So in the best spirit of “me too!”-ism, Terry McAuliffe slowly and quietly rolled out his education program as so many Greentech golf carts cars off the tractor trailer on a Friday night in Mississippi.
The core essence of McAuliffe’s plan? Apparently, it is to gut the Standards of Learning (SOLs) to the point as to make them meaningless — a position so ridiculous, it would remove any realistic benchmark Virginians might have as to whether or not our public schools are failing or succeeding.
Let’s get into the meat of McAuliffe’s last minute slap-and-dash education proposal drafted in reaction to some pretty meaty and well-thought out policy papers from the Cuccinelli campaign.
On the Standards of Learning, rather than concrete answers, McAuliffe is recommending essays — a much more lengthy process that will require a bit more subjectivity… and many more manhours to read those essays. How pervasive does McAuliffe want these essay questions?
Moving to essay or short answer-based testing where possible. Multiple-choice tests drive teachers to drill individual facts rather than broad understanding. It’s good if a child knows when we landed on the moon, but it’s much better if the child knows about the space race, NASA, and the Apollo program. Essay and short answer tests let our kids demonstrate knowledge and our teachers teach.
Where possible? Or wherever possible? And the answer to McAuliffe’s questions regarding the space race, NASA, and the Apollo program can be done just as easily in multiple choice rather than “the Apollo program was the result of NASA’s passionate resolve to dominate the space race” — an answer that tells us nothing about what the student knows about any of those three items.
On STEM-H (science, technology, engineering, math, and health) the McAuliffe plan is very high on rhetoric but very low on specifics. Public/private partnerships sounds impressive, but what does that mean? Lab schools? Partnerships with community colleges is already happening regardless of McAuliffe’s desire to link them to public education… and early STEM education and teaching students to write? How — especially when McAuliffe’s own policy researcher can’t answer their own questions with Virginia-specific concrete examples?
On education funding, I will give McAuliffe credit for restoring some of the funding through the SOQs (standards of quality)… but ultimately, it devolves into vapid nonsense rather quickly. How are we going to fund that? McAuliffe doesn’t say what he’s going to cut from the Virginia budget in order to fund the SOQs, though he does take direct aim at — wait for it — “efficiencies at the local and state level” where there’s some magic pot of gold just waiting to be tapped. In short, long on promises and short on delivery mechanisms…
On “letting teachers teach” McAuliffe’s solution is… reducing admin paperwork and increasing professional development. Think about that one folks.
Finally, for the coup de grace the McAuliffe campaign decided to double down on pre-K. One slight problem? Pre-K doesn’t work. For the pre-K programs that do work (and there are a couple that did), we have this little nugget of information:
When you get down to it, there are only two or three pre-K programs that have solid enough research bases that advocates can confidently say they had lasting, positive effects. As Dylan Matthews’ question makes clear, the two most prominent are the Abecedarian and Perry Preschool programs. But here’s what you need to know: Both were hyper-intensive programs with very dedicated staff. Indeed, Abecedarian treated just 57 children at a price of about $17,700 per child, and Perry worked with 58 kids at roughly $12,500 per child. For all intents and purposes there is no way any government is going to scale those up and get the same effects, much less the bloated, ineffectual federal government.
Federal pre-K has big problems. State pre-K that works is expensive beyond reason. McAuliffe’s plan for paying for any of it? Just have the localities sort it out, I suppose… one more unfunded mandate.
McAuliffe’s higher education plans aren’t that much more impressive. They sing a good song on workforce development, but again it’s a program big on platitudes and shallow on specifics. Many ends, few means… which translates into greater cost without any specifics as to how McAuliffe would achieve any of it.
Worst of all, there’s no synthesis in this, no elegance. How do we get from pre-K to high school, to STEM and trades over to community colleges and four-year institutions, to actual workforce development? It’s not there. Instead, the reader gets three or four siloed problems and gets minor, non-controversial solutions to them all — cost excepting, of course. It sounds good… but it’s so vapid in substance and practical means to achieve them that McAuliffe might as well have insisted that we offer free puppy dogs with every college diploma.
A thinking man’s critique of McAuliffe’s plan? Guts the SOLs, mediocre on state funding, ridiculously expensive, and beyond paying lip service to workforce development and STEM training it is extremely short on synthesis.
Let’s hope that Cuccinelli does better when the full plan rolls out this week. Honestly, I’m really disappointed in the McAuliffe plan for education. It was the one point where his “centrism” could have prevailed, and instead all we got was mush and platitudes — like being served a bowl of flakes and being told it was filet mignon.
Weak beer, my friends.
