Overall, there does seem to be an effort at hand-forcing but if this campaign turns into a debate about vouchers please just shoot me now.  I’d prefer a debate that ignores education than that tired fight again.   Besides, everyone knows that performance-pay is the new vouchers anyway.  And, although it seems that McCain is trying to lay a bear trap for Senator Obama around the voucher issue, I’ve always thought that for a bear trap to work you needed a, you know, bear.   The D.C. voucher program hardly seems likely to be a big issue during the fall campaign and is more an ‘09 issue, so where’s the bear?  Alternatively, if he’s trying to trip up Senator Obama once he’s President Obama, then that’s a novel campaign strategy…But I could be wrong on this…

But there is a bigger disconnect here:  Where’s the big agenda and the resources?  I’m hardly a throw money at the problem kind of guy, but big ideas do often have a commensurate price tag.   Sara Mead’s bummed that McCain didn’t talk about pre-kindergarten education.   Me too especially because pre-k is exactly the kind of public-private choice driven system Republicans claim to like so much.  But I’m even more disappointed that while overall McCain says we need to get past conventional thinking on this issue, something I agree with wholeheartedly, he doesn’t provide a roadmap or the resources to do that.  

I don’t disagree with some of his ideas (several of which seem familiar…) and there is some good stuff in there but collectively they’re more a laundry list than any sort of comprehensive set of ideas to seriously change American education and without serious resources attached to them they’re not going to leverage real change anyway.  Meanwhile, McCain wants to make a big bet on virtual education with a proposal that will make some of the vendors swoon, but it’s unclear from what he laid out if he understands that the virtual education problem is at least as much one of content as infrastructure.   There is a pretty big gap between what teachers are seeing with this stuff and what the enthusiasts are promising…Likewise, he’s right to want to add more pluralism to teacher training but this package needs more dollars and more ambition on that front.

And, during Q & A in front of the NAACP he seemed to commit to “fully funding” No Child Left Behind, something dramatically at odds with his earlier pledges to rein in federal spending and balance the budget by 2013.   Lest it be considered a flip flop, his aides cleaned that up afterwards but it’s illustrative of what seems to be something of a disjointed approach to education policymaking over there.  It’s hard to see what the coherent whole is and hard to tell if Senator McCain cares enough to really develop one.  The rhetoric was mostly casting the issue in the negative, what others had done wrong etc…there was no simple mission statement that under his leadership x or y would happen on education or some set of first principles.    And the stuff on faraway Washington officials is as tired as it gets, I’ve seen that movie…Especially in front of the NAACP he could have laid out a bigger vision for what educational equity looks like and in the process perhaps stimulated more of an education debate in this campaign.

*In the interest of transparency as I start to write more about the campaign I should note that I’m supporting Senator Obama.   And, although in my role at Education Sector, a non-partisan 501c3 organization I’ve had contact with both campaigns around our published work and theories of action, in my free (personal and non-compensated) time I have contact with the Obama campaign on policy issues.

Local school districts are right to be freaked out

Besides, today’s buses are horrendous polluters even when greener technology is available, control over transportation means control over parental decision-making, and school districts often aren’t even very good at designing efficient transportation schemes or adapting to changing circumstances like $4 gas, which was not exactly an unforeseen issue in the transportation world…Student safety means that, especially for younger students you want to be careful about how you merge transportation schemes, but having local or regional agencies that handle transportation would pay a lot of dividends if was approached with the dual principles of being greener and more parent-and civic friendly at the front-end.

However, per the WaPo’s Maryland article today and others like it,  all that said, the NAEP is not the be all and end all of tests, no test is, and the fetish about it is getting a little out of hand.  Remember, all these standards, and the NAEP operates within a framework, too, are human constructions.  There is no stone tablet somewhere that says what a student should know or be able to do in, say, 5th grade math.     So, healthy skepticism is always in order about what states are up to but at the same time the flashing of the NAEP as a yellow card every time a state improves its numbers is counterproductive.    There are some legitimate reasons (alignment, time lag, students clustered around proficiency benchmarks etc…) why those gains may not be reflected on the NAEP in the short term.

*PS–Today’s politics have the Public Relationists in a bit of a bind.  Say schools are doing better and the Bush Administration gets some reflected credit, say they’re not and you undermine the whole Public Relationist strategy.

Ssshhh…nobody tell Maryland the kids can’t learn if the Dow is under 11K!

Update:  Commenter Meadowlark makes an interesting point below, what about libraries?   It’s a fair question and raises, I think, three issues.   First, in the case of federal elected policymakers they do have access to a great library and really strong analysts via the Library of Congress and the Congresssional Research Service.  So they’re getting access to current literature, usually via synthesis, that way.   Second, in the case of think tanks, research organizations, and academia, there is a lot of variance in the extent to which various analysts and writers keep up with the literature in a particular field or sub-field.   But, although the cliche is that people will talk about anything, if you actually were to do a content analysis you’d find that most influential people stick pretty close to their knitting because it’s hard to really stay current and effective on more than a handful of issues.  And while contra Jay Greene I don’t think our information market works especially well in the short term, it does seem to reward that approach over time.  Third, to Meadowlark’s main point that people should go to the library, that’s certainly true as a general principle.  Still, in practice we should also be cognizant that there is a lot of information coming at policymakers these days through various means.  So, if people want their ideas in that mix, they have to affirmatively make that happen by getting them out from behind firewalls and making them accessible both in form and content.   And per my original post above, the incentives in academia still generally work against both of those things right now in addition to the more basic tension between journalism, public affairs, etc…and academic research.