Why McCain: My Next Three Reasons

I've already spoken at length (to put it mildly) about my Reasons Four & Five (Immigration Reform, Pro-Life Agenda) for supporting McCain, so I won't repeat myself. Here's my Sixth Reason for Supporting McCain, which is really just a chance to talk about a subject important to me, not to echo anything the Senator has said.

Education Reform

Well-educated children grow into adult citizens that can solve almost any of the daunting problems our country faces. Although McCain seems a bit of a lightweight on substantive education reform ideas, that doesn’t mean I believe that any of Obama’s policy proposals will significantly improve our current system. And, as with most Democratic proposals, I believe we will pay through the nose for negligible results.

Neither candidate has advanced any plan as dramatically innovative and far-reaching (albeit failed, in some eyes) as NCLB, and perhaps that’s a good thing. Rather than creating entirely new programs, why not study, publicize, and copy the programs and methods that have been already been proven to be successful (Massachusetts, for instance, leads the nation in achievement levels, even though they increased their standards above the norm)? A successful school system is its own reward to its community—what the federal government ought to do is find creative ways to dispense this valuable information to other communities.

Instead of building on successes, however, the main feature of Obama’s education platform is the expansion of a forty-year-old program that has had little success in improving the cognitive abilities of young, disadvantaged children, Head Start (this negative evaluation courtesy of a Clinton-era commissioned study http://www.aei.org/publication23373). Obama’s Zero to Five Plan envisions educating infants as soon as they’re born instead of waiting until they’re three—which may be a good idea---I just don’t know how that works practically without somehow forcing parents to participate, and it’s a little creepy to think about the State taking away infants who should be bonding with their parents in order to mold them into future scholars. Even now, many children eligible for Head Start don’t participate, because their parents are disinterested or because they enroll their children in private pre-school programs, despite their cost.

Imagining that we can improve the education of disadvantaged children through increased funding for a program that has continually failed to do just that seems illogical--at best. Since the evidence from the study shows that the improvements over time for a child enrolled in Head Start are negligible, perhaps no institutional early education program, no matter how expansive, can really improve a child’s educational ability beyond what his genetic predisposition and his home environment provide. That may seem discouraging and defeatist, but many teachers complain that NCLB is forcing them to raise every child to an educational level that many cannot meet, due to these factors (genetics and home life).

Perhaps the focus of education policy, instead of exhorting teachers to jump higher and higher, ought to work on those factors that educators feel helpless to control, and find ways to better prepare students for school, where educators do have more control. The government has, for a long time, been doing an excellent job of preventing birth defects and promoting pre-natal health, and I can’t think of any ways to improve pre-school readiness in that area that a free society could tolerate. However, maybe policy should concentrate on enlisting parents themselves (the “home environment” part of those currently uncontrollable factors) to improve their child’s learning potential in those early years, and beyond, through the use of financial and tax-related incentives.

What if, instead of redistributing wealth in the form of dependent child tax credits (checks in the case of those who pay no net taxes), those tax credits or checks were issued on the basis of your child’s behavior and performance in school? It would have to be coupled with a mass marketing parent education kit (handed out at the hospital?) to explain goals and parameters, and contain information on ways to meet those goals, but it would get folks who might otherwise be discouraged by the long term goal of their child’s eventual success to focus on short term goals (set by teachers and school boards). This would reward effort rather than mere existence, as the current tax credit system does, and enlist those who have the most contact with their children to share the educational burden with their teachers and society. Society would benefit much more from a system that rewards parents for raising civil children who want to learn rather than just rewarding parents for having children.

The devil is in the details, definitely, but school systems that are struggling to cope might welcome self-interested (and therefore genuine) assistance from the parents in their community, with no new bureaucratic system to enforce it. Simply generate the entry level standards for each grade based those already in existence, add a behavior component (the “Conduct” grade on a report card), and distribute it to the IRS and parents in the same way that employers distribute W2s. Teachers would appreciate the help on behavior and learning from previously disinterested parents. The parents of newborns might receive the standard “existence credit” for the first two years of their child’s life, but that credit would be replaced at age three by a credit (or no credit) based upon a preschool report card. Thus even the parents of newborns would know that they need to begin at birth to prepare their child for school. If they chose to educate and nurture their child at home, performance on a test conducted by a private sector educational testing service that uses the standards set by the local school district would determine their eligibility for the credit. If that seems too invasive, well, eventually home-schooled children will need to participate in the workforce, and so they need to meet or exceed the same standards as their institutionally-schooled peers.

Coercion of teachers by parents unhappy with their child’s report card might be a problem, but would it be worse than the situations teachers face every day in their classrooms with unruly, disrespectful, truant students? This system rewards good behavior and attendance, as well as at-home support without publicly embarrassing poor (in an ethical, not income sense) parents in a way that might cause retribution. Entering and exiting grade and conduct report cards might reflect both on the parents and the teacher, and pinpoint the problem more specifically. If a child enters a grade on par with his peers, and his performance drops that year, but picks up the next, it may be the fault of a situation at home, but it may also not be the parents’ fault—this may be a bad teacher. Fire the teacher if this trend continues with his students. Conversely, a student who continually underperforms, no matter who the teacher, may have bad parents, and should be a candidate for intensive outside help in all categories (and fund this outside help with the tax credit/check that you DON’T give to his parents).

The situation of learning-disabled kids would naturally need to be handled separately---but, with a nod to NLCB, I wonder if some children aren’t prematurely labeled, and if their parents had access to educational aids in their homes from birth (that marketing kit), there wouldn’t be fewer kids entering the system already labeled as failures. I’m very ignorant of the educational needs and expectations that should address learning-disabled children, but I would think that similar standards could be set by the educators of those children, to make their job easier by focusing on the amount of readiness for school education provided at home, even if it is just simple behavioral standards.

And just as differing natural abilities to learn should not condemn learning-disabled children to a life of bleak poverty or state support, neither should their more “average” peers all be expected to point towards college as the only suitable educational goal. Charles Murray of AEI has written extensively about the need to elevate vocational education to the status of higher education, and a number of educators agree that many children either don’t want to, or simply cannot achieve the academic levels necessary to be successful at a white collar job. Again, publishing studies accurately comparing the lifetime earnings and workplace satisfaction of skilled craftsmen versus bachelor-degree-holding office workers might encourage more children to seek out occupations desperately in need of workers---welders, carpenters, pipefitters, etc. The tax credit system could just as easily reward the parents of a high school student who behaved, came to school regularly, and passed his welding certification test instead of College Prep English. Don’t get me wrong, I think core knowledge of history, literature, writing, science and math is critical to the citizens of a democracy, and should never be neglected in any curriculum. But if a kid can’t do well in college preparatory classes, shouldn’t we insist that he demonstrate sufficiency in some workplace skill, so that he doesn’t leave our educational system unable to support himself? Perhaps, if vocational education began at an earlier age, a high school graduate might leave school able to earn far more, and contribute more to the economic growth of the country, than his peers heading to college will in a decade, or ever.

In a nutshell, I think education and spending policy should amplify what has already been proven to work, and focus on parents as the missing link in today’s education policy proposals.