By Karen Matsuoka
For The Daily Bruin
Earlier this month an ABC/Washington Post Poll rated it as the
single most important issue to voters in the November election and
both major party candidates can’t stop talking about it.
With George W. Bush’s now well-known tag line,
“leave no child behind,” and Al Gore’s signature
education Blue Book, which outlines his opinions, the candidates
have been hard at work developing their policies for education
reform.
Though Bush and Gore may differ in the actual measures they are
proposing, both are emphasizing greater accountability and choice.
Some of their proposals are raising concern among school
administrators and education policy analysts.
“Gore and Bush are similar because each imagines greater
testing at the state level and, to some extent at the national
level, as being a prime engine for reform,” said John Rogers,
Director of Research at Center X, a branch of UCLA’s Graduate
School of Education focusing on teacher training and education
policy that promotes equity.
As for his proposals, Bush has called on states to annually test
students in the third through eighth grades.
Gore supports voluntary testing in fourth grade reading and
eighth grade math. He proposes to increase funding to failing
schools and then shut them down and reopen them with a new
principal and faculty if they continue to underperform.
“Where we find failure, we need to take immediate action
to increase accountability and put in place strong remedies to
ensure failing students are not left behind, improve or remove
failing teachers, and turn around failing schools,” Gore
wrote in a statement in his education Blue Book.
Both candidates want to provide schools with financial
incentives to boost performance. Bush proposes to set aside $500
million to reward states with improved test scores.
But Jo Ann Isken, a Principal at Moffett Elementary School in
Los Angeles and a faculty advisor at UCLA’s Center X, said
testing is, at best, an imperfect measure of school, teacher, and
student performance.
“When a student arrives at school who’s been abused
since he was two years old, there are serious issues to be dealt
with prior to teaching him how to read,” Isken said.
“He may not start reading with the other kids, but with
counseling for his abuse, he will start to read eventually. But all
that the test scores will show is this kid is not reading which
prompt questions like “˜What’s wrong with the
school’ or “˜Why isn’t the teacher trying hard
enough?'” she continued.
Despite their shared emphasis on accountability and choice, Gore
and Bush differ when it comes to how they propose to increase
choice.
While Gore supports greater public school choice and increasing
the number of charter schools, Bush supports providing vouchers to
students from low-performing schools which can be used to transfer
out.
The voucher issue will surface this election season in
California, when voters will decide on Proposition 38 ““ the
school voucher initiative.
Rogers claims there is a crisis in public education, a big part
of which is caused by external factors, beginning with insufficient
resources.
“A Congressional Budget study said that $100 billion is
needed just for infrastructure ““ like building new
schools,” Rogers said. “Without that funding, you have
a situation where you have year-round schools in California that
disadvantage poor communities with dense populations.
Rogers also said that neither candidate is talking enough about
equity in education.
“Both candidates have catchy mottos but neither is
discussing the funding gap between students who live in poor and
wealthy neighborhoods,” he said.
Bush has received some praise for his education policies in
Texas by a recent RAND study which ranked that state number one in
closing the achievement gap between minorities and whites as well
as improving test scores overall.
In one of his education position papers, Bush addressed the
issue of educational inequalities among certain groups.
“We are a nation … where the achievement gap between
rich and poor, Anglo and minority is wide ““ and in some cases
growing wider still,” Bush wrote in the paper. “My
administration will do things differently.”
No matter how many reform policies or positions papers the
candidates produce, Rogers said it is important for the future
president to remember that there is more to education than testing,
accountability and vouchers.
“Both candidates more or less look at education as a
discrete policy area, but it’s essential to see it as
embedded in a whole host of other social policy issues related to
addressing the needs of the working poor,” Rogers said.
Still, Isken said she is optimistic that politicians are
beginning to see the importance of a more holistic approach to
education policy.
“People are beginning to understand the family and
conditions at home and how they relate to academic
performance,” she said. “At least the Clinton-Gore
administration has increased funding for after-school programs and
neighborhood- and school-based school clinics.”
With reports from Michael Falcone, Daily Bruin Senior Staff.