"Luck is his companion, Gamblin' is his game"

We must wonder what part of the meaning of "maverick" can be applied to John McCain's cloning of Bush's education privatization policy. Being mavericky most certainly has nothing to do with independent judgment or dissenting opinion that would cut him loose from his more evil twin, W., even though McCain has dropped the threadbare veil of pretense that the Bushies hung in front of their eight years of machinations aimed to crush the public schools, teacher preparation, and the teaching profession.

Perhaps by "Maverick" he means a kind of rollicking riverboat gambling with children's education and, thus, America's future, in much the same way that McCain and Bush would bet America's retirement on a marked deck dealt by the unregulated sharks of Wall Street.

Here is a clip from Bruce Fuller's take on the Bush, er, McCain education platform from today's NYTimes:

John McCain’s fusion to President Bush’s ideological hip couldn’t be tighter when it comes to education. He is eager to expand taxpayer financed vouchers to aid parents who send their children to parochial schools, to “shake up schools with competition,” as he said Thursday night in his acceptance speech. And he aims to further centralize elements of President Bush’s No Child Left Behind initiative, rather than rethinking how Congress can narrow achievement gaps without micromanaging the daily work of teachers.

. . . .

According to a recent Gallup poll, just two in five Americans support school vouchers. On No Child Left Behind, four in five believe they should be revamped by Congress, to de-emphasize standardized tests. Mr. McCain’s speech alleged that Mr. Obama wants schools answerable to “entrenched bureaucrats,” rather than to parents, yet it’s the Republican candidate who still supports Washington’s maze of rules under the No Child Left Behind legislation.

Mr. McCain’s push to privatize schooling also surfaces in his pitch to have Washington pick after-school tutoring companies, removing this authority from local school boards. These budding corporations, sniffing out a vast new market, see better prospects if they can directly lobby federal officials, not unlike the inside politics of winning farm subsidies.

On early education, Republican leaders have been silent, even though quality preschools pack a strong punch in boosting young children’s learning. Mr. McCain has repeatedly voted against bipartisan proposals to expand and improve Head Start preschools.

Addressing the Problem Rather Punishing the Victims: BoldApproach.org

A step toward the restoration of sanity in education policy. From BoldApproach.org:

A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education
Print-friendly Adobe PDF version

The Challenge

More than a half century of research, both here and abroad, has documented a powerful association between social and economic disadvantage and low student achievement. Weakening that association is the fundamental challenge facing America’s education policy makers.

Education policy in this nation has typically been crafted around the expectation that schools alone can offset the full impact of low socioeconomic status on learning. Schools can—and have—ameliorated some of the impact of social and economic disadvantage on achievement. Improving our schools, therefore, continues to be a vitally important strategy for promoting upward mobility and for working toward equal opportunity and overall educational excellence.

Evidence demonstrates, however, that achievement gaps based on socioeconomic status are present before children even begin formal schooling. Despite the impressive academic gains registered by some schools serving disadvantaged students, there is no evidence that school improvement strategies by themselves can close these gaps in a substantial, consistent, and sustainable manner.

Nevertheless, there is solid evidence that policies aimed directly at education-related social and economic disadvantages can improve school performance and student achievement. The persistent failure of policy makers to act on that evidence—in tandem with a school-improvement agenda—is a major reason why the association between social and economic disadvantage and low student achievement remains so strong.

The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Framework Cannot by Itself Meet the Challenge

Through its disaggregated reporting requirements, No Child Left Behind and the public discussion it has supported have cast a bright light on the achievement gap, on underachieving disadvantaged children, and on persistently underachieving schools.

The potential effectiveness of NCLB has been seriously undermined, however, by its acceptance of the popular assumptions that bad schools are the major reason for low achievement, and that an academic program revolving around standards, testing, teacher training, and accountability can, in and of itself, offset the full impact of low socioeconomic status on achievement. The effectiveness of NCLB has also been weakened by its unintended side effects, such as a narrowing of the curriculum, and by the incentives that NCLB generates for schools to focus instruction on students who are just below the passing point, at the expense of both lower-performing and higher-performing students. NCLB also requires a rate of achievement growth that exceeds the results of even the most effective school improvement measures, alone or in combination, either here or abroad.

A Broader, Bolder Approach for Education

Given the limitations of conventional policy, including NCLB, we believe that the time has come for U.S. policy makers to rethink their assumptions and adopt a broader, bolder approach for education—one that is powerful enough to produce a large reduction in the current association between social and economic disadvantage and low student achievement.

This broader, bolder approach breaks with the past by embracing an expanded concept of education in two respects. First, conventional education policy making focuses on learning that occurs in formal school settings during the years from kindergarten through high school. The new approach recognizes the centrality of formal schooling, but it also recognizes the importance of high-quality early childhood and pre-school programs, after-school and summer programs, and programs that develop parents’ capacity to support their children’s education. It seeks to build working relationships between schools and surrounding community institutions.

Second, the broader, bolder approach pays attention not only to basic academic skills and cognitive growth narrowly defined, but to development of the whole person, including physical health, character, social development, and non-academic skills, from birth through the end of formal schooling. It assigns value to the new knowledge and skills that young people need to become effective participants in a global environment, including citizenship, creativity, and the ability to respect and work with persons from different backgrounds.

The broader, bolder approach we support is also informed by research. While recognizing that the relations between cause and effect in education are often ambiguous, the new approach incorporates policies and practices whose effectiveness is reinforced by the preponderance of evidence presently available from serious research. In particular, the approach is informed by a large and powerful body of literature from researchers over the years who have examined the powerful impact on student achievement of numerous contextual and environmental factors such as early learning, parenting, health, poverty, and the cognitive, cultural, and character development that occurs outside schools.

Characteristics of the Broader, Bolder Approach

Consistent with these two principles, we propose a broader, bolder approach with the following four priorities:

Continue to pursue school improvement efforts. Research support is strongest for the benefits of small class sizes in the early grades for disadvantaged children, and for attracting and retaining high-quality teachers to work in hard-to-staff schools. Many other school improvement efforts commonly advocated in today’s policy debates have merit and should be pursued, such as improved professional development and school leadership; better coordination between pre-school, elementary, secondary, and higher education; the use of assessments that provide guidance to teachers and principals; and better instruction that makes a high-quality college preparatory curriculum accessible to all students. Educational planners must recognize that some students, such as recent immigrants, arrive at school with distinctive needs that warrant special attention.
Increase investment in developmentally appropriate and high-quality early childhood, pre-school, and kindergarten education. Every American child should arrive at the starting line of first grade ready and able to learn. Such a goal is consistent with Americans’ strong belief that every person should have the opportunity to make the most of his or her abilities. It is also a prerequisite for weakening the link between socioeconomic background and achievement.
Increased investment in the early years is a natural base for an expanded education policy approach. The country’s major longstanding program in this area, Head Start, enjoys widespread public support. Research suggests positive social, economic, and behavioral impacts on the lives of low-income children who participated in quality education programs prior to entering formal schooling. The operative word here is “quality.” Assessing the best research in this area, Nobel Laureate in Economics James J. Heckman describes investments in disadvantaged young children as “a rare public policy initiative that promotes fairness and social justice and at the same time promotes productivity in the economy and in society at large.”

Increase investment in health services. Research supports the provision of prenatal care for all pregnant women and preventive and routine pediatric, dental, and optometric care for all infants, toddlers, and schoolchildren, in order to minimize the extent to which health problems become obstacles to success in school. Such care can be facilitated by programs such as nurse home-visiting, Early Head Start, and clinics that improve parents’ capacity to monitor and care for their own and their children’s health. Expanding the availability of health insurance for low-income families is a positive step, but insurance should be augmented by ensuring that families have access to medical practitioners in their neighborhoods.
One particularly promising policy is to locate full-service health clinics in schools. Such clinics offer a way to overcome the absence of primary care physicians in low-income areas. They also address the fact that poor parents are often unable to take time from work for preventive and other health care services.

Pay more attention to the time students spend out of school. A body of research has shown that much of the achievement gap is rooted in what occurs outside of formal schooling. By and large, low-income students learn as rapidly as more-privileged peers during the hours spent in school. Where they lose ground, though, is in their lack of participation in learning activities during after-school hours and summer vacations. Such findings suggest that policy makers should increase investments in areas such as longer school days, after-school and summer programs, and school-to-work programs with demonstrated track records.
Successful programs do not exclusively focus on academic remediation. Rather, they provide disadvantaged children with the cultural, organizational, athletic, and academic enrichment activities that middle-class parents routinely make available to their own children.

The new education approach we propose should be implemented in a careful and deliberate fashion, with ongoing modification as new evidence becomes available. The approach is equally applicable to federal, state, or local policy making. However, the federal government’s historic role in equalizing educational opportunity implies a federal obligation to help states meet the needs of disadvantaged youngsters more fully.

The public has a right to hold schools accountable for raising student achievement. However, test scores alone cannot describe a school’s contribution to the full range of student outcomes. New accountability systems should combine appropriate qualitative and quantitative methods, and they will be considerably more expensive than the flawed accountability systems currently in use by the federal and state governments.

We believe that it is both possible and necessary to weaken the link between social and economic disadvantage and low student achievement. A policy strategy that combines continued school reform with efforts to address the roots of low achievement can be effective in doing so.

Facing the Challenge

It is a violation of the most basic principles of social justice that a country as wealthy as ours denies the opportunities that come with a high-quality education to a substantial proportion of our young people. The increasingly inter-connected world of the 21st century places a premium on the preparation of all of our young people to take their places as effective workers, citizens, and family members.

America has a decision to make. We can continue to pursue education strategies that focus on schools alone and on narrow, test-based accountability—and be content with the modest improvements long associated with this approach. Or we can ratchet up our ambitions and adopt a new and expanded strategy with the capacity to improve student achievement and adult outcomes more effectively and efficiently.

Weakening the link between social and economic disadvantage and low student achievement—leaving no child behind—is an urgent national priority. With our population aging and schools serving a growing number of disproportionately poor immigrant children, the future viability of our Social Security, health, and other social institutions will be affected by how well we educate young people of all backgrounds.

For the sake of enabling all of America’s children to pursue and realize the American dream, for themselves and for our nation, we urge policy makers to embrace this broader, bolder approach to education.

Lisa Graham Keegan as the New Margaret Spellings?

(Photo from the Arizona Republic)

Back when Lisa Graham Keegan was just another young attractive blonde female contender for the Arizona Superintendency of Education, she was lucky to have a gentleman and mentor like John McCain to rally to her support and to push her name forward. It was the move that would rocket Lisa to the top of the education industry privatizers and corporate socialists that moved into Washington when W was elected. All those delicious discretionary grants! And what a capable grant writer Lisa turned out to be.

Now after some years of laying low following the evaporation of milllions of dollars from some of those big federal grants to the Education Leaders Council that Lisa headed up, Lisa is on the move once more as an advisor and education consultant to the McCain campaign. Will John ask Lisa where the federal grant money went? Will Lisa become the new Margaret if John is elected? After all, she loves charter schools and high-stakes testing for social engineering purposes. Stay tuned.

From the Arizona Republic:

Yvonne Wingett
The Arizona Republic
Mar. 6, 2008 12:00 AM

Lisa Graham Keegan will scale back on her job as an assistant Maricopa County manager to spend more time working on John McCain's presidential campaign as an education-policy adviser.

She has worked for the county since last year, first as a contract consultant, then as one of its top - and best-paid - administrators, at a $175,000-a-year-salary. Keegan will scale back her role no later than May 1, and will continue to work with the county and bill by the hour.

Keegan is part of an unpaid crew of five from across the nation that will advise McCain on education policies, speak at events and travel with him, she said.

"We write for him, but because it (education) hasn't been a really active issue, none of us have had to spend very much time with him on this issue yet," said Keegan, a Republican from Peoria.

Keegan is a former Arizona superintendent of public instruction, and was the architect of controversial education reforms of the 1990s.

She is best known for opening the door to charter schools, enacting new state curriculum standards and fighting a bitter political battle to impose the state's high-stakes AIMS graduation test.

Keegan and McCain go way back, to the 1980s, when he first took office. He later served as chairman of her campaign for superintendent of public instruction, and prepped her when she was on President Bush's short list for Education secretary in late 2000.

Keegan has no interest in joining McCain's team as a full-time, paid staffer, she said.