Copio nota y referencias circuladas por Jeffrey Puryear & Marcela Gajardo, Codirectores, PREAL.
A pesar de tener opiniones diferentes sobre muchos temas, el presidente de Los Estados Unidos, Barack Obama, y el candidato presidencial, Mitt Romney, están mayormente de acuerdo en la política educativa. Ambos se han pronunciado a favor de las escuelas “chárter” (que son de gestión privada, pero financiada por el gobierno con base en el número de estudiantes que atraen) y ambos coinciden en que los profesores deben ser responsables del aprendizaje estudiantil. La mayoría de los sindicatos de maestros se oponen a ambas posiciones. En lo que no están de acuerdo es en el tema de los vales escolares o “vouchers”, o en si el gobierno debe pagar la matrícula de los estudiantes que asisten a escuelas privadas. Obama se opone a hacerlo, pero Romney está a favor alegando que promueve la innovación y aumenta la competencia entre los proveedores. Para Romney, esto aleja el poder y el dinero de las entidades que administran los sistemas escolares poniéndolas en manos de los padres – lo cual puede ser el cambio más fundamental.
Los artículos que siguen (en inglés) presentan la posición de Romney y el contraste con las de la administración de Obama.
“Why Romney, Obama Are Education Twins” – 27 de mayo de 2012. Por Jay Mathews, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/why-romney-obama-are-education-twins/2012/05/27/gJQAVtZHvU_story.html
“Romney Calls Education ‘Civil Rights Issue’ of Our Era’ and Urges Shift” – 23 de mayo de 2012. Por Trip Gabriel, New York Times

“Mitt Romney promotes school vouchers in attack on Obama’s education policy” – 23 de mayo de 2012. Por Lyndsey Layton and Philip Rucker, Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/nationall/education/mitt-romney-promotes-school-vouchers-in-attack-on-obamas-education-policy/2012/05/23/gJQAZN37kU_story.html?hpid=z1

Why Romney, Obama are education twins
By Jay Mathews, Published: May 27
Poor Mitt Romney. He appoints a splendid group of education policy advisers, smart people with great ideas. Then he learns that he has to give a speech explaining how he differs from President Obama on schools when those same advisers have spent their careers making that nearly impossible.
The two major parties mostly agree on education policy. This has been true for a generation. This is good for schools, but during presidential campaigns it makes speech writers miserable. Here is an example from Romney’s education speech last week to the Latino Coalition’s Annual Economic Summit:
“Dramatically expanding parental choice, making schools responsible for results by giving parents access to clear and instructive information, and attracting and rewarding our best teachers — these changes can help ensure that every parent has a choice and every child has a chance.”
That’s a nice sentence. The only flaw is that it sums up the views of the Obama administration pretty closely. There is a new emphasis on transparency rather than accountability in the Romney plan, but it is too esoteric for most voters.
Republican and Democratic presidential candidates have been happily copying each other since a group of Democratic governors (including Bill Clinton) started the school accountability movement in the 1980s and several Republican governors (including George W. Bush) joined in. Many of Romney’s advisers, like Nina Rees and Bill Evers, have been a part of that bipartisan effort, but don’t crow about it.
Instead the two parties pound each other with an education issue that makes them look tough to their most partisan supporters. That convenient weapon is vouchers, tax-supported scholarships for students who want to attend private schools. Obama has cut funds for a voucher program in the District so Romney embraces it. “I will be a model for parental choice programs across the nation,” he said in the speech.
The split doesn’t affect the bipartisan approach to schools much because vouchers have no chance of ever expanding very far. There aren’t nearly enough available spaces in good private schools to meet the demand. Any significant growth in vouchers would lead to heavy government interference in private schools and kill any allegiance conservative Republicans had to it.
The most significant change in U.S. education, and the most likely to give parents more choice, is the growth of public charter schools. There Romney and the president are soulmates. “Charter schools or similar education choices must be scaled up to meet student demand,” Romney said. Obama has pressured several states to raise or eliminate quotas on charters.
In the education speech, Romney tried one more standard GOP ploy to put some ideological distance between himself and the Democrats: He attacked the teachers unions. Romney said they “oppose even the most common-sense improvements.”
That should get him a few Pinocchios from my Fact Checker colleague Glenn Kessler. The unions have become more willing to rate teachers and tolerate charters as their younger members embrace such changes. The Obama administration has ignored the unions on these issues, accelerating the transformation.
One sign of how difficult it is to portray teacher unions today as reactionaries is the quote Romney used to prove their obstinance. He said an unnamed “long-time president of the American Federation of Teachers” once said: “When school children start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of children.”
No teachers union leader today would ever utter such words. The person to whom the quote is usually attributed, the late AFT leader Albert Shanker, probably didn’t either. It first appeared unsourced in the Meridian (Miss.) Star in 1985, and so far there is no proof he said it.
It is unlikely Romney will be saying much more about schools this year. The economy is the issue. That’s good. Leaving education out of the debate will reduce partisan impediments to getting things done.

Romney Calls Education ‘Civil Rights Issue of Our Era’ and Urges Shift
By TRIP GABRIEL
Published: May 23, 2012

Lamenting that millions of American children receive “a third world education,” Mitt Romney on Wednesday called for poor and disabled students to be able to use federal funds to attend any public, private or online school they choose.

In an already feverish campaign contest with President Obama that has focused largely on the economy, Mr. Romney, the presumed Republican nominee, turned his attention to the issue of education.
It might have seemed an unlikely choice, given how insignificantly education has figured in recent presidential elections. But the campaign has long planned to flesh out Mr. Romney’s agenda and move beyond daily tit-for-tat criticism of the president.
Mr. Romney’s sudden emphasis on education is reminiscent of George W. Bush’s forceful embrace of the same issue in 2000, a pillar of his “compassionate conservatism” that was credited with softening his image with moderate voters in the general election.
Another hint of Mr. Romney’s political aims was his audience: a meeting in Washington of Hispanic voters, a constituency that polls consistently show cares deeply about education, and one that Mr. Romney must court as he tries to win critical states like Florida and Colorado.
Mr. Romney said that the failure of so many American schools with minority students “is the civil rights issue of our era,” echoing a mantra of the school choice movement. “It’s the great challenge of our time.”
The challenge for Mr. Romney is that many of the ideas he touched on — increasing the number of charter schools, holding teachers more accountable for student success — have already been adopted by the Obama administration, whose education policies have all but co-opted traditional Republican positions.
In response to Mr. Romney’s proposals, the Obama campaign released a compilation of Republican governors’ past praise for the president’s education policies, including comments from Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey and Gov. Susana Martinez of New Mexico.
Mr. Romney told donors at a private gathering in Florida last month that he would reduce the size of the Education Department or fold it into another agency. But on Wednesday he gave no hint of the cuts he would make to education spending. He said he would consolidate $4 billion in current expenditures on teacher quality across 10 federal agencies, and send the money to states as block grants.
He also promised to break logjams that still hold up reforms by taking on teachers’ unions, which he called “the clearest example of a group that has lost its way.” He accused Mr. Obama of quavering before the unions because of their power within the Democratic Party. “President Obama has been unable to stand up to union bosses — and unwilling to stand up for our kids,” he said.
In fact, Mr. Obama has crossed teachers’ unions, notably in 2010 when he praised a mass firing of teachers in Rhode Island in a showdown over an administration policy to radically overhaul failing high-poverty schools.
In a policy paper released on Wednesday, the Romney campaign called for the elimination of such federal intervention.
James Kvaal, policy director for Mr. Obama’s campaign, accused Mr. Romney of wanting “to stop the clock on decades of reform by no longer insisting action be taken” to reform struggling schools.
In place of overhauling failing schools, which can include replacement of the staff or conversion to a charter school, Mr. Romney would substitute a “public report card,” one exposing a school’s failures so that parents, presumably, could steer clear. It is uncertain how that proposal differs from existing report cards now required under the No Child Left Behind law enacted under President Bush.
Mr. Romney’s biggest departure from existing policy was his call for poor students and those with disabilities to be able to attend any public school in their state — “or a private school where permitted by law” — and to have federal funds follow them, rather than the current system in which the money stays with a student’s local school.
The inclusion of private schools suggested that Mr. Romney favors voucher programs that use public dollars to pay private tuition, long a controversial idea but one that has lately been embraced by Republican lawmakers in Indiana and Louisiana.
“For too long, we’ve merely talked about the virtues of school choice without really doing something about it,” Mr. Romney said.
Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy group, said Mr. Romney’s proposal would significantly shift how the two largest Education Department programs for kindergarten through 12th grade students — those for poor students and those with disabilities — are now run.
“It’s a fundamental structural change of focus away from districts and schools to focus on kids and families,” Mr. Finn, an education official under President Ronald Reagan, said. “It changes the allocation of power as well as money, from people running school systems to parents choosing schools.”
But apart from the symbolism, the shift might not lead to many students choosing better schools, since the federal government pays only about 10 percent of education costs for students. States and school districts, which provide the balance, have in many cases already embraced the portability of financing when students choose a school beyond their neighborhood.
“Frankly, it catches up the federal policy to what is already state policy” in many places, Mr. Finn said.
Michael Barbaro contributed reporting.

Mitt Romney promotes school vouchers in attack on Obama’s education policy
By Lyndsey Layton and Philip Rucker, Published: May 23
Calling it a “national education emergency,” Mitt Romney said Wednesday that poor and disabled children should be allowed to escape failing public schools by using federal money to attend private schools and other alternative settings.
Under a banner that read “A Chance for Every Child,” the likely GOP presidential nominee seized on K-12 education, an area that had so far been overlooked on the campaign trail. It is considered one of President Obama’s strengths, bringing him more bipartisan support than any other issue and winning him accolades from Republican governors such as Chris Christie of New Jersey and John Kasich of Ohio.
Romney borrowed from Obama, calling education “the civil rights issue of our era,” but then tried to draw a sharp contrast, saying the president is beholden to teachers unions and blaming him for rising college costs, among other things.
During his speech at the Latino Coalition’s Annual Economic Summit in Washington, Romney said he would “do everything in my power to reverse this decline” in America’s schools, adding that if it were not for the struggling economy and the housing crisis, education would be “the great cause of this campaign.”
Romney said he wants to expand choices for families so children can flee failing schools. His campaign released a white paper highlighting his support for federal vouchers — a plan to reroute tax dollars sent to public schools to help educate poor and disabled children, instead letting that money follow the students to private schools. The federal government will spend $48.8 billion this year on poor and disabled students.
Romney did not discuss how he would fix troubled public schools. He said No Child Left Behind, the federal education law signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, was too prescriptive in requiring failing schools to adopt specific turnaround strategies. Instead, he suggested that schools would feel pressure to improve if they had to issue public report cards documenting their performance, although No Child Left Behind already requires them to report such data.
Progressive groups said Romney’s approach would return the nation to a time without accountability. “We have a long history in this country — and you can see it in the civil rights struggle to desegregate schools — of states and districts not doing anything to provide an equal educational opportunity for all students,” said Cynthia Brown of the Center for American Progress.
Romney slammed the Obama administration for not funding next year’s budget for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, created by Congress in 2004 as the first and only vehicle to provide federal money for private-school vouchers for low-income children. He said he wants to expand the program to make it a “national showcase.”
A 2010 study by the Department of Education found “no conclusive evidence” that the D.C. program improved achievement, noting that students with vouchers had reading and math test scores that were statistically similar to the scores of students without them, although they were more likely to graduate from high school.
Congressional supporters of the program, including House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), have been pushing the administration to fund the vouchers.
But the president believes the vouchers drain resources from public schools and do not help most students, James Kvaal, policy director for the Obama campaign, told reporters Wednesday. “Vouchers, which might serve a small number of students, will do nothing for the vast majority of students left behind in public schools,” he said.
Teachers unions are steadfastly opposed to vouchers.
“What Romney fails to understand is that when teachers and public schools have the resources they need, students win,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “Real public education improvement comes from teachers, administrators, parents and communities rolling up their sleeves and working together to help all kids, not just some kids, succeed.”
The idea of vouchers, which has floated around for decades, began gaining traction across the country in 2010 after Republicans won majorities in several state legislatures. Louisiana, Indiana and other states have passed programs that allow poor and even middle-income children to use state tax dollars for private-school tuition. Some legal challenges have arisen regarding the constitutionality of giving public money to private religious schools.
The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, created by the late economist and free-market advocate Milton Friedman, welcomed the introduction of vouchers into the presidential campaign. “If you want to dramatically improve education, you have to give all parents the freedom to choose,” said Susan L. Meyers, a spokeswoman for the foundation.
In his speech, Romney lashed out at teachers unions, which he said are entrenched interests opposed to common-sense reforms.
“When your cause in life is preventing parents from having a meaningful choice or children from having a real chance, then you are on the wrong side,” he said. “You might even be in the wrong vocation, because good teachers put the interests of children first.”
This week, Romney announced a team of education advisers that includes Rod Paige, a former education secretary who drew fire in 2004 when he called the National Education Association, the largest teachers union, a “terrorist organization.”
Romney also attacked Obama for his connections to the politically powerful unions, saying the president is talking about reform while “indulging” the groups that are blocking it. “He can’t be the voice of disadvantaged public school kids and the protector of special interests,” Romney said. “We have to stop putting campaign cash ahead of our kids.”
Teachers union leaders were attending a conference Wednesday to discuss ways to work with management to improve schools. “His speech demonstrates a complete disdain for public schools and educators,” said NEA President Dennis Van Roekel. “He’s completely out of touch with what is happening in schools and classrooms across the country.”