Education Not Central Issue in '08

WASHINGTON, MARCH 4, 2008 -- Education's role--or lack thereof--in the 2008 presidential race was discussed by Frederick M. Hess and a panel of experts at AEI on Monday. Education has been a salient issue in federal politics since the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957 and the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958. Since then, the 1983 report A Nation at Risk and multiple reauthorizations of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), including its most recent reiteration as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), have given education a prominent position on the national stage. Hess hearkened back to the 2000 election, when 16 percent of Americans identified education as the single most important issue facing the country. Today, only 4 percent of Americans agree.

Chester E. Finn Jr. of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation added that "if any of today's candidates really thought education was a winning issue or an important issue in the 2008 election, we'd know it by now." The author of the recently released Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik (Princeton University Press, 2008), Finn offered several possible explanations for education's relatively low visibility in 2008 and suggested that "education is no longer a winning issue for presidential candidates because it turns out that, when push comes to shove, there really is not all that much that a president can do about it."

Echoing Finn's assessment, William Galston of the Brookings Institution remarked, "Not only has education not been a big issue in this presidential election, it is not going to be a big issue in this presidential election." On Barack Obama's opposition to "teaching to the test"--a common criticism of post-NCLB instruction--Galston said: "The opposition to filling in the bubbles, or teaching to the test, is a middle class problem. . . . As a matter of pedagogy, teaching to the test is worse than teaching creatively. But it's a lot better than not teaching at all, which is what is happening in a lot of other places."

Marc Lampkin of Ed in '08 challenged Finn and Galston, asserting that while "the goal of making education the top issue is aspirational," this should not obscure the smart discourse that has occurred so far among the candidates. With the exception of Ron Paul, Lampkin pointed out, all the remaining candidates have addressed the issue of standards and embraced the notion that we need to change the way we compensate teachers. Furthermore, he emphasized the importance of the transparency created by NCLB and was more optimistic that the law's "baseline notions of NCLB--assessment and disaggregated data--will remain intact."

Discussion Highlights

• Transparency. Finn weighed in on the transparency created by NCLB, arguing that it will be blurred if excessive "alternative measurements" are accepted.
• Teacher Compensation. Galston noted that although Obama may be a more forward-thinking than Hillary Clinton on the issue, the gap between them is not significant enough to constitute a significant or meaningful debate. Lampkin stressed the role of unions in shaping the issue of differential pay, observing that all of the Democratic candidates but Obama proposed measures that the unions could stomach. Clinton supports differentiated pay on a school-wide basis, for instance, because it does not go to individual teachers--a position that the American Federation of Teachers accepts. Finn noted that the pay-for-performance mechanisms supported by Obama and Clinton both entail extra pay for teachers who take on extra responsibilities. Because it resembles overtime pay rather than merit pay, he said, this is a far cry from what many people think of as "differential compensation."
• The Future of NCLB. Hess asked panelists to consider the collapse of the coalitions in the House of Representatives and Senate that propelled NCLB to passage in 2001. Looking forward, Lampkin noted that NCLB is the beginning, not the end, of the discussion. Finn identified John McCain as having the greatest potential for bipartisanship, yet acknowledged his undeveloped track record in education. Galston lamented that the funding issues surrounding NCLB created a "bad faith" mentality, which has kept Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and George Miller (D-Calif.) from going back to those whose loyalty they drew on in 2001. Galston predicted that reauthorization will not happen until 2009, and that while there will be "a continuing focus on transparency, public information and subgroup aggregation . . . next year's [reauthorization] is likely, when the dust settles, to look more like the 1994 version than the 2001 version."

--JULIET SQUIRE

For video, audio, and more information about this conference, visit www.aei.org/event1669/.

AEI's Education Policy Studies program is a national leader in research on school reform. Chester E. Finn Jr. has coauthored or coedited two books with Frederick M. Hess, AEI's director of education policy studies: No Remedy Left Behind (AEI Press, 2007) and Leaving No Child Behind? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

For more information about education policy studies at AEI, contact Morgan Goatley mgoatley@aei.org or 202.828.6031.

For media inquiries, contact Véronique Rodman at vrodman@aei.org or 202.862.4870.

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