Obama's Education Defense

We had our problems with Senator McCain's acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, in which Mr. McCain bragged about how he had fought against the "tobacco companies" and "drug companies," and about how he had voted against "another corporate welfare bill for oil companies." Americans might be forgiven for wondering what companies might be left standing in a McCain administration to provide actual jobs.

Where Mr. McCain's words really resonated in a positive way, though, was in the section devoted to education. "We need to shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition, empower parents with choice," Mr. McCain said. "Let's remove barriers to qualified instructors, attract and reward good teachers, and help bad teachers find another line of work. When a public school fails to meet its obligations to students, parents deserve a choice in the education of their children. And I intend to give it to them. Some may choose a better public school. Some may choose a private one. Many will choose a charter school. But they will have the choice, and their children will have that opportunity."

Mr. McCain went on: "Senator Obama wants our schools to answer to unions and entrenched bureaucrats. I want schools to answer to parents and students." It was a detailed contrast to Mr. Obama's convention acceptance speech, which had dealt with education in a shorter, vaguer section, promising, "I'll recruit an army of new teachers, and pay them higher salaries, and give them more support. And in exchange, I'll ask for higher standards and more accountability."

Mr. McCain's remarks apparently touched a nerve not only with parents but also with Mr. Obama, who went to the unusual length of scheduling an education policy speech yesterday. The headline out of the speech was that Mr. Obama will double federal funding for charter schools. That sounds impressive. But like so much else about Mr. Obama, the speechifying sounds better than the underlying reality. Federal funding for charter schools now is only about $200 million a year, according to the Obama campaign. So Mr. Obama's doubling would take spending on charter schools to $400 million a year — or six one-thousandths of the federal education department's budget. To put it another way, for every $10 that the Obama administration spends on education, it will let charter schools have six cents.

This is what passes for supporting education reform in a Democratic presidential campaign. It makes for quite a contrast with Mr. McCain. Under the McCain plan, it would be parents, rather than Mr. Obama, who would decide whether their money flows to private schools, charter schools, or public schools. The amount of funding for the schools would be dictated by the number of parents who chose to send their children there, not by a politician calibrating how much offense the teachers unions can withstand and coming down with a compromise of six cents to charter schools for every $10 on everything else.

We're not under any illusions that a President McCain would have an easier time getting a school voucher plan past what is likely to be a Democratic Congress than did President Bush, who ceded a large-scale voucher plan in a first-term compromise with Senator Kennedy to get No Child Left Behind passed. He did so even though he had a Republican-controlled Congress. Mr. Bush did win passage of a voucher plan for the District of Columbia, over the opposition of Senator Biden, who voted against it, even though both he and his children went to private school.

But Mr. McCain will try. And at least he's putting the topic on the national agenda, forcing Mr. Obama to respond. Mr. McCain's ability to get the upper hand on the education issue from the Democrats is just one of many ways the maverick is reshaping traditional categories this election year.