Obama vs McCain on education

I think we can all agree that education is an important issue…perhaps one of the most important issues. Across the country, teachers’ unions have made mediocrity acceptable and failure the norm. Our inner city school districts produce thousands of illiterate and disinterested students every year. The solution of course is that the politics and policies of the past have failed and that we need a new way forward. We need change.

So what will the touted  candidate of change do improve our education system and rescue us from those failed policies? According to the Wall Street Journal not much. First some background on actual facts;

 Mr. McCain cited the Washington, D.C., Opportunity Scholarship Program, a federally financed school-choice program for disadvantaged kids signed into law by President Bush in 2004. Qualifying families in the District of Columbia receive up to $7,500 a year to attend private K-12 schools. To qualify, a child must live in a family with a household income below 185% of the poverty level. Some 1,900 children participate; 99% are black or Hispanic. Average annual income is just over $22,000 for a family of four.

A recent Department of Education report found nearly 90% of participants in the D.C. program have higher reading scores than peers who didn’t receive a scholarship. There are five applicants for every opening.

Then the solutions from the Candidate of Change;

Congressional Democrats have refused to reauthorize the D.C. voucher program and are threatening to kill it. Last month, Philadelphia’s school reform commission voted to seize six schools from outside managers, including four from Edison. In L.A., local school board members oppose the expansion of charters even though seven in 10 charters in the district outperform their neighborhood peers.

It’s well known that the force calling the Democratic tune here is the teachers unions. Earlier this month, Senator Obama accepted the endorsement of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union. Speaking recently before the American Federation of Teachers, he described the alternative efforts as “tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice.”

Mr. Obama told an interviewer recently that he opposes school choice because, “although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you’re going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom.” The Illinois Senator has it exactly backward. Those at the top don’t need voucher programs and they already exercise school choice. They can afford exclusive private schools, or they can afford to live in a neighborhood with decent public schools. The point of providing educational options is to extend this freedom to the “kids at the bottom.”

So like everything else, Senator Obama talks about how he we should have Hope and how he’ll Change the country, but the truth is this; he’s still relying on the poltics of the past…the empty rhetoric that has given us only two Democrat presidents in the last forty years. There is no change, there is no hope, there’s only Democrats who want to remain in power. Period. The solution for the Democrats is the same solution they’ve always had…enslave the country to the whims of corrupt teachers’ unions.

Category: Politics, Society