Obama outlines broad plan for US education
By Scott Helman, Globe Staff | September 10, 2008
Senator Barack Obama, responding in part to new competition for the women’s vote from Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, outlined his plan to overhaul education yesterday, pledging to double federal funding for public charter schools, spend $500 million to upgrade school technology, and award merit pay for teachers, including higher salaries for math and science instructors.
Speaking at Stebbins High School near Dayton, Ohio, Obama offered a dismal picture of the state of American education, warning that US students are lagging behind Asian counterparts in advanced engineering degrees, that jobs are going unfilled because of a lack of skilled applicants, and that elementary school pupils are receiving too little science education to compete in the global economy.
“That kind of future is economically untenable for America,” Obama said. “It is morally unacceptable for our children. And it is not who we are as a nation.”
Some of what Obama detailed yesterday he has proposed before, but he laid out a series of new proposals that his campaign estimates would cost about $1 billion. These initiatives, combined with earlier proposals he offered on early education and K-12 schools, bring the price tag of Obama’s education plan to about $19 billion, which his campaign says can be covered by cutting federal spending, including slashing the amount of congressional earmarks.
Obama also sprinkled in new, harsh criticism of his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, charging that McCain had “marched with the ideologues in his party” for almost 30 years in opposing efforts to hire more teachers and expand the Head Start program for preschoolers.
“This is important to understand,” Obama said. “In those three decades, he has not done one thing to truly improve the quality of public education in our country. Not one real proposal or law or initiative. Nothing.”
In response, McCain’s campaign issued a litany of education votes and proposals the Arizona senator has made, and highlighted his own education blueprint. McCain’s plan calls for, among other things, recruiting qualified non-teachers to take over classes, awarding bonuses to teachers who work and excel in underperforming schools, and giving parents more choice in how and where their children are educated, namely through vouchers for private and parochial schools.
Republicans also pointed to an article last year in Education Week, the “newspaper of record” on school policy, which concluded that Obama had not “made a significant mark on education policy” while a US senator or state senator in Illinois.
Late yesterday, McCain’s campaign hit back on the issue, unveiling a television ad that questions Obama’s record on education reform and that raises the red-hot political issue of sex education. “Obama’s one accomplishment? Legislation to teach ‘comprehensive sex education’ to kindergartners,” the announcer says in the ad. “Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama. Wrong on education. Wrong for your family.”
The Obama campaign said he voted for a sex education bill while in the Illinois Legislature, but that it stated the instruction should be “age appropriate” and parents could opt out. “It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement.
Obama’s focus on education this week is part of a broader pitch he has been making on the economy and domestic issues - particularly in battleground states in the Midwest - since formally accepting the nomination two weeks ago. A key part of his strategy is to convince voters that McCain differs little on policy from President Bush, whose popularity rating rests at about 30 percent.
But Obama’s appeals to middle-class and suburban families - notably women, a crucial voting bloc - have grown more urgent since McCain’s pick of Palin, the 44-year-old Alaska governor, changed the contours of the race, with the GOP ticket now casting themselves as mavericks eager to shake up Washington.
“After three decades of indifference on education, do you really believe that John McCain is going to make a difference now?” Obama asked yesterday in Ohio, and his audience responded with a resounding “No!”
Obama’s campaign also released a new television ad yesterday highlighting many of the same points, noting McCain’s call, as Republicans took control of Congress in 1994, for the abolition of the US Department of Education.
Still, in an illustration of the difficulty Obama faces in countering the excitement Palin has added to the race, CNN cut away from his education speech to show Palin addressing thousands of supporters about 30 miles south in Lebanon, Ohio.
Two elements of Obama’s plan in particular may appeal to some independents and Republicans: his call for doubling federal spending on charter schools, from $200 million to $400 million a year; and an insistence that districts receiving certain federal assistance have clear plans to remove poorly performing teachers.
Obama bemoaned, as he has done on other issues, the partisan gridlock that he says has allowed problems in the public education system to fester. But there are real and significant differences among Republicans and Democrats about the right solutions.
While Obama emphasizes parental choice within a publicly funded school system, McCain made a point in his speech to the Republican National Convention last week of promoting his support for vouchers, which would allow parents to take public money allotted to their children and spend it in different settings.
“Some may choose a better public school. Some may choose a private one. Many will choose a charter school,” McCain said. “But they will have that choice and their children will have that opportunity.”
The Boston Globe
Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.