Republican National Convention, September 1-4, St Paul, MN

August 20, 2008

Barack Obama and John McCain have some useful ideas on education. But something bolder is needed.

EDUCATION HAS had a cameo role in a campaign dominated by foreign policy and the economy. What little discussion there’s been by the two presumptive major-party nominees has fallen along the traditional fault lines of party ideology. Democrat Barack Obama wants more money for public schools while Republican John McCain espouses more choice for parents. But would either be willing to embrace the dramatic changes needed to shake up a system that fails far too many children?

Mr. McCain’s July 16 appearance before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in which he provided details about his education plan, sparked the first real exchange, showing clear differences on school issues. Mr. McCain favors expanding school choice through private school vouchers and online education; Sen. Obama opposes vouchers and has called for $18 billion in new spending. But there’s a crisis in urban education. To significantly improve achievement levels among poor and minority children, scripted and predictable responses won’t do.

Of the two, Mr. Obama has given the issue more attention. His background as a community organizer and state legislator includes work with neighborhoods on school issues. As a candidate for president, he has delivered several major speeches on education and developed a plan that runs the gamut from birth to college. He places a heavy emphasis on early childhood education, recognizing that if the achievement gap is to be narrowed, work must start before a child enters kindergarten. It is hard to quarrel with other programs he endorses — such as teacher-residency and mentoring initiatives — but he stops short of advocating solutions that many reformers see as essential to real change but which the powerful teachers unions oppose. These include allowing more flexibility in removing ineffective teachers and overhauling a tenure system that rewards those who stay put, no matter how mediocre their performance.

Mr. Obama deserves credit for going in front of the National Education Association two years in a row to say that the most effective teachers deserve more pay. But his hemming and hawing about using test scores as a measure, and his qualification that nothing should be imposed on teachers, suggests a troubling tendency to try to please everyone: He extols the accountability of the No Child Left Behind Act but then derides preparing children to fill in bubbles on a test.

Mr. McCain has spoken sensibly about giving parents a choice in their children’s education, finding another line of work for teachers who have lost their focus on children and giving merit pay to the best teachers. Particularly intriguing is his idea to direct federal money to alternative teacher-certification programs. But his education plan is both late in coming and still a work in progress, and his promise to slow discretionary spending in a bid to balance the budget leaves little money for initiatives or to fully fund No Child Left Behind.

It is encouraging that both candidates would retain the No Child Left Behind law, albeit with revisions yet to be detailed. We hope they’ll read the congressional testimony of urban school chiefs who recently argued for tougher standards and even more accountability. Leaders of schools in New York, the District of Columbia, Atlanta and Chicago — places that, as Education Week noted, have the toughest time meeting NCLB goals — asked Congress to establish national standards and assessments. It is madness that there are 50 different definitions of what constitutes proficiency in math and reading or of what a high school graduate should know. National standards and tests would provide a yardstick by which the progress of students could be measured, thus eliminating the sham of states dumbing down tests for the illusion of achievement. No doubt, tough national standards would make life even harder for educators. But as New York City Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein told Congress, "It’s not about me, it’s about my kids."

To address rising property taxes, Governor Paterson has been pushing for a property tax cap that would severely limit local spending and have a devastating impact on public schools. Property taxes are a real issue, but Governor Paterson’s ‘tax cap’ plan is the wrong solution.

That’s why Education Voters of New York has teamed up with the Working Families Party and education advocates across the state to fight what the New York Times called “an election year gimmick.”

The tax cap scheme has been tried in other states, and the results were disastrous for public schools. In California, Illinois, and Massachusetts, tax caps led to laid off teachers, bigger class sizes, and lower test scores. Inequities between school districts were exacerbated: wealthy neighborhoods overrode budgets that were too limiting but other districts could not afford to do so. In New York, given the already massive disparity between rich and poor districts, the results of a tax cap would be even more punishing – particularly during an economic decline when the state will not be able to make up for lost local revenues.

And why is this a gimmick? Because a tax cap will not even lower property taxes. And because it doesn’t do anything to control the causes of high property taxes: insufficient state aid for education and rising costs like fuel and healthcare that schools themselves can’t control. Rather than rely on income taxes, New York’s public schools rely more on local property taxes than every other state other than Texas.

Governor Paterson’s bill passed in the Senate, but can be stopped in the Assembly. Thousands of New Yorkers have already sent Albany a message: vote NO on Paterson’s ‘tax cap’ scheme. The legislature will reconvene for a special session on August 19th. We need to keep the pressure on.

By Glynda C. Carr, New York State Director

The requirement would be one of the most far-reaching regulatory actions taken by any education secretary, experts said, because it would affect the official statistics issued by all 50 states and each of the nation’s 14,000 public high schools.

Ms. Spellings will announce her action at a so-called dropout prevention summit in Washington on Tuesday, the officials said. The summit is organized by a group beginning a national campaign intended to reduce dropout rates.

“In the coming weeks, I will take administrative steps to ensure that all states use the same formula to calculate how many students graduate from high school on time — and how many drop out,” Ms. Spellings said in remarks prepared for delivery on Tuesday and made available to The New York Times.

Ms. Spellings’s statements underline the rising urgency among policymakers and corporate leaders to address the nation’s dropout epidemic, as well as the administration’s growing sense that efforts in Congress to rewrite the law this year may not succeed.

The adoption of a federal graduation formula would correct one of the most glaring weaknesses of the federal No Child Left Behind law. Although the law requires states and high schools to report their graduation rates to the federal government, it allows states to set their own formulas for calculating them. As a result, most states have used formulas that understate the number of dropouts, and official graduation rates are not comparable from state to state. The No Child law establishes no national school completion goal.

Michael Cohen, who was an assistant secretary of education under President Clinton, said the proposed measure would be considerably more important than most Department of Education regulations.

“This is a huge deal, in terms of its impact, because it will basically affect every high school in the country,” Mr. Cohen said.

Senior Education Department officials said Ms. Spellings would publish the proposed graduation formula requirement in the Federal Register, opening a period of public comment that often lasts several months, before issuing the final regulation later this year.

On Tuesday, Ms. Spellings is not expected to outline the specific graduation rate formula that she intends to require states to adopt. But in her remarks, she noted that all 50 governors in the National Governors Association signed a compact in 2005 agreeing to eventually calculate their graduation rates according to a common method.

Under that formula, graduation rates are calculated by dividing the number of students who receive a traditional high school diploma in any given year by the number of first-time ninth graders that entered four years earlier. The governors’ agreement lacks the force of law, and a few states have moved to enact the governors’ formula more vigorously than others.

Many states still use dozens of other graduation rate formulas that vary in reliability.

New Mexico, for example, has defined its graduation rate as the percentage of enrolled 12th graders who receive a diploma, a method that grossly undercounts dropouts by ignoring all students who leave school before 12th grade. North Carolina until last year used another formula that so exaggerated graduates that when the state adopted a more accurate method last year, its rate plummeted to 68 from 95 percent.

New York has reported a 77 percent graduation rate to comply with the No Child law. But the federal department uses a formula that closely approximates the governors’ formula to estimate a graduation rate for all 50 states, and using that method, New York’s graduation rate is 65 percent.

The dropout summit scheduled for Tuesday has been organized by former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his wife, Alma, who is the chairwoman of the America’s Promise Alliance, the group beginning the national campaign.

“We Americans can’t afford to have a third or more of our kids not getting through high school — how can we have this?” Mr. Powell said in an interview. “Some places have a 70 percent dropout rate. We can’t have this.”

According to a report issued by the alliance for Tuesday’s summit, 1.2 million American teenagers drop out of high school every year. Christopher B. Swanson, the report’s author, said that to use the governors’ graduation formula, a state must have a statewide school record system capable of tracking each student through four years of high school.

Many states have made progress toward building such systems, Dr. Swanson said, but some have not, raising questions about how the Department of Education could require states to calculate a rate that is beyond their technological capacity, he said. The department might have to establish an interim graduation rate formula for use by some states until they can develop their tracking systems, and that could mean that graduation rates might for a time still not be comparable across states, he said.

Amy Wilkins, a vice president at Education Trust, a group that has pushed for more accurate reporting of graduation rates, said Ms. Spellings’s action “shows that she is impatient for changes in N.C.L.B. that she knows are commonsensical.”

“Reauthorization is taking longer than she wants to wait,” Ms. Wilkins said. “She’s tired of seeing flaws in the law limit its effectiveness. She has the power to make changes, and so she is.”