Obama’s education perspective: not yet fully formed, not yet modern, not yet bold

http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=NDgwNDcwMGYwNDcyZWQwMzMyNTUxMWNlOTRjNDdiMzI

The sky over Washington, D.C., was gray and gloomy this past Saturday when Barack Obama addressed thousands of members of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, who had assembled several blocks from the Capitol for their annual convention.

Education has not been prominent in the presidential campaign to date and it’s unlikely that will change. Nonetheless, attention must be paid when Obama peddles his education wares to salivating teachers’ union members, who are equally ready to applaud or assail anyone — be he Republican or Democrat, mere mortal or Obama — who challenges their core beliefs.

The NEA always presents a particularly tough crowd for Obama because he sees education as one proven pudding of his bipartisan bona fides. Thus, on Saturday he could not simply recycle union claptrap and tell the NEA all the nonsense it desperately wanted to hear. The question, then, was this: In what way would Obama, in his speech, choose to break from the teachers’ union orthodoxy and thereby shore up his work-across-the-aisle credentials?

In the past, he has tried to do this by supporting the completely reasonable idea, unreasonably attacked by the NEA, that good teachers should receive more money than bad ones. Last year, well before he secured the presumption of presidential nomination, Obama suggested at the NEA convention that so-called merit pay for teachers made sense (for which suggestion he was the recipient of sundry boos). And in April of this year, in a segment on FOX News Sunday, Obama restated that position to host Chris Wallace.

Obama: I think that on issues of education, I’ve been very clear about the fact — and sometimes I’ve gotten in trouble with the teachers’ union on this — that we should be experimenting with charter schools. We should be experimenting with different ways of compensating teachers.

Wallace: You mean merit pay?

Obama: Well, merit pay, the way it’s been designed, I think, is based on just a single standardized test — I think is a big mistake, because the way we measure performance may be skewed by whether or not the kids are coming into school already three years or four years behind.

But I think that having assessment tools and then saying, “You know what? Teachers who are on career paths to become better teachers, developing themselves professionally — that we should pay excellence more.” I think that’s a good idea, so…Paying useful employees more money than lousy employees is indeed a “good idea”; in most industries, in fact, it’s known as common sense. Not so, though, in the American public school bureaucracy in which educators — the good, bad, and ugly — all receive raises based not on which subjects they teach or how well they teach them but on how long they’ve been in the profession. Tenure trumps talent.

Saturday, via video from Butte, Montana, Obama again told the NEA that merit pay made sense, and again boos swelled from the crowd. Good for him. He deserves credit for backing a smart idea. But that in no way proves that Obama has gone against his party or subscribes to his own post-partisan speechifying.

Merit pay may arouse the NEA’s ire and Republicans’ ardor, but it’s hardly a policy out of step with many left-leaning thinkers or with the Democratic party. Last November the liberal Center For American Progress released a report, “The Future of Teacher Compensation,” on the reformation of teacher salaries through merit pay. In September 2007, Democratic Representative George Miller, chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor, clashed publicly with NEA President Reg Weaver after Weaver opposed any inclusion of merit pay in an updated draft of the No Child Left Behind law that Miller constructed.

Merit pay for teachers is abundantly sensible — so much so, that opposing it is widely seen as batty. The USA Today editorial board wrote last year, “Objecting to merit pay today amounts to opposing a proven tool for making teachers more effective.” The same can be said about charter schools, which Obama commendably supports but which are nonetheless also supported not only by Republicans but by large swaths of liberals and the Democratic party.

And despite his advocacy for merit pay and charter schools, Obama still took from the NEA convention its presidential endorsement after 79.8 percent of the union’s voting delegates backed him.

What else did Obama say to the NEA on Saturday? He said public schools need more money, he said he was a stalwart opponent of vouchers and private-school choice, he said we need 100,000 new teachers, he said we can’t hold teachers and schools accountable without holding parents accountable too, he said we need “better pay for teachers across the board,” and he accused McCain of “recycling tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice.”

Such elocutions hardly amount to a post-partisan prescription for reforming the nation’s failing schools. Opportunities for Obama to show such post-partisan leadership have arisen– such as last month, when Washington, D.C.’s voucher program (supported by Marion Barry, even) was under attack from congressional Democrats — but the candidate has passed on these opportunities.

Nonetheless, Obama says that in the realm of education policy his actions have demonstrated his commitment to post-partisanship. Such meager efforts as his scarcely merit such claims.

– Liam Julian is a Hoover Institution research fellow who writes frequently about education.

Robert Reich: economics approach should be bottom-up

http://robertreich.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, July 22, 2008
A Short Primer on McCainomics Versus Obamanomics: Top-Down or Bottom-Up

McCain and Obama represent two fundamentally different economic philosophies. McCain’s is top-down economics; Obama’s is bottom-up.

Top-down economics holds that:

1. If you give generous tax breaks to the rich, they will have greater incentive to work hard and invest. Their harder work and added investments will generate more jobs and faster economic growth, to the benefit of average working people.

2. If you give generous tax breaks to corporations, reduce their payroll costs, and impose fewer regulations on them, they will compete more successfully in global commerce. This too will result in more jobs for Americans and faster growth in the United States.

3. The best way to reduce the energy costs of average Americans is to give oil companies access to more land on which to drill, lower taxes, and lower capital costs. If they get these, they’ll supply more oil, which will reduce oil prices.

4. The best way to deal with the crisis in credit markets is to insure large Wall Street investment banks, as well as Fannie and Freddie, against losses. This will result in more loans at lower rates to average Americans. (Bailing them out may risk “moral hazard,” in the sense that they will expect to be bailed out in the future, but that’s a small price to pay for restoring liquidity.)

All of these propositions are highly questionable, especially in a global economy. The rich do not necessarily invest additional post-tax earnings in the United States; they invest wherever around the world they can get the highest returns. Meanwhile, large American-based corporations are doing business all over the world; their supply chains extend to wherever they can find low labor costs combined with high output, and their sales to wherever they can find willing buyers. Oil companies, too, are operating globally and set their prices largely at the point where global supply meets global demand. Additional drilling here creates environmental risks for us but generates the same marginal benefits for consumers in China, India, and Europe as we might enjoy (most likely not for a decade or more). Credit markets are global as well, so the beneficiaries of bailouts of large investment banks and lenders are also worldwide while the potential costs (including moral hazard) fall on American taxpayers.

This isn’t to argue that top-down economics is completely nonsensical. America is, after all, the world’s largest economy. So whatever helps the top of it will to some extent trickle down to everyone else here, and whatever hurts the top is likely to impose some burdens all the way down.

But in a global economy, bottom-up economics makes more sense. Bottom-up economics holds that:

1. The growth of the American economy depends largely on the productivity of its workers. They are rooted here, while global capital and large American-based global corporations are not.

2. The productivity of America workers depends mainly on their education, their health, and the infrastructure that connects them together. These public investments are therefore critical to our future prosperity.

3. Global capital will come to the United States to create good jobs not because our taxes or wages or regulatory costs are low (there will always be many places around the world where taxes, wages, and regulatory costs are lower) but because the productivity of our workers is high.

4. The answer to our energy costs is found in the creativity and inventiveness of Americans in generating non-oil and non-carbon fuels and new means of energy conservation, rather than in access by global oil companies to more oil. So subsidize basic research and development in these alternatives.

5. Finally, in order to avoid a recession or worse, it’s necessary to improve the financial security of average Americans who are now sinking into a quagmire of debt and foreclosure. Otherwise, there won’t be adequate purchasing power to absorb all the goods and services the economy produces. (As to “moral hazard,” the financial institutions that did the lending had more reason to know of the risks involved than those who did the borrowing.)

Listen carefully to the economic debate in the months ahead in light of these two competing economic philosophies. And hope that the latter wins out in years to come.