On 'No Child Left Behind'
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An Education Debate
Whoever enters the White House in January is likely to have an impact on schools across the country. On Oct. 21, education advisers to Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain faced off in a debate hosted by Columbia University Teachers College. Lisa Graham Keegan, former Arizona school superintendent, spoke for McCain. Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond represented Obama.
On 'No Child Left Behind'
Darling-Hammond:"Senator Obama believes in the goals of the law: the idea of closing the achievement gap, ensuring that all kids have access to well-qualified teachers, having methods of accountability that allow us to see how schools are doing. And to have that data reported is very important. At the same time, he acknowledges that there are many, many problems with the law and how it's been implemented. They need to be fixed."
Keegan:"Senator McCain is a strong supporter of No Child Left Behind as well, and where he is absolutely adamant is that state standards and the assessments for kids that are in place have got to stay in place. He would change the way that we judge the quality of a school's work by changing it to a value-added formula for adequate yearly progress."
On Teacher Merit Pay
Keegan: Sen. McCain "believes that school principals should be the people in charge of both recruiting their own staff [and] also evaluating their own staff, and he would like to use federal money that goes to schools to go directly to schools and have principals be able to reward teachers primarily on the basis of student achievement. They might choose to do that in the entire school. . . . But they absolutely, in his mind, have to organize themselves around student achievement."
Darling-Hammond:"What Barack Obama has proposed is that we need to recognize and reward excellence in teaching as part of a career ladder, as part of a career-development program that ensures that beginning teachers get strong mentoring on the way into the profession from expert mentors who can give them that intensive help [and] continue with ongoing professional learning and opportunities for teachers to grow."
