Over at Flypaper, Mike Petrilli drops a bombshell. He was on a talk show this morning with, among others, Greg Toppo of USA Today and Melody Barnes of the Obama campaign.
We discussed the candidates’ education proposals, and all went according to plan until about halfway through the segment when Melody said that Obama wanted to look at different kinds of student assessments, including portfolios. Portfolios? As Greg and I said on the air, this was news. We’re not aware of the Obama camp ever saying before that portfolios might be part of the mix. I’m pretty sure I could hear Kati Haycock screaming from a few miles away.
As Mike points out, portfolios were found to be completely unreliable as large-scale accountability measures years ago. “Let me make a prediction,” writes Petrilli, ”either the Obama campaign will clarify that the Senator would consider portfolios on top of tests, not instead of them, or the McCain campaign will pounce on this issue and argue that it shows Obama to be weak on reform. Because one thing is for sure: embracing portfolios is a clear signal of an intention to roll back accountability.”
Portfauxlio Update: Michele McNeil at Campaign K-12 says Obama talkin’ about alternate assessment is nothing new and no big deal.
Update II: More from Petrilli. “I respectfully disagree with McNeil,” he notes. ”It still sounds to me that Barnes is talking about portfolios instead of standardized tests..” He suggests the Obama campaign could clarify: are you in favor of continuing standardized testing under NCLB, or not?
Update III: Over at TWIE, A-Rus has a fairly persuasive Obama quote from earlier in the campaign that sheds light on the Portfauxlio affair: “This doesn’t mean that we won’t have a standardized test, I believe children should master that skill as well and that should be part of the assessments and tools that we use to make sure our children are learning. It just can’t dominate the curriculum to the extent where we are pushing aside those things that will actually allow children to improve and will accurately assess the quality of teaching that is taking place in the classroom. This is not an either/or proposition, it is a both/and proposition, and that’s what we will be working on by fixing NCLB.”
TeachersFirst asked U.S. teachers what they would tell Barack Obama and John McCain about how to improve American education. The top priority is not money but equity–ensuring that all schools have equal access to adequate facilities, equipment, and materials. Next, teachers want the next President to develop “meaningful alternatives to standardized testing.” The third biggest priority is encouraging parents to work with schools so their children will succeed.
A nonprofit site that offers lesson plans and other resources for teachers, TeachersFirst says it polled “thousands of members, representing all 50 states, almost half of them with 20 or more years of experience.” The survey, which is a non-scientific straw poll, asked the teachers to choose their top three priorities from a list of twelve, including strengthening teacher preparation; improving physical safety; emphasizing math, science, and information literacy; and strengthening early learning and pre-K programs.
The full results are here.
USA Today’s Greg Toppo takes note of the presidential candidates’ debate on education, or lack thereof, and sounds the same tone of non-surprise as the rest of us. “The USA’s teetering economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have all but squeezed out education,” he notes, “a topic important to previous elections.”
Still, the paper produces a nice chart detailing the various stands and pronouncments by the McCain and Obama camps. “The two split most notably on how much federal funding they believe schools can expect in 2009 and beyond,” Toppo writes. “They also have different visions of what drives schools to improve. Obama focuses on improving teacher quality. McCain cites competition from taxpayer-supported private schools along with independently and publicly funded charter schools.”
Asked which candidate they would want as their child’s teacher, Barack Obama beats John McCain 55 to 44 percent in an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll. They’d also rather watch a football game with Obama, but by a slimmer margin, 50 to 47 percent.
Interestingly four U.S. Presidents spent at least part of their careers as school teachers: Adams, Garfield, Arthur and Lyndon Johnson.
Checker Finn noticed that the words “No Child Left Behind” never even crossed the lips of Obama or McCain in their convention acceptance speeches.
In the education sphere, that’s roughly equivalent to talking about America’s foreign and defense challenges without mentioning Iraq. NCLB is the 800-pound gorilla of federal K-12 education policy and the foremost topic of conversation whenever this domain is touched on. In fact, as I roam the land, it’s the only federal education issue that non-educators invariably ask about. Yet in their major campaign kick-off addresses, both wannabee presidents managed to talk about education without disclosing that they’re even aware of its existence.
NCLB is a “damaged brand,” Finn writes, even while the public still supports standards, assessment, and school accountability. But the silence from the candidates has as much to do with “real and serious” internal schisms in each party, Finn says. Democrats are split over the role of teachers’ unions, and if schools alone can boost performance, or if problems beyond schools’ control need to be addressed first.
The GOP, too, faces a pair of big (and also overlapped) splits, both reverberating with past vs. present, of what might be called Reagan-era vs. Bush-era thinking about education priorities. One involves Uncle Sam’s role: forceful driver of reform or an undemanding source of dollars to states, districts and parents to do pretty much what they think best in the K-12 sphere. The other Republican schism is between supporters of school choice as the surest path to better education and advocates of standards, testing and results-based accountability, i.e. between reliance on the marketplace or on government-driven change.
The upshot: the less McCain and Obama say about NCLB the better. “Stick with the crowd pleasers today and save for tomorrow — some tomorrow after November 4 — any clear plans for what to do when statutory reality can no longer be avoided,” Finn concludes.
Democratic standard-bearer Barack Obama is widely perceived to be stronger than GOP nominee John McCain on education issues, according to a new poll. Asked which candidate they would support “if you were voting solely on the basis of a desire to strengthen public schools,” 46% chose Obama to 29% for McCain. Obama also leads on “promoting parental choice, an issue often perceived to favor Republicans.
More poll results here.
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