Personally, I feel that charter schools are a more reliable system. What do you feel about charters?

Dear MisterD,
Could you be more specific about the "saying one thing, living another" comment? Your mention of Saddam Hussein doesn't seem to offer much illumination since it was the Bush administration that lacked any judgement with regard to Saddam Hussein, invading Iraq recklessly, causing hundreds of thousands of needless deaths and laying waste to our international standing and our economy.
And just why do you think Obama can't choose his kid's school with "any wisdom?"
Do you know something detrimental about the "Lab School?"
Senator McCain sent his children to an "exclusive private school", too. Does that reflect badly of his "wisdom?"

tanarur: "I would point out that Sen Obama seeks to deny other Americans the choice to do for their children what he has been able to do for his own."

How do you suggest he is denying Americans the choice for private schooling? Are you suggesting that the voucher system is a fair and promising form to spread the wealth around as you put it?

"not very good" is an understatement. I taught in Auburn Gresham last year at one of the Charter schools funded by Chicago Public Schools. It was in the neighborhood of 95th street. I had children living in cars with no parental support. When I reported the students to DCS, nothing was followed up on. Half of my 9th graders could not read at a sixth grade level. One of the most disturbing trends was the way teachers are fired from CPS charter schools when children don't do anything in class. I had several failing students who were truant and as a result, failed the quarter.Some teachers were fired for not padding grades. The whole issue of Ayres is relevant in this case because the "Perspective" of the school is political activism, while High School math and reading scores are at elementary levels. Chicago Charter Schools are Union Busters. They offer higher salaries than the CPS Public Schools, but hire unskilled teachers. The elective teachers in my school weren't even certified. When one was fired, two substitutes took over their jobs. I thing if Barak Obama really was pro teacher union, he would have had someone address the hiring of scabs at the school his agency funded.

I always wonder at the fact that the very same political leaders who oppose school vouchers and other reforms that impact on truly challenging public schools would never send their child to one. My question would not be so much why the children of the Senator from Illinois, but why NOT the children of the sanitation worker from Irvington, NJ.