McCain Plays Fast and Loose With Education Alliances

by David Safier

You can sum up McCain’s education policy by saying he’s for school vouchers and . . . well, that’s about it. He also wants merit pay and he likes the idea of higher salaries for teachers working in difficult schools, but those are on the periphery. It’s all vouchers all the time — except that he prefers the more deceptive term, “school choice.”

McCain’s agenda, like every conservative in power since Reagan set the bar, is privatize, privatize, privatize.

McCain describes his educational agenda in an op ed in the New York Daily News. But the way he does it is slimy, misleading and . . . well, that’s about it. Slimy and misleading, like every conservative who’s been in power in recent years.

McCain claims he’s in agreement with the Education Equality Project, which is an Odd Couple alliance of Joel Klein, the Chancellor of NYC Public Schools, and Al Sharpton. Among others listed as signatories on their website are NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Jeb Bush, Henry Cisneros, J.C. Watts, Harold Ford and John McCain.

Like I said, it’s an odd, odd coupling. And missing from the list is Barack Obama, which McCain makes a big deal out of.

Now here’s where McCain gets slimy. The Education Equality Project doesn’t endorse vouchers, but McCain implies it does. In fact, very few people in this county beyond the groups funded by $70 million in U.S. Department of Education money and the conservatives they represent believe in vouchers. (The $70 million given to the ed. privatizing industry by the Bush DOE to push its agenda is the subject of a later post.) But without actually saying so, McCain implies this group supports vouchers. He moves from the group’s general dissatisfaction with the status quo and its belief that teachers unions are too powerful to the conclusion that it therefore supports vouchers, because that’s the clear (read: untested and conservative) answer to all our education problems.

McCain is cleverly exploiting a split in current Democratic thinking about education reform. One side is represented by the Education Equality Project that says, in sum, “Our schools suck, and we have to make them better.” Then the group talks about why they suck, though when it talks about improvement, it stays on a high level of abstraction. How else could it keep such an unwieldy coalition that includes Al Sharpton, Jeb Bush and John McCain together?

The other side, sponsored by the Economic Policy Institute, calls its plan A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education. Its list of signatories includes Julian Bond, past Chair on the NAACP, Arizona’s own Richard Carmona who had an unhappy stint as Bush’s Surgeon General, John Dilulio, another disgruntled Bush admin guy who was in charge of faith-based programs, Joycelyn Elders, Clinton’s Surgeon General, and Janet Reno. Another odd coupling, though not nearly as ideologically divergent as the folks in the Education Equality Project. This group puts more emphasis on remedying social conditions than on attempting to fix schools in isolation. It maintains that even the best schools will fail to educate children who come from an environment of hopelessness. It advocates that schools take a more active role in children’s well being, including full-service school clinics, early childhood education and so on.

This group fits with Obama’s general ideas about society and education, though he has no direct connection to it.

McCain says, if you’re not with the group I’m with (though he ignores its disavowal of vouchers), you don’t want to move education forward. Obama says, I see a different approach which meshes schools into the larger social network to give children the opportunity to achieve and grow.

An interesting sidenote. Remember Jesse Jackson’s semi-obscene slam of Obama that was caught on tape awhile back? I’m pretty sure it revolved around this basic issue. Jackson tends to blame society for all the ills of African Americans and demands that society fix the problems. Obama says we have to look at the problem from a more holistic, societal viewpoint that involves the government and the community working together. This is why Obama is sometimes criticized for telling the African American community it has to heal itself at the same time the greater society has to open itself to greater inclusion. Jackson went ballistic when Obama took that approach, which resulted in the remark.

I agree with Obama that Jackson, and Rev. Wright, and McCain represent old ways of looking at our current problems. Jackson and Wright see the current civil rights situation through the confrontational lens of the 60s and 70s. McCain is emotionally in his first year of freedom from the Hanoi prison, still trying to figure out how to win the Vietnam War. Let’s relegate all these relics to a shelf somewhere and find some young, vibrant leadership that has the brilliance, the scope and the global vision to make the country and the world a better place. Oh, and someone who knows you to use email. Now where are we going to find someone like that? Hmm. Let me look at the candidates a minute, and I’ll give you the answer.