Both advisors argued convincingly their candidate’s dedication to America’s schools and to closing the achievement gap in low-income and minority districts. How each goes about addressing this inequality is the devil in the details. Still, both candidates favor the basic tenets of education reform: standardized testing, teacher recruitment and assessments, and more research on value-added programs.

Many of the candidate’s differences boil down to the hatchet and the scalpel, a reference to Obama’s and McCain’s budget management styles.

McCain favors the hatchet—cut programs that don’t work and fund programs that do, Head Start in the former category and Teach for America in the latter. McCain prefers to get rid of teachers’ unions altogether and tie teacher pay directly to student achievement as measured by standardized tests. He advocates both charter schools and vouchers. To make college more affordable, McCain proposes more students take A.P. classes in high school, thereby reducing the number of paid credits needed for a college degree, and he advocates centralizing grant programs.

Obama would prefer to take a scalpel to the education budget, delicately preserving aspects of programs that are working while slicing out the ineffective aspects. He would infuse $5 billion into Head Start, making pre-K universally available to every low-income child. He sees standardized testing as one piece of whether a teacher is ineffective and he favors a more comprehensive approach to teacher evaluations and pay raises. Obama likes charter schools but not vouchers. To make college more affordable, Obama would give each student a $4,000 tax credit and continue to raise Pell Grant amounts

the article “NYC education and the next president” was published on the 21^st of October in the web site “examiner.com” http://www.examiner.com/x-949-New-York-Schools-Examiner~y2008m10d21-NYC-education-and-the-next-president

Published Monday, Oct. 27, 2008