Political Parties Present Clear Choices For Education In 2016, So Far
For years, there’s been an agreement – a “Washington consensus” – among Beltway policy makers and political elites that America’s schools are in “crisis” and only a punitive program of standards, testing, and accountability can remedy them.
Both Republicans and Democrats bought into that narrative and adopted it into their party platforms.
So, as seasoned edu-journalist, Jay Mathews of The Washington Post has long observed, “Republican and Democratic presidential candidates have been happily copying each other” on education policy and political rhetoric.
This phenomenon started, according to Mathews, when “a group of Democratic governors (including Bill Clinton) started the school accountability movement in the 1980s and several Republican governors (including George W. Bush) joined in.”
But there are signs this era may be coming to a close.
As prospective and declared candidates in the 2016 presidential race kick off their campaigns, what we’re hearing on education policy is a clear division between Republicans and Democrats. So far, one party is doubling down on continuing failed accountability policies, while the other party calls for an investment agenda to relieve years of grueling austerity and ineffective policy branded as “reform.”
Can you guess which party is promoting which?
The Walker Way On Education
On the Republican side, likely presidential candidate Scott Walker, the current governor of Wisconsin, touted his education credentials recently in an op-ed that appeared in an Iowa newspaper where it could get the attention of potential voters in that state’s critically important primary.
In the column, he brags about changing Wisconsin’s “broken system” that provided teachers with some job protections, what he calls “tenure.” He calls attention to a “Wisconsin Teacher of the Year,” who he says was let go because of the “old system” but now would be protected in his new and improved plan. And he claims to have increased “the number of quality education choices all over Wisconsin.
He calls for “moving money out of Washington” so it can be spent “at the local and state level” where it “is more efficient, more effective and more accountable.” And he calls for ” big, bold reforms” like school vouchers that allow tax dollars to flow to private and religious schools.
“The reforms are working,” he declares. “Schools are better. Graduation rates are up. Third grade reading scores are higher.”
What Walker doesn’t mention is that he presided over the “biggest cuts to education” in Wisconsin’s history. His most recent state budget proposaltakes an additional $127 million bite out of education spending next year, according to state news outlets, causing school districts across Iowa to consider where they will have to cut next – staff lay-offs, teacher pay, or program reductions.
While he promotes the idea of sourcing school funding decisions at the local level, he actually enacted a freeze on local spending that “greatly restricted schools’ ability to raise property taxes to make up for the lost aid.” The result was another $800 – $900 million cut to school districts.
In higher education, Walker plans to cut $300 million from the state’s prized university system while funneling $500 million to a basketball stadium. As a result, as Think Progress reports, colleges across the state are now planning faculty lay-offs, offering massive employee early retirement packages, and eliminating student majors and degree programs.
Walker’s claims of making education improvements are way over-blown. When Alyson Klein at Education Week looked into reading scores and graduation rates in the state, she found a mixed bag, at best. “Wisconsin trend lines in fourth grade reading on the National Assessment for Educational Progress (aka the Nation’s Report Card) have increased during Walker’s tenure, but their rate of improvement … before Walker came in … are almost identical,” Klein writes.
“Graduation rates tell a similar story. Wisconsin’s graduation rate is up, but the nation’s is up too. And in fact, the Badger State is growing a little slower than the national average.”
And that teacher whose job Walker says his new system would save? First, she wasn’t really a Teacher of the Year, Salon’s Joan Walsh reports. Second, she wants him to stop telling this story. “I am hurt that this story is being used to make me the poster child for this political agenda,” she says, according to The Huffington Post.
The Christie Education Chronicles
Another prospective Republican presidential candidate, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, also has an education agenda he wants to bring to the nation. In a recent speech reported on in The New York Times, Christie claims to know what “real education reform for America looks like.”
If it looks like what has taken place in New Jersey, a Christie presidential administration would be disastrous for the country.
First off, it’s troubling, to say the least, when a top government official equates classroom teachers to terrorists, as Christie did recently did. Watch the video here to see him agree with a questioner’s contention that Political Parties Present Clear Choices For Education In 2016, So Far: