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Education and the election

The Washington Post's Sebastian Mallaby has an op-ed today in which—Gasp!—the topic of education actually makes it into a discussion of the Presidential race. Attention, Ed in '08! Mallaby gives his take on Barack Obama and John McCain when it comes to a variety of "growth" issues, but he winds it all up with these observations on the issue of education:

The growth issue on which they have clashed is education. McCain is a firm supporter of President Bush's No Child Left Behind policy, which is based on a reasonable desire to hold bad schools accountable; Obama is mushier. But the research consensus on No Child Left Behind is actually quite mushy, too: Experts such as Cecilia Rouse of Princeton reckon that some accountability reforms can help (for example, Florida's seems good) but that No Child Left Behind may be too loosely designed to make much of a difference. The one certainty about education is that holding schools accountable is only part of the solution. This is where Obama has the lead. He wants a big push on early-childhood education, which researchers believe can have an excellent payoff in terms of later achievement; he wants to address key gaps in teacher quality with higher pay; he wants a new tax credit to make college more affordable. A hundred years ago, the United States set the stage for the American century by investing more public money in education than other advanced economies. It needs to up its game again if it wants to retain its preeminence.

For more on what the candidates say on education, OnTheIssues.org has collections of tidbits on Obama, McCain, and Clinton.

Full post as published by BoardBuzz: NSBA's Daily Weblog on June 02, 2008 (boomark / email).