Josh Patashnik: Obama's evolution on education issues
[Josh Patashnik is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.]
... [Barack] Obama is not the most liberal member of the Senate--the widely reported National Journal rankings released in January, which say that he is, are essentially meaningless when it comes to grading presidential candidates, who inevitably miss significant numbers of votes--but nor is he a centrist. National Journal's rankings from last year, which have more validity, scored him as the tenth most liberal senator. The tension between Obama's post- partisan rhetoric and his deep-blue voting pattern is real.
There's at least one issue, though, on which Obama's record puts him sharply at odds with the party's liberal establishment: education. Obama has long advocated a reformist agenda that looks favorably upon things like competition between schools, test-based accountability, and performance pay for teachers. But the Obama campaign has hesitated to trumpet its candidate's maverick credentials. As an increasingly influential chorus of donors and policy wonks pushes an agenda within the Democratic Party that frightens teachers' unions and their traditional liberal allies, Obama seems unsure how far he can go in reassuring the former group that he's one of them without alienating the latter. And this is a shame, because Obama may represent the best hope for real reform in decades.
Obama's background certainly gives educational traditionalists pause. During his time in the state legislature, The Chicago Tribune described him as "a leading advocate in Illinois of charter schools," and, in a 2002 interview, he said he was "not closed-minded" on the question of vouchers. He also championed legislation creating Illinois's innovative universal preschool program, which focuses more on the first three years of a child's life than equivalent programs in other states do. "He was always considered someone who was willing to look outside of the box for solutions," says Donald Feinstein, executive director of Chicago's Academy for Urban School Leadership.
That pattern continued when Obama arrived in Washington. In a strongly worded October 2005 education policy speech, he warned that "government alone can't meet" the challenge of preparing children to compete in a globalized world, and he criticized "liberals who will look at failing test scores and failing schools and not realize how much change matters." He introduced legislation to fund new training and teacher-pay programs that would encourage mentorship within the profession and a stronger commitment to schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods. And, when Obama kicked off his presidential campaign, he flaunted his heterodoxy: In July 2007, Obama told a gathering of the reform-averse National Education Association (NEA)--with 3.2 million members, the nation's largest labor union--that he supports performance-based pay incentives for individual teachers. As president, Obama says he would spend an additional $18 billion annually on education--more than Hillary Clinton--but he warns that greater funding must go hand-in-hand with greater accountability....
As the campaign has worn on, though, Obama has sounded more and more like a traditional liberal Democrat. His stump speech denounces No Child Left Behind (NCLB)--a law far more popular among the Democratic think-tank crowd than among party regulars, who dislike its reliance on standardized tests--with little mention of the "good elements" in the bill that he identified in his October 2005 speech. His campaign platform contains a handful of new ideas, notably on teacher recruitment and professional development, but many reformers find it disappointingly conventional. "It's not as bold as some of us were hoping for," says Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, a self-described Obama supporter. "He's been a little fuzzy." After he gave a major education policy address in New Hampshire last fall, Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford professor and Obama education adviser, emphasized to The Concord Monitor that his teacher-compensation plan--one of the few proposals in the speech that genuinely set him apart from the Democratic field--wasn't really a performance-pay scheme....
Despite his occasional pandering to the left, many reformers assume that, deep down, Obama is with them. They don't have much of a choice: Clinton has never released a detailed K-12 education plan, and her orthodox public statements and union support have made it fairly clear that she toes the party line. But there's good reason to believe that the reformers aren't just deluding themselves. The Journal Sentinel interview wasn't an isolated incident: Obama has a habit of peppering his speeches with hints as to where his sympathies lie--a sort of dogwhistle politics for education wonks. He cites as a model Denver's pioneering teacher-compensation system, which provides bonus pay to teachers who agree to teach in poor neighborhoods and who do well on a variety of quality assessments, including having students who score highly on standardized tests. "Denver has become a buzzword for a willingness to do things differently," says Brad Jupp, a former teacher and senior academic policy adviser with the Denver Public Schools. By contrast, in November, Clinton told Iowa teachers the idea "would open a whole lot of problems."...
Read entire article at New Republic
... [Barack] Obama is not the most liberal member of the Senate--the widely reported National Journal rankings released in January, which say that he is, are essentially meaningless when it comes to grading presidential candidates, who inevitably miss significant numbers of votes--but nor is he a centrist. National Journal's rankings from last year, which have more validity, scored him as the tenth most liberal senator. The tension between Obama's post- partisan rhetoric and his deep-blue voting pattern is real.
There's at least one issue, though, on which Obama's record puts him sharply at odds with the party's liberal establishment: education. Obama has long advocated a reformist agenda that looks favorably upon things like competition between schools, test-based accountability, and performance pay for teachers. But the Obama campaign has hesitated to trumpet its candidate's maverick credentials. As an increasingly influential chorus of donors and policy wonks pushes an agenda within the Democratic Party that frightens teachers' unions and their traditional liberal allies, Obama seems unsure how far he can go in reassuring the former group that he's one of them without alienating the latter. And this is a shame, because Obama may represent the best hope for real reform in decades.
Obama's background certainly gives educational traditionalists pause. During his time in the state legislature, The Chicago Tribune described him as "a leading advocate in Illinois of charter schools," and, in a 2002 interview, he said he was "not closed-minded" on the question of vouchers. He also championed legislation creating Illinois's innovative universal preschool program, which focuses more on the first three years of a child's life than equivalent programs in other states do. "He was always considered someone who was willing to look outside of the box for solutions," says Donald Feinstein, executive director of Chicago's Academy for Urban School Leadership.
That pattern continued when Obama arrived in Washington. In a strongly worded October 2005 education policy speech, he warned that "government alone can't meet" the challenge of preparing children to compete in a globalized world, and he criticized "liberals who will look at failing test scores and failing schools and not realize how much change matters." He introduced legislation to fund new training and teacher-pay programs that would encourage mentorship within the profession and a stronger commitment to schools in disadvantaged neighborhoods. And, when Obama kicked off his presidential campaign, he flaunted his heterodoxy: In July 2007, Obama told a gathering of the reform-averse National Education Association (NEA)--with 3.2 million members, the nation's largest labor union--that he supports performance-based pay incentives for individual teachers. As president, Obama says he would spend an additional $18 billion annually on education--more than Hillary Clinton--but he warns that greater funding must go hand-in-hand with greater accountability....
As the campaign has worn on, though, Obama has sounded more and more like a traditional liberal Democrat. His stump speech denounces No Child Left Behind (NCLB)--a law far more popular among the Democratic think-tank crowd than among party regulars, who dislike its reliance on standardized tests--with little mention of the "good elements" in the bill that he identified in his October 2005 speech. His campaign platform contains a handful of new ideas, notably on teacher recruitment and professional development, but many reformers find it disappointingly conventional. "It's not as bold as some of us were hoping for," says Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, a self-described Obama supporter. "He's been a little fuzzy." After he gave a major education policy address in New Hampshire last fall, Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford professor and Obama education adviser, emphasized to The Concord Monitor that his teacher-compensation plan--one of the few proposals in the speech that genuinely set him apart from the Democratic field--wasn't really a performance-pay scheme....
Despite his occasional pandering to the left, many reformers assume that, deep down, Obama is with them. They don't have much of a choice: Clinton has never released a detailed K-12 education plan, and her orthodox public statements and union support have made it fairly clear that she toes the party line. But there's good reason to believe that the reformers aren't just deluding themselves. The Journal Sentinel interview wasn't an isolated incident: Obama has a habit of peppering his speeches with hints as to where his sympathies lie--a sort of dogwhistle politics for education wonks. He cites as a model Denver's pioneering teacher-compensation system, which provides bonus pay to teachers who agree to teach in poor neighborhoods and who do well on a variety of quality assessments, including having students who score highly on standardized tests. "Denver has become a buzzword for a willingness to do things differently," says Brad Jupp, a former teacher and senior academic policy adviser with the Denver Public Schools. By contrast, in November, Clinton told Iowa teachers the idea "would open a whole lot of problems."...