PoliticOlogy’s Analysis

As part of a weekly series exploring the policy positions of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, this article examines Barack Obama's education plan: what it claims, what it promises, and whether it delivers. Make sure to click back to our analysis of Mitt Romney's education plan, and follow PoliticOlogy for weekly analyses of the candidates' positions.

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Pros:

Early Childhood Education and Waivers (kind of)

There is enough evidence to support the expansion of early childhood education. In allocating $500 million to the next round of Race to the Top Early Learning Challenge grants, the administration has made a sincere and significant effort to improve the quality of early childhood education. Most of the funding will go to low-income students, which is certainly understandable the political climate and the restrictions on spending. But, as the team from Broader, Bolder Approach suggests, the administration should push for a system that provides high-quality resources for all children, rather than a select few.

Just like public schools around the country, pre-k centers have had similar problems measuring and guaranteeing success. According to a report by Sharon Lynn Kagan, the co-director of the National Center for Children and Families at Teachers College, Columbia University, "some programs for infants and toddlers are of very poor quality, whether measured by child-to-staff ratio, teacher qualifications or direct observation." The administration is now trying to tackle this problem by withholding Head Start funding from pre-k centers that don't achieve certain standards.

By most accounts this a good thing. When most people think of standards, they think of standardized tests. But as glue and glitter skills can hardly be tested, early education organization have had to develop other measures that rely on assessments of the facilities, the child-teacher ratio, and the qualifications of the teachers.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was a well-intentioned piece of legislation that tried and failed to provide the magic solution to education. Now, since taking office in 2008, Obama has made significant efforts to nullify NCLB, mostly by giving qualified states waivers to set their own standards. The aim of every piece of education reform policy is to close the achievement gaps and increase reading and math scores. What experts have found, however, is that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. States need to develop their own, achievable standards and measures. That said, states must first comply with a number of federally mandated standards, like teacher and principal accountability based on multifaceted guidelines.

Cons:

Standards based education reform doesn't work. Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institute points to, what he calls, the "Fallacy of the A+ Countries," which illustrates the faulty logic that advocates of national standards use: "If you look at the top ten countries in the world, they all have national standards." But, he says, that's not evidence that national standards work. "If you look at the bottom ten nations of the world, they all have national standards too." Yet, policy makers seems to have an obsession with raising standards, assuming that that will bridge the achievement gap or encourage better results.

So, when we look at student academic achievement and teacher accountability, it becomes difficult to know what sorts of measures policy makers should use to assess success. Obama has tried to devise a multifaceted approach to standards, which seems to emphasize principal, peer, student and parent evaluations. Some have argued, like Diane Ravitch has, that schools will still be judged by their students' test scores, making it impossible to look at student achievements in the arts and humanities.

And she's probably right. Obama has tried to shift the focus from a singular, national solution to a varied, local-level solution. But his policy hardy allows for a local level solution: to qualify for a waiver or Race to the Top grants, states have to meet a great number of federal standards, including the adoption of a core standards system, which is just another way of saying standardized testing.

Accountability and transparency do very little to attract teachers and retain the good ones. Indeed, tests are almost never good predictors or measures of a teacher's success. Even so, when policy makers say accountability, they are really talking about eliminating tenure in order to fire the teachers who don’t meet certain testing standards. It's any easy fix to a difficult problem.

Here's the kicker: Obama, like Romney, is promoting charter schools despite the fact that research shows charters schools barely affect student academic achievement. One study concludes that charter schools produce the same results in students as their traditional public school counter parts. Nonetheless, Republicans and the Obama administration take the line that charters are the leaders in innovation and education. Sadly, there's no research to say that's true.

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Related Post: Mitt Romney's Education Plan: Overview and Analysis

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