Edwards: Tapping Working-Class Roots to Focus on Opportunity

Few contenders this presidential season have made higher education as fundamental to their candidacy as has John Edwards, the former U.S. senator from North Carolina. He has called for simplifying federal financial aid, overhauling the student-loan system, and providing a year’s free tuition to all college students. For Mr. Edwards, who grew up making do in small, Southern towns, the issue of college access feeds into a broader theme of his campaign, that of providing economic, educational, and social opportunity to all Americans.

In the the latest installment of The Chronicle's series of profiles of the leading candidates for president, we take a look at Mr. Edwards’s efforts to establish a pilot college-access program in his home state and how his own experience could shape his perspective as president.

We have also posted a Q&A from a Chronicle interview Mr. Edwards that was conducted in 2006, when he was director of the Center for Poverty, Work, and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Education Platforms

We've added many of the presidential candidates' positions on education to our righthand column under Education Platform. Some candidates have full-fledged education issues pages while others have only brief mentions of education and still others don't have an "education" issues page, but a "youth" page.

We didn't include a link to John McCain, because I couldn't find education among his issues. If anyone could offer one, I'd welcome a link.

John Edwards and No Child Left Behind

There is a refreshing depth to Edwards' positions on No Child Left Behind. He certainly does much better than Bill Richardson's get-rid-of-it view, which has to be the stupidest campaign plank ever from such a demonstrably smart man. Edwards joins the multitudes in supporting changes that would allow states to track the growth of students over time. He also likes the proposal in the George Miller draft that would make it easier for schools that just have a few failings in a few categories to make adequate yearly progress. I remain among those who think this is a bad idea, since it weakens the law's focus on disadvantaged children, but if they don't do something like that the law is going soon to look ridiculous to taxpayers and voters, who will wonder why nearly every school in their town has missed the federal targets. It is not good for a law to look ridiculous, so Edwards is likely smarter than I am on that issue.
My main complaint with his NCLB position is his stand on testing, which I think betrays a lack of understanding of what good teachers do. He is not alone in this. I have yet to find a presidential candidate who understands, or is willing to discuss, this point, so I can't see this as a major Edwards flaw. None of us is perfect.
Here is what his Web site says about his view on tests under NCLB: "Rather than requiring students to take cheap standardized tests, Edwards believes that we must invest in the development of higher-quality assessments that measure higher-order thinking skills, including open-ended essays, oral examinations, and projects and experiments."
Sounds great, doesn't it? So why have so many states shied away from such tests? Why has the state of Maryland just decided to end its use of written answers to questions---the brief constructed responses?
The answer is that such tests are very expensive, very slow to grade and don't give you any important information that you cannot get from multiple choice exams. In addition, attempts to write such exams for ALL children---as opposed to Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams written for high schoolers who choose to take a challenging course--usually fail, because the test makers find they have to dumb down the process or graders will go made, and they will be reporting May's scores the following February. Such tests also cost millions of extra dollars that would be better spent raising teacher salaries.
That is what happened with Maryland's BCRs---they came out slow and stupid and expensive and led to bad teaching. Maryland was smart to get rid of them.
It may sound odd, but it is much better to make do with short, cheap standardized tests. They give you enough to know how a student, and a school, are doing in general, and can provide some quick clues to a kid's weaknesses. All that fine teaching on critical thinking will come if the student has a good teacher, and the cheap tests can show which teachers are good at raising achievement levels and which are not. Those are also the teachers who are most likely to be teaching those thinking skills that Edwards rightly praises. But until we get to high school and can give students tests of the quality of AP and IB, those good teachers do not need a standardized critical thinking test to help them. They prefer a cheap, quick multiple-choice test, something they can get out of the way, so they can continue their imaginative classroom work.
The cheap tests will help identify teachers who are not so good, and need help, and also identify those teachers whose students do well on the cheap tests and thus are most likely to be learning the thinking skills we all want our children to have. That certainly has been my experience, watching hundreds of teachers in action over the last 25 years. But if anyone can point me to a teacher who managed to raise scores significantly on those cheap tests without cheating, and yet did NOT teach those deeper skills, I would like to hear about it, so I can talk to the teacher and do a story. In my experience, teachers who raise achievement on cheap tests are very good teachers. They are just getting started. Their success on those tests is as closely tied to their success in teaching critical thinking as long spring walks are entwined with young love. Edwards should stop asking for tests that won't work, and emphasize his many other ideas that have merit.

John Edwards' smart school ideas

I apologize for my long absence and thank the smart posters who have been looking at Edwards recently. His stumbles on rural school statistics are embarrassing, but he remains the most intelligent candidate in the field when talking about how to improve schools. That does not mean that all of his proposals make sense. Like every national politician, he has to cater to some interest groups for whom good policies spell reduced influence. But as he did four years ago, Edwards is staying ahead of the pack, at least when it comes to thinking about education.
What impresses me most about the proposals he made in Des Moines last month is his take on the merit pay issue. The fact that he addresses it at all wins points with me. Some candidates think (wrongly) that the teachers unions just won't stand for merit pay, and so shy away. Edwards goes one very big step further by recognizing that the sort of individual rewards that some candidates support are unlikely to work in a well run school. In a poorly run school, it may make sense to reward your best teachers with some extra money to persuade them to stick around until somebody can find a good principal to match their good efforts with good support. But if a school is really going to soar, and raise the achievement level of nearly every child, it needs a team spirit, and Edwards' proposal recognizes that.
He wants to raise pay for teachers in succcessful (note that very important word) high-poverty schools by up to $15,000 a year. The first $5,000 would be for veteran teachers who mentored new teachers. This is fine, although his press release does not make it clear that this money would only go to such mentors in schools that have shown success. The second $5,000 would go to teachers who earned their National Board certification. This is also okay, since all teachers have a shot at the year-long certification process, but again the press release does not specify if the school would have to reach a certain level for them to get the money.
The impressive part of this merit pay plan comes with the third $5,000, which would go to every single teacher in "high poverty schools with high academic performance, good student behavior, and high parent satisfaction." There are a few schools like that in nearly every big city in America right now. Most of them are small charters. They don't get that much attention, but that extra money would help them recruit more good teachers and inspire more organizations to create such schools, or persuade public school systems to find smart, tough principals willing to create such schools as part of their districts.
It is a smart idea that should win support from many union members, since a team approach is what unionism is all about. Republicans so far are too stuck on the individualized approach--more money for every teacher whose students do well---to see that in the inner city, the every- teacher-for-herself approach doesn't work well. But the GOP folk are also openly admiring of the schools that have shown the power of the team, so I wait for them to get smart like Edwards and move in that same direction.

Education roundup

Some of the news laid out in this Associated Press story by Holly Ramer is noted elsewhere on Education Election by our bloggers, but this is a good summary. Interesting to note the turn toward education issues among the Democrats. Especially interesting is the boost in tax credits for higher education proposed by Clinton. Again, she's targeting middle-income voters who could use the help both there and from universal preschool.

Richard Whitmire

Is that a fact?

John Edwards frequently talks about the need to improve rural schools. But are they as bad as he says they are?

Hillary Clinton signals her support for school accountability by talking about her key role in bringing Arkansas schools out of the dark ages in the 1980s. Does she overstate her case?

Politifact, the St. Petersburg Times' new web site aimed at keeping the candidates honest, is starting to tackle education issues. The first forays focused on Edwards and Clinton. Take a peek at whether they tell the truth while on the stump.

The kids love Obama

Barack Obama continues to be a hit with the college set, speaking last week to an excitable crowd of 24,000 at New York University.

Obama again delighted the crowd by ripping the cost of college in a speech that touched on Iraq and health care too.

In other campaign news, Obama and John Edwards said in last week's New Hampshire debate that they would be comfortable reading the book "King and King," which has same-sex relationships as a theme, to their young children and would support its use as part of a school curriculum. Hillary Clinton also gave less enthusiastic support for the book, the subject of a controversy when a second grade techer read it to her class in Massachucetts.

The three were criticized by Mitt Romney, who in a statement said he opposed the use of such a book in school.

This post also appears on my education blog, Get on the Bus .

(Image Credit: Washington Square News)

John Edwards: Restoring The Promise of America's Schools

It's not quite as catchy as No Child Left Behind, but John Edwards released his education platform last week and armed it with four catch phrases instead of one -- the umbrella of "Restoring the Promise of America's Schools" and these subtitles:
1. Preparing Every Child to Succeed 2. An Excellent Teacher in Every Classroom 3. Making Every School an Outstanding School.
Maybe those don't roll off the tongue, but at least he's making a stand on education...

Giuliani's Tough-Guy Record on Higher Education

Rudolph W. Giuliani hasn’t said much yet about his campaign plans for higher education, but the Republican does have a controversial record on the issue.

In the first of our series of profiles of the leading presidential candidates, The Chronicle of Higher Education takes a look at Mr. Giuliani’s higher-education record as mayor. We also highlight his undergraduate experiences (he wrote political columns that, among other things, criticized Barry Goldwater) and summarize his platform positions that do mention postsecondary education.

As mayor, Mr. Giuliani worked to end open enrollment and raise admissions standards at New York City’s public university system, the City University of New York. To his supporters, his actions represented a bold move that has improved CUNY’s rigor. To his critics, Mr. Giuliani’s approach was bullheaded and threatened to undermine the urban university’s historic mission to educate all New Yorkers.

Both his supporters and his critics say Mr. Giuliani’s record on CUNY shows how he aggressively pursues his convictions, often without regard for public opinion, and illustrates the kind of leadership style — and heated debate — that Mr. Giuliani might bring to the White House if he were elected.

On another front, John Edwards released a plan on Friday to reform elementary and secondary education. It included a proposal to create a "West Point for teachers."

John Edwards a year ago: Universal Higher Ed

I sat down with John Edwards in Chapel Hill last year before he was a declared candidate for the Democratic nomination for president. I was interested in interviewing him for The Chronicle of Higher Education because we were in the midst of a series called the Growing Divide in which were were looking at the haves and have-nots in higher education and Edwards focused on "the two Americas" a lot during the 2004 presidential campaign. In the interview, which you can find here on The Chronicle's Web site, Edwards talked about how he thinks the country should basically adopt universal higher education. The suggestion surprised me given the cost, but Edwards maintained that the reason this hasn't been debated publicly is because no one has made the case for it.

-- Jeff Selingo

P.S. I promise to leave John Edwards to Jay Mathews after this post. It just had to be said.

Mathews loses a interesting Edwards quote

I had a story on page A2 of the Washington Post yesterday (Aug. 14) on research showing that inner city families who moved to better neighborhoods under an unusual federal housing voucher program did not find that their children were, on average, doing any better in their new schools. The reports threw cold water on the hopes shared by many social reformers, including presidential candidate John Edwards, that moving kids to better schools in better neighborhoods would improve their academic achievement, as other studies have indicated would happen.
I made plans for the story several weeks in advance, and asked several experts, including Edwards, to comment on the findings. When I got back from vacation on Monday, I tried to collect all the emails the experts had sent me, but stupidly overlooked the one from the senator. Here is what he said:

"Education should be the sturdiest ladder of opportunity in this
country. But more than fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education,
we still have two school systems in this country, where the quality of
our children's education depends on their parents' zip code.
Concentrating poor families together, often far from good schools and
good jobs, undermines every other antipoverty effort. Obviously, we
need to improve schools and neighborhoods everywhere. But when done
right, economically diverse schools and neighborhoods have helped
low-income children learn without impacting middle-class children."
-John Edwards

He was reacting to the point made by the researchers that the federal program, while scientifically interesting because it provided a random control group of similar families who did not move, may not have been a good test of the power of economic diversity because the neighborhoods the inner city families moved to were not much better than they ones they left. The new neighborhoods were not very racially diverse and the new schools were not very high-performing. My conclusion from reading the studies was that improving the academic achievement of inner city children is going to require hard work at raising the standards of the schools in the neighborhoods they live in now, and if the kind of economic class integration Edwards is talking about is to succeed, it will have to find a way to get those low-income kids into schools with a much greater proportion of middle-class students than the families in the HUD Moving to Opportunity program found in their new schools.
Edwards' "Plan to Promote Economically Diverse Schools" includes bonuses to middle-class schools enrolling low-income students and magnet schools dedicated to economic integration. Both are interesting ideas, and buttress Edwards' status in my eyes as the most original of the presidential candidates on educational issues so far.
His plan also includes creating a million new housing vouchers. The HUD MTO program created only about 3,000 new vouchers, but that was a pretty good test of what such a program would do. He might want to reconsider that part of his plan in light of the disappointing results from the HUD effort.

Watching Edwards

I am one of the EWA members who have agreed to post regularly on particular presidential candidates and their views on education. I asked to be assigned John Edwards, and was happy the EWA blog junta agreed to my request, because in past elections he has been among the more daring in his recommendations for reform. There is nothing wrong, of course, with the standard NEA-driven mantra for Democratic candidates, but I like some raisins and bananas in my oatmeal, so always applaud the officer seeker who occasionally free styles.
What distinguished Edwards in the past were his detailed recommendations for raising the level of high school instruction, including more Advanced Placement courses. His Web site says that strengthening high schools is still a priority, which is good.
But this year he has been getting most of the attention, when he speaks about education, for his suggestion that we work harder to bring his two Americas, rich and poor, together in our public schools. He has been talking about integrating schools by social class, something the law and the courts still allow us to do, even though it is likely to be very difficult. He is quoting the work of Century Foundation senior fellow Rick Kahlenberg, the most interesting and energetic advocate of this approach. Edwards knows the data---low income kids do better academically in high-income schools. He has so far NOT given into the annoying despair of some people who take this line to the extreme, saying low-income children are doomed to low achievement until we have a social revolution and open up public housing for them and their families in Scarsdale, Winnetka, Bethesda, Hillsborough and other neighborhoods they can't afford.
So I think he is the man to watch on education issues, the most likely to say something interesting, although Obama and Clinton are also hinting at some risk-taking. I watched all of the CNN debate, and it did not appear that Edwards was given a chance to say much about schools. Maybe it was just as well. Richardson and Biden, both of whom I admire for many reasons, did not seem to have a firm grasp of No Child Left Behind. Richardson, maybe the brightest man in the group, uttered one factual inaccuracy after another. They have to play for votes from otherwise inattentive people at those TV forums, and I always find they are much more savvy and connected to reality when you read their Web sites.
If there are other Edwards watchers out there, let me know what you think of his education stands, and stick it to me if you think I have missed something, or said something even more idiotic than usual. I am always reachable at mathewsj@washpost.com.

The public wants to know about education

The two-hour Democratic presidential debate last night didn't include the depth of questions posted to YouTube. It's a shame because obviously, the public wants to know the candidates' stands on education.

The first education question posed was a lighter one: who is your favorite teacher?


The next one asked the candidates about their position on No Child Left Behind, complete with musical score.

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said he would scrap it. Delaware Sen. Joe Biden said he thought the law was fundamentally flawed. Unfortunately, none of the other candidates were asked about the law and neither of the two leading candidates, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama addressed it. Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd, however, returned to the question later and said the law needs to be improved, not scrapped. "You measure growth in a child. You invest in failing schools. But I would not scrap it entirely. Accountability is very important in this country. We ought not to abandon that idea," he said.


The next questioner asked the candidates whether they sent their children to public or private school. Sen. Hillary Clinton pointed out that while Chelsea attended private school in Washington, D.C., she attended public ones in Arkansas.


Finally the candidates were asked about sex education and how early it should begin, perhaps because of the controversy over Illinois Senator Barack Obama's stance that sex education should begin early. Obama noted that it was important for children to learn that people should not touch them inappropriately.


Despite the number of submissions dealing with college affordability (see previous post), the subject was not raised at all. So even though education is on the public's mind, it doesn't seem to be on the minds of CNN officials screening the questions and very little pressure was put on the top Democratic candidates to address a key issue during the debate.