TIMSS makes the debate "lightning round"

Education was the subject of the lightning round question in the seventh Democratic presidential candidates debate. After parrying jabs from her fellow candidates all night, Clinton took on the question – with a 30 second time limit – but didn’t offer much that was new. Here’s the question, as posed by NBC’s Brian Williams, and her response (both taken from the debate transcript posted on the New York Times Web site):

WILLIAMS: We're going to introduce the concept of a lightning round here. Take one question; go down the line. 30 seconds each -- a time we're going to enforce. … This is about something called Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. It's called TIMSS. A number of overseas nations took part in it. It found that overseas students spend an average of 193 days annually in school. The deficit compared to the U.S., where it's 180 days -- over 12 years, that adds up to one-year gap between education in the U.S. and overseas. … Do you believe we in this country need to extend the school day and/or extend the school year? And will you commit to it?

CLINTON: Well, very quickly, I would start at the very beginning. We need to do more to help our families prepare their children. A family is a child's first school. The parents are a child's first teacher. This is something that I've worked on for many years.
We need to really support it through nurse visitation or social worker, child care. We need to do more with the pre-Kindergarten program that I have proposed.
In addition, though, this has to fit into an overall innovation agenda which I have also set forth because we can't just say go to school longer. We need to do what happened when I was in school and Sputnik went up and our teacher said, your president wants you study math and science. That's what I want kids today to feel, that it's part of making sure we maintain our quality of life and our standard of living.

~ Cathy Grimes

Obama taking more about education

Alexander Russo at This Week in Education has the scoop on Barack Obama's take on changing NCLB during an MTV/MySpace forum.

Meanwhile, The American Association for Colleges of Teacher Education is hailing Obama for his effort to spare the Teacher Quality Enhancement grant program from elimination in the budget. The group's president and CEO, Dr. Sharon P. Robinson, had this to say about Obama:

"Senator Obama is a true champion for education and is committed to ensuring that our nation has a supply of high-quality teachers."

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

Big Obama education plan coming in November

Barack Obama Friday rolled out a plan he said would greatly improve life in rural South Carolina and it included an education component.

Not only that, Obama said on a conference call that he would be rolling out a full education plan within a month:

“We’re going to be doing a roll-out of my education plan in much more specificity in the next two or three weeks. And we abide by my basic principle, which is we don’t propose any programs that we can’t pay for, so it will be structured in the context of other savings we have achieved elsewhere,” he said.

What will be in the plan? Well maybe the South Carolina proposal has some clues. In it he says federal dollars should be focused on rural areas to help with school construction. Look for a major early childhood education component, too:

“The federal government has to target where its dollars are going to make a difference,” he said. “Early education is an area where we think we can get a huge bang for the buck. The same is true when it comes to teacher pay tied to innovation in the schools.”

The Greenwood, S.C., Index Journal said Obama touted "partnerships between communities and state and federal governments" as "the only ways to adequately fund education."

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

A Good Read on Romney

Whatever you think about Republican Mitt Romney's ideas about education, it's worth reading Ryan Lizza's recent piece on the former Massachusetts governor in the latest issue of the New Yorker.

The article starts out by introducing readers to Romney the detail guy—a candidate who routinely checks his own web site and lets his campaign staff know when it needs more information. (Has he checked the education part of his web site lately?)

As the story explores the evolution of Romney the Candidate, it does touch a bit on education. Lizza points out how Romney's experience in management consulting influenced his education reform strategies. For example, as Massachusetts governor, he hired his former firm Bain & Co. in 2003 to evaluate the state's education system, which, Lizza writes:

"...formed the basis of a radical overhaul that would have increased fees and dismantled the system in place at the University of Massachusetts. In the corporate world, the Bainies, whose power emanated from the C.E.O.’s office, could implement their plans by diktat. On Beacon Hill, Romney had to deal with a Democratic legislature. The Bain education plan never passed."

Pull the plug on Illegals, says Thompson

In a speech Tuesday, former Tennessee Senator and Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson said federal dollars should be withheld from municipalities that don't report illegal immigrants, according to The Associated Press.

"In his first major policy proposal, Thompson challenged presidential rivals Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney by criticizing "sanctuary cities" where city workers are barred from reporting suspected illegal immigrants who enroll their children in school or seek hospital treatment," the story said.

"Taxpayer money should not be provided to illegal immigrants," Thompson said at a round-table discussion that included Collier County, Fla., sheriff Don Hunter."

The 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Plyler v. Doe said that undocumented children have the right to a free K-12 education in this country. Most states and school districts have a policy against their staffs asking students or their parents about their immigration status, including Thompson's home state of Tennessee.

--Dakarai I. Aarons

Richardson and others trailing Colbert

How unimpressed are voters with Bill Richardson and other presidential candidates? Enough that more of them say they would vote for Stephen Colbert than Richardson and other Democratic runners. It seems ridiculous, but it's true. Take a look at this Washington Post blog to see how Colbert fared against all candidates in a poll conducted by Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm.
If nothing else, Colbert's decision to run is a welcome break from the same old stump speeches candidates continue to deliver all over the country.

Preschool vs. NCLB

Is there a chance universal preschool will overtake No Child Left Behind as the key education issue in the campaign? That would contradict all conventional wisdom, but there's a chance. I make the argument here in Politico.

Richard Whitmire