Debate: Education and the Next President

Last night was the Edweek-sponsored, Teachers College-hosted debate between Linda Darling-Hammond and Lisa Graham Keegan, prominent education advisers to Obama and McCain, respectively.

Edweek has a roughly-edited transcript of the debate.  To watch the archived webcast, click on this link and then click “Register to view the archive of this webcast.”

The debate video is approximately 90 minutes long.

Here’s an excerpt from the debate in which Hammond discusses the Obama education plan:

Well, one of the things about Barack Obama’s priority on education that has kind of surfaced over and over again is that in these recent debates and in these very, very troubling financial crisis times, he has been asked, you know, well what would you not spend money on in order to manage the financial crisis and he has said over and over again, “I will tell you what I won’t cut.”

“I won’t cut the budget for early childhood education because it’s the investments we will make in children that will close the achievement gap before we get to school and enable them to have a level playing field when they start.”

When Senator McCain went to the NAACP convention last summer he promised to fully fund a Head Start, but he has voted against it at least four times in the last decade, and his plan would actually cut $3 billion out of Head Start in order to both freeze the budget and make the $300 billion in tax cuts that are on the table.

So I think part of the question of priority is that your money has to be where your mouth is with respect to how you are actually going to transform the inequalities that exist in our public education system and make the kind of investments that are necessary to move us forward because for every dollar we invest in preschool, we are going to reap 7 to 10 in returns to the education in less school failure, higher wages, so on.

[Obama] kind of acts on that deep sense of priority in many, many ways, and legislatively in terms of the way in which he continually prioritizes it in the pulpit, if you will, and so his many education advisors and I will say there are a number of education advisors in the Obama campaign … [who] get a lot of direct feedback from him about what he cares about, about what he wants to do, his plans are really his plans.

Many people have noted that a very big portion of his agenda is an agenda to create a profession of teaching to invest in recruiting, improving preparation, insuring mentoring, insuring professional development, insuring that there is a career advancement system and ladder for teachers.

And that comes from his own personal belief that he has stated many times to many of his advisors that teachers are the single most important element.

Tagged: debate, Edweek, election '08, Head Start, Teachers College, video

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