Presidential Primaries Impact Education Policy (1/4/2008)

With the Iowa caucuses, the Presidential election season officially went into full swing this week. Despite the ever-increasing media coverage of the race, education remains low on the priority list for most candidates. Following debates and speeches dominated by talk of Iraq, immigration, and fiscal policy, education is often lost. However, as the primary season draws forward, voters should begin to focus more on the various issue areas for each candidate.

What do the Iowa caucuses mean for education? Republican candidate Mike Huckabee, who won the GOP caucus in Iowa, advocates a return to more traditionally conservative ideologies. From his own website, as well as interviews and other statements, Huckabee’s stance on education, basically, entails the following:

• Making arts and music education integrated in the curriculum, not extracurricular;
• Allowing states to set benchmarks and achievement goals for No Child Left Behind (NCLB);
• Encouraging home schooling and school choice programs;
• Testing teachers and imposing waiting periods for teacher tenure; and
• Creating teacher-designed performance-pay systems.

This move toward more state control is the predominant viewpoint among GOP candidates. All Republican candidates advocate either for amending NCLB to allow states more control and flexibility or aborting NCLB altogether. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is also calling for greater state control and flexibility when it comes to meeting benchmarks under NCLB. While Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has not detailed a specific education platform, he has repeatedly stated his opposition to federally imposed national standards for education.
Former Senator Fred Thompson (R-TN) has called for NCLB to be discarded altogether, opting instead for states to set their own education priorities. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani continues to stay away from discussing NCLB, and instead focuses his education platform on supporting school choice as the best method for reform.

For Democrats, with just four days until the New Hampshire primary, Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) is scrambling to find a strategy to counter to Senator Barack Obama’s momentum after his convincing win in Iowa. Education will not likely be a critical part of this new strategy because the education debate, thus far, has lacked any true substance and neither candidate is eager to generate new education initiatives out of Washington or tackle the nuances of NCLB.

The candidates are proposing education platforms that have remained unchanged over the last 20 years: addressing the drop-out crisis, afterschool opportunities, better training, and recruiting and pay of teachers and principals. “The parties are mired in the tired debates they've been having since the 1990s. The candidates' K-12 education proposals are, by and large, the same old same old,” writes Mike Petrilli, Vice President for National Programs & Policy of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. And he is right.

Both Clinton and Obama argue that NCLB needs to be reformed, but the details are absent, even if Clinton is more rhetorically aggressive against the law’s testing and sanctions. So what does the Iowa caucus mean for federal education policy? Not much actually. The presidential election, thus far, is about issues other than education.

So as November approaches, keep in mind that the critical education policy makers are the same as they were in 2007: Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and the staff of the Committee on Health Education Labor and Pension and George Miller (D-CA) and the staff of the House Committee on Education and Labor. The federal education activity will come from those offices in 2008.

Resources:
Mike Petrilli, “Parties like it’s 1999,” Education Gadfly, November 29, 2007, http://www.edexcellence.net/foundation/gadfly/issue.cfm?edition=&id=317#3720.
“Education,” Obama ’08, http://www.barackobama.com/issues/education/
“Supporting Parents and Caring for Children,” Hillary for President, http://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/family/
“Education and the Arts,” Mike Huckabee for President, http://www.mikehuckabee.com/?FuseAction=Issues.View&Issue_id=7
“Raising the Bar on Education,” Mitt Romney for Education,
http://www.mittromney.com/Issues/education
Authors: DAD, SAS