Re: Educating the Presidential Candidates

["GERALD BRACEY" <gbracey1@verizon.net>]

I think Levine is wrong.  I think he's misled by rankings.  He says 
education fell to 5th in Americans' ranking of issue from 2000 to 2004. 
Well, in 2000 we hadn't had 9/11 and terrorism was probably much lower than 
education.  Social Security and health care loomed.  Just before, we'd had a 
little thing going called a recession.  And W said NCLB would take care of 
our education problems.

In 2004, no candidate except Dean said anything about NCLB having any 
problems except it wasn't fully funded.  And sure, they were playing to NEA 
(and there were 7 Dems, not 6), but those are still public statements. 
There are clips on YouTube.

I think Edin08 sucks.  It's another fear mongering strategy.  I was 
disappointed when I was speaking to a convention of NASSP to hear Jerry 
Tirozzi say they had sorta signed on, but I imagine he thought "sure, more 
attention from the candidates might translante into more money."  But when I 
showed the audience an Edin08 ad he was quite put out and I think I might 
have made him rethink their association.  The ad shows a young hand that has 
just written "a histery of Irak" on a blackboard.  The text reads "Iraq 
should be hard to debate, not to spell."  Below that "America's schools are 
falling behind."

When he announced the program Broad said he and Gates had concluded that 
everything they had been doing was marginal and something like this was 
needed "to wake up the American people."  Broad is 73, old enough to 
remember Sputnik, the ghetto riots, "Crisis in the Classroom" and "A Nation 
At Risk," not to mention the rising tide of reform reports that followed 
that.  Where has he been?


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Peter Farruggio" <pfarr@cal.berkeley.edu>
To: <arn-l@interversity.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 10:14 AM
Subject: [arn-l] Educating the Presidential Candidates



Arthur Levine, former dean and president of
Teachers College, is portrayed in the mainstream
media as a researcher and independent voice in
education reform.  I think his report on the
status of colleges of Teacher Education had many
valid points, including a call for more funding
to re-make them into full-bore professional
schools (as in nursing and medicine); EXCEPT that
his argument for preparing pre-service teachers
for the "realities of the classroom" sounded very
much like coded language for training in scripted
teaching to satisfy principals' demands for
teaching to the test.  With minimal discussion of
pedagogy, his research seems to have a narrow administrative perspective.

Here he champions the publicity efforts of the
Gates and Broad foundations.  Could he be so
naive as to not see their corporate standardista
agenda, or could he be a supporter of that agenda?

Pete Farruggio



Published in Education Week, July 30, 2007 (online edition)
Commentary
A Lost Issue in 2008?

Educating the Presidential Candidates

By Arthur Levine

In their first seven debates, Democratic and
Republican presidential candidates have presented
America with a cornucopia of plans for solving a
plethora of urgent issues­health care, national
security, energy, the economy. But the candidates
in both parties have had relatively little to say
to most viewers about one of the most prominent
issues of the past several elections: education.

Education is falling off the nation's priority
list. Indeed, during the 2000 presidential
election, Americans ranked education either first
or second among the nation's priorities. In 2004, it fell to fifth.

And now, as the 2008 election season gathers
steam, the presidential candidates are
demonstrating just how precipitous the decline
has been. In the first 12 hours of debates, they
gave education less than 33 minutes of air
time­19 of them in the June 28 Democratic debate
at Howard University, aired by PBS and, most
pundits agreed, little watched. Until that
debate, only three of 17 candidates said anything
of substance about how they would improve our
schools. Even one of the candidates, Gov. Bill
Richardson of New Mexico, observed that the
late-June debate marked the first occasion on
which education had been discussed. Three of the
candidates still don't include education in the
platforms that appear on their Web sites. Many of
the rest rank education low among their
concerns­putting it seventh, eighth, or even 10th on their top-10 lists.

To be sure, the candidates mention education when
they have to. At the Howard debate, the U.S.
Supreme Court's decision against voluntary school
integration handed down earlier that same day
forced the issue. At the National Education
Association's annual convention the following
week, the seven candidates who spoke about the No
Child Left Behind Act­one Republican and six
Democrats­largely echoed the NEA platform,
telling their audiences what they wanted to hear.
And in the July 23 CNN-YouTube debate, they
responded well enough, if for the most part
vaguely, to the four of 39 questions that had to
do with education: Who was your favorite teacher?
What will you do with NCLB? Did your kids go to
public schools? Did you teach them about sex? But
for the most part, the candidates continue to
treat education as a subject for niche audiences, not a major national 
concern.

While the silence on education issues among the
candidates has been deafening, it is even more
unfortunate that most elected leaders are not
paying that much attention to the subject these
days, as my college-age daughter and her
classmates recently discovered. On a trip to
Washington to learn about government, they were
required as part of their assignment to visit
congressional offices in small groups to lobby
for an issue of their choosing. Rachel's group
chose education. She later called home,
discouraged, to say that everyone is concerned
with immigration, energy, and the war­but no one wants to hear about 
education.
To permit education to fall off the national
agenda today is to accept weak and inequitable
schools. Not only is this bad policy, but it is morally wrong.

In the next decade, our nation is likely to pay
less and less attention to education. Baby
boomers, who constitute more than half the
electorate, single-handedly made education a
priority because they wanted good schools for
their children. Today most of their kids have
graduated or are largely through school. The
boomers are now focused on their parents, who are
growing older and more frail, absorbing an
increasing share of boomers' time and resources.
They are asking for relief in the form of elder
care, health insurance, and Social Security.
These issues will gain more and more priority as
the boomers themselves begin reaching retirement age in 2008.

The sheer size of the post-World War II baby boom
generation means that any issue its members agree
upon as critical becomes a national priority.
Every politician running for any office­from
dogcatcher to president of the United
States­quickly develops a platform in that area.
For these reasons, senior benefits and health
care will likely overshadow education in the 2008
election and the elections that follow.

Yet our country still faces huge education
challenges: the persistence of
academic-achievement gaps; a need for more and
better-prepared teachers, as many as 2 million;
and failure­after nearly 25 years of school
improvement efforts­to turn any urban school
system around. We have to fix these problems. If
America is to compete globally and sustain a
democratic society, all of our children need,
more than ever before, higher-level skills and
knowledge to support a family and participate as engaged citizens.

To permit education to fall off the national
agenda today is to accept weak and inequitable
schools. Not only is this bad policy, but it is
morally wrong for children to be denied a quality
education at birth because of their parents' income or skin color.

The reality is that education is part of the
answer to many of the issues that now dominate
the presidential debates. Preparation of experts
and general education of America's population are
key elements of national defense, the war on
terrorism, and energy policy. It is at the heart
of immigration, health care, and environmental protection.

It would be a mistake for the candidates for the
nation's highest office to treat education as an
issue whose salience has come and gone. It would
be an error to drop education from America's list
of priorities in favor of the fad du jour ranking
higher on today's public-opinion surveys. It
makes no sense to discuss subjects such as
evolution, global warming, or stem-cell research
instead of schooling, because they are inextricably intertwined with 
education.

----------
What can be done to ensure that candidates pay
attention? The national education media and the
independent sector have a crucial role to play in
getting candidates to articulate­and helping to
delineate­their positions. For example, the Bill
& Melinda Gates Foundation and the Eli and Edythe
Broad Foundation have launched a bold and
concerted campaign to make education improvement
a priority in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Called <http://www.edin08.com/>"ED in '08," the
$60 million, nonpartisan awareness campaign
focuses on three issues: higher academic
standards, effective teachers in every classroom,
and more time and support for all students to
learn. It will employ techniques varying from the
very personal, such as questioning candidates at
campaign stops and organizing campaign activists,
to mass-media strategies, including e-mail
campaigns in primary states and commercial advertising.
It makes no sense to discuss subjects such as
evolution, global warming, or stem-cell research
instead of schooling, because they are inextricably intertwined with 
education.

ED in '08 may be the most important philanthropic
investment in education in years, and perhaps for
years to come. Its $60 million price tag is far
less than the price society will pay if we fail
to reconstruct our education system: billions of
dollars to address crime, cover health and social
services, maintain prisons, and make up for lost tax revenue.

Not only are the nation's largest philanthropies
taking notice of the silence on education, so too
are journalists, businesspeople, and the
nonprofit sector. In June, the Education Writers
Association, a professional association for the
nation's education reporters, announced it would
host, with the support of the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce, the Carnegie Corporation of New York,
the Lumina Foundation, and KnowledgeWorks, a
series of panel discussions and interviews with
candidates to explore their positions on education.

These efforts need to be successful. They need to
be supported and accelerated by reporters,
parents, educators, business leaders, and
government associations­because the future of our
nation depends upon it. The Broad and Gates
foundations, along with the other organizations
now pressing the point about education, are
offering our nation the chance to do well and do
good. The presidential candidates need to embrace
it­not just when circumstances force them to, but
as a crucial plank in their platforms.

Arthur Levine is the president of the Woodrow
Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, in
Princeton, N.J., and president emeritus of
Teachers College, Columbia University.
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