Education Futures » assessment

McCain and Obama on educational change

John Moravec — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 17:40:50 +0000

Few topics are as political as education, in which at least basic schooling is compulsory for all Americans. It is fitting, then, that we conclude this week’s focus on change with a look at the changes that presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama each propose for U.S. education. After analyzing educational policy statements on each candidate’s website, one contender clearly presents an agenda for educational change: Barack Obama. Unfortunately, Sen. McCain only provides a short statement on his educational stance, while Sen. Obama, in addition to an outline for action he proposes, provides a comprehensive plan for lifetime success through education.

McCain focuses his statements on education on school choice –that is, if a school fails a student, then the student should have the freedom to move to a different school. McCain believes that many schools are failing, and No Child Left Behind helps to illustrate the problem. Obama believes that public education was broken before NCLB –and that NCLB was intended to fix the problem, but was poorly conceived, never properly funded, and was poorly implemented.

Excerpts from statements made by each campaign:

On No Child Left Behind

McCain: No Child Left Behind has focused our attention on the realities of how students perform against a common standard. John McCain believes that we can no longer accept low standards for some students and high standards for others. In this age of honest reporting, we finally see what is happening to students who were previously invisible. While that is progress all its own, it compels us to seek and find solutions to the dismal facts before us.

Obama: Reform NCLB, by funding the law. Obama believes teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests. He will improve the assessments used to track student progress to measure readiness for college and the workplace and improve student learning in a timely, individualized manner. Obama will also improve NCLB’s accountability system so that we are supporting schools that need improvement, rather than punishing them.

On Science, Technology, Education and Mathematics (STEM)

McCain: Unknown.

Obama: Obama will recruit math and science degree graduates to the teaching profession and will support efforts to help these teachers learn from professionals in the field. He will also work to ensure that all children have access to a strong science curriculum at all grade levels.

On Non-Formal Education

McCain: Unknown.

Obama: Obama will double funding for the main federal support for afterschool programs, the 21st Century Learning Centers program, to serve one million more children.

Obama’s “STEP UP” plan addresses the achievement gap by supporting summer learning opportunities for disadvantaged children through partnerships between local schools and community organizations.

On Higher Education

McCain: Unknown.

Obama: Obama will make college affordable for all Americans by creating a new American Opportunity Tax Credit. This universal and fully refundable credit will ensure that the first $4,000 of a college education is completely free for most Americans, and will cover two-thirds the cost of tuition at the average public college or university and make community college tuition completely free for most students. Obama will also ensure that the tax credit is available to families at the time of enrollment by using prior year’s tax data to deliver the credit when tuition is due.

Obama will streamline the financial aid process by eliminating the current federal financial aid application and enabling families to apply simply by checking a box on their tax form, authorizing their tax information to be used, and eliminating the need for a separate application.

On Responsibility for Education

McCain: If a school will not change, the students should be able to change schools. John McCain believes parents should be empowered with school choice to send their children to the school that can best educate them just as many members of Congress do with their own children. He finds it beyond hypocritical that many of those who would refuse to allow public school parents to choose their child’s school would never agree to force their own children into a school that did not work or was unsafe. They can make another choice. John McCain believes that is a fundamental and essential right we should honor for all parents.

Obama: The Obama plan will encourage schools and parents to work together to establish a school-family contract laying out expectations for student attendance, behavior, and homework. These contracts would be provided to families in their native language when possible and would include information on tutoring, academic support, and public school choice options for students.

Right now, Sen. Obama is the only candidate who shares a plan for educational reform. As the election nears, we will revisit the positions on the two candidates. If the McCain campaign comes forward with a plan for educational change, we will share it with you at EducationFutures.com as the election nears.

Knowing what we know

John Moravec — Mon, 19 May 2008 12:59:43 +0000

As mentioned last week, schools have a hard time determining how students are doing, or what they know. The problem, argues Dr. David Shupe, founder of the eLumen Collaborative, is present at all levels of formal education and is becoming an issue for accreditors. To address the problem, eLumen has created a technology-centered approach to “authentic assessment” (a rubrics-based mix of formative and summative assessments) and is rolling out their product to colleges and universities across the United States.

eLumen Collaborative’s approach to higher education is “Let it be clear what students know and can do,” and they really mean it. Their software models a generic process (with variations) for an academic institution systematically attending to expected and actual student achievement, and individual colleges and universities, to the extent that they use it, come to resemble such an institution. The process is straightforward: faculty, working together, define the specific expected student learning outcomes throughout the institution and its programs and explicit evaluation criteria for each. When these are associated with catalog courses (again in different ways), course instructors link work that students will already be doing to these outcomes — whenever and wherever they choose to do so — and then evaluate this work through those specific lens — e.g., what has this student shown in this activity concerning his or her ability to … [whatever specific outcome(s) the faculty (and perhaps the students) have chosen]. These are judgments that faculty are already making – the difference is that each student is evaluated relative to explicit standards (rather than simply to each other) and that the software is used to record those evaluations.

Given that these data are digital and in an integrated relational database, the system can generate instantaneous reports on actual student achievement — per student, per set of students, per student learning outcome, per set of student learning outcomes, per catalog course, per program, per institution, and selected combinations of these — an array of data on student achievement that has never before been visible. Also, when a program chooses, its students (and authorized advisors) can see, in real time, his or her own data and see how their own achievement record compares to any set of expected student learning outcomes that a program or the institution has devised. Likewise, the appropriate committee can see how any defined set of students stands relative to the same define set of expectations. Perhaps the best analogy is the point-of-sale technology that has revolutionized the retail industry.

What if this were adopted in PreK-12, home schooling, corporate professional development, etc.?

What do you know?

John Moravec — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 15:13:16 +0000

The StarTribune ran a positive piece that raises awareness of David Shupe’s eLumen Collaborative, a Web-based, enterprise-level application for tracking student competencies. The project began as a response to a simple question that higher education institutions and graduates have a hard time answering: What, precisely, did graduating students learn, and what competencies have they developed?

The software allows for faculty-driven assessments via dynamically-generated rubrics, with the possibility of incorporating student-driven assessments as well. Will this signal a new trend in assessments for the 21st century? …or, do we need to push for something beyond rubrics? …beyond assessments?