Trump: "I'm not cutting services, but I'm cutting spending. But I may cut Department of Education," Trump says. "I believe Common Core is a very bad thing. I believe that we should be--you know, educating our children from Iowa, from New Hampshire, from South Carolina, from California, from New York. I think that it should be local education."
Clinton initially responded to the question about how to fix the U.S. educational system by praising Common Core. She then said that families today are too "negative" about the current system, a system Clinton described as "the most important non-family enterprise" in the country. After noting what she described as "unfortunate" opposition to Common Core, Hillary Clinton also dismissed the concerns of Common Core opponents by saying they just "do not understand the value" of the controversial top-down curriculum. Source
Trump: "Our public schools are capable of providing a more competitive product than they do today. Look at some of the high school tests from earlier in this century and you'll wonder if they weren't college-level tests. And we've got to bring on the competition -open the schoolhouse doors and let parents choose the best school for their children. Education reformers call this school choice, charter schools, vouchers, even opportunity scholarships. I call it competition--the American way."
Clinton: Does not like voucher programs. While she does support school choice as it exists as a form of public education, Clinton has always been opposed to allowing public funds to be used toward private and religious schools. As a New York Senator, Hillary Clinton voted against voucher programs in the state in 2001.
Clinton initially responded to the question about how to fix the U.S. educational system by praising Common Core. She then said that families today are too "negative" about the current system, a system Clinton described as "the most important non-family enterprise" in the country. After noting what she described as "unfortunate" opposition to Common Core, Hillary Clinton also dismissed the concerns of Common Core opponents by saying they just "do not understand the value" of the controversial top-down curriculum.
Stein: Replace Common Core with curriculum developed by educators, not corporations, with input from parents and communities.
Trump: "I believe Common Core is a very bad thing. I think that it should be local education."
Clinton: Does not like voucher programs. While she does support school choice as it exists as a form of public education, Clinton has always been opposed to allowing public funds to be used toward private and religious schools. As a New York Senator, Hillary Clinton voted against voucher programs in the state in 2001.
Stein: "Charter schools are not better than public schools--and in many cases they are far worse. They cherry-pick their students so they can show better test scores. The treasure of our public schools system has been assaulted by the process of privatization."
Trump: "We've got to bring on the competition--open the schoolhouse doors. Education reformers call this school choice, charter schools, vouchers, even opportunity scholarships. I call it competition--the American way."
Clinton: In Mrs. Clinton's Senate race in 2000, Mrs. Clinton stated that the posting of the Ten Commandments in public schools is a violation the Constitutional separation between church and state. Source
Stein: "Charter schools are not better than public schools--and in many cases they are far worse. They cherry-pick their students so they can show better test scores. The treasure of our public schools system has been assaulted by the process of privatization."
Clinton: Does not like voucher programs. While she does support school choice as it exists as a form of public education, Clinton has always been opposed to allowing public funds to be used toward private and religious schools.
Q: Should the federal government establish Common Core as a nationwide academic standard for high school graduation?
Stein: Replace Common Core with curriculum developed by educators, not corporations, with input from parents and communities.
Trump: "I believe Common Core is a very bad thing. I think that it should be local education."
Evan McMullin's answer: No
Tim Kaine's answer: Yes
Mike Pence has not answered this question yet.
Evan McMullin's answer: No
Mike Pence's answer: No
Tim Kaine's answer: Yes
STEIN: It's not only possible, it's essential. If we found a way to bail out the crooks on Wall Street who crashed the economy through waste, fraud and abuse, we can certainly find a way to help students who are some of the chief victims of that crash. We bailed out Wall Street to the tune of $17 trillion when you include the no-interest loans and the straight-up bailouts they received. The good news is that student debt is tiny by comparison: only $1.3 trillion. And we have the people power to make this happen. There are 43 million young and not-so-young people burdened with predatory student loan debt. That turns out to be a winning plurality of a presidential vote, especially if all those students bring out a family member or two! Students are leading the charge to fix this crisis.
Rep. Bernie Sanders voted in favor of the initial NCLB bill in May 2001, but voted against the final version in December 2001. Sen. Hillary Clinton voted in favor of both the initial NCLB bill and the final bill.
On the new ESEA bill, Sanders voted for the initial bill in the Senate education committee; then voted in favor on the Senate floor and in favor of the conference committee version. Hillary Clinton announced her support for the Every Student Succeeds Act, which is widely considered a fix to No Child Left Behind's worst flaws.
A: Provide vouchers, so that they would have choice in terms of the schools that they go to. We know that the best education is homeschool, the next is private schools, the next is charter schools, the next is public schools. If we want to change that dynamic we've got to offer some real competition to the public schools. We do everything we can to facilitate school choice, a voucher system. Incentivize the states to enact voucher systems.
TRUMP: We're going to be cutting tremendous amounts of money and waste and fraud and abuse. But, no, I'm not cutting services, but I am cutting spending. But I may cut Department of Education-- Common Core is a very bad thing. I think that it should be local education. If you look at a Jeb Bush and some of these others, they want children to be educated by Washington, D.C. bureaucrats.
A: The national teachers union--because they're not for education of our children. They're for greater membership, greater benefits, and greater pay for their members. And they are the single most destructive force in public education in America. I have been saying that since 2009. I have got the scars to show it. But I'm never going to stop saying it, because they never change their stripes.
CHRISTIE: My alternative is we have to start to put market forces on these college costs. I pay for two college tuitions right now, and I can tell you that they're the most opaque bills you'll ever see in your life. If you got that bill for dinner with that little of that detail, you wouldn't pay it. You'd send it back. Yet for college, we pay it.
Q: What would you do as president?
CHRISTIE: Universities need to start telling us exactly what they're spending the money we give them on. And secondly, we need to unbundle those costs. So if a child doesn't want to pay for all of these different things in college, they should be able to select it. That will tell colleges what they don't need to provide and we shouldn't have to pay for. These ideas will help to contain costs, but the concept of free college for everybody -- there's nothing free in this world. We need to earn what we get.
A: Our education system is in trouble, but demonstrably, giving more money to the Department of Education, as we have been doing for almost 40 years, doesn't improve the state of education. Common Core has become a nationally driven set of bureaucratic standards that teach teachers how to teach, that teach children how to learn, and what we need is to provide more parental choice so that our kids anywhere they live have a real chance, and Common Core doesn't help us do that.
Q: So what should be done?
A: We know that the most important thing about a child's education is to have a great teacher in front of the classroom and a lot of choice and accountability with parents, whether that's at home or with vouchers or charters or parochial schools. And Common Core, unfortunately, limits parents' choices. It limits the creativity a teacher can apply in the classroom. So, it will over time limit our children's chances.
WALKER: What I'm doing with the University of Wisconsin system, is I'm giving them the same sorts of tools I gave to public education four years ago: the same critics said that was going to devastate public education. I took away seniority in tenure and now, we can hire and fire based on merit. We can pay based on performance. We can put the best and the brightest in our classrooms
Q: But U.W. says they're going to have to raise tuition on students.
WALKER: But they're not. We have a two-year tuition freeze.
Q: But after that?
WALKER: Going forward, we have a cap on it tied to inflation. And so, we will be much more affordable than just about any other campus in America. We believe it's not about austerity, it's about reform. The reforms that worked before will work here.
Trump: Well first of all, I think it's going to kill Bush, and I think that education should be local, absolutely. I think that for people in Washington to be setting curriculum and to be setting all sorts of standards for people living in Iowa and other places is ridiculous.
Q: Why is it going to kill Bush?
Trump: Because I think people don't want to have somebody from Washington looking down and saying this is what you're going to be studying.
Q: But do you think he's responsible for that part of it?
Trump: No, but he's responsible for supporting it."
In a statement later, Walker said "Both science and my faith dictate my belief that we are created by God" and that "I believe faith and science are compatible, and go hand in hand."
Rubio's lectures reveal a tactical mind that explores "targets of opportunity" for both parties. He discusses demographic slices of the electorate as if they are pieces on the Electoral College chessboard.
Rubio explains the GOP's dilemma like this: "Basically, Barack Obama got eight out of 10 votes from the fastest-growing groups in America. And Mitt Romney got 90 percent of his votes from the group that is diminishing in terms of its overall percentage of the population.
Imagine, he tells his students at one point, that "despite your message, you can't get through [to minority voters] because they're convinced you hate them. That's going to be a problem."
Bloomberg said the poor in the U.S. need better education. By the end of his life, he said he's going to write a book about why the poor remain poor. "It's always the poor that get screwed," said the founder of Bloomberg L.P.
WALKER: They did. Yes, wide receivers.
Q: You love football. But when you look at the concussions, when you look at what's happened, can you imagine saying to your grandchildren, 'yes, go do that'?
WALKER: I think in a state like Wisconsin, we actually have pretty good standards. My kids, even a few years ago, one of them had an early concussion, and was out for 10 days. They wouldn't let him back in until he had a full checkup. That actually should have happened a long time ago, and I'm hopeful other states around the country will do that. Because I think a lot of us enjoy football.
Q: If you were out there in Arizona?
WALKER: I'd be in Phoenix watching the Packers take on the Patriots, but I still think, like anything in life, there's ways of doing it that are responsible, and I still think football can be responsible in America.
HUCKABEE: No, I'm absolutely against what Common Core has come to stand for. But it's totally different than what it was intended to be. The original intent, which was conceived out of the Achieve Movement from the mid-'90s that a number of governors, most of them Republicans, put forth to keep state standards, not letting the federal government get in control. And the whole idea was let the states decide the standards, but have high standards. So that was the genesis of it. Common Core originally only dealt with two things: language arts and math. That was it. And nothing, nothing in curriculum.
Jindal takes the latter stance in the name of greater "local control" of education--which would presumably allow Louisiana schools to teach his version of acceptable "science."
Jindal won a major round of applause at the recent Republican Leadership Conference when he highlighted his opposition to the Obama administration-backed Common Core. He took a firm stand against the mathematics and English education standards that Louisiana and 44 other states have adopted. "I am for standards. I am for our kids learning," the second-term governor said. "I am for our kids being able to compete, but it seems to me there is something fundamentally wrong with the bureaucrats in the federal government--especially [those] who think they know best and [that children] don't need to listen to parents."
His current opposition to Common Core puts him at odds with John White, the Louisiana state superintendent of education, who was Jindal's top pick for the job.
[One Republican State Representative], who has led efforts to gut Common Core, said Jindal could have done more at the statehouse to get lawmakers on board: "He has not been engaged in the legislative process to get rid of Common Core, whereas with school choice he was very much engaged."
[One activist said], "it makes us question just exactly his true intent after he was so adamantly for Common Core." [Another activist said] Jindal has talked the talk and now she wants him to walk the walk, much like he did on school choice: "All we have is words right now," she said. "We've had no action
SEN. WARREN: No. So let's start by just reminding everybody what this is. Our young people are being crushed by student loan debt, $1.2 trillion in outstanding student loan debt, and it is exploding. In less than a decade, student loan debt has gone up 71% for the average amount that young people are borrowing. This is a crisis that now is not just affecting families that get hurt by it, it's affecting the whole economy.
EMANUEL: To the larger economy, the biggest thing that is happening is a skills deficit that inhibits us from doing what we need to do. Having a four-year college degree or better is key. I am not for this [smiles mischievously], but B.P. in Indiana is expanding a huuuuuge refinery. They are bringing in people from Alabama and Kentucky because we don't have enough pipefitters up here
Q: This isn't an issue where you seem angry, yelling that Wall Street needs to pay.
EMANUEL: Look, I am not defending Wall Street. Wall Street has screwed up enough. But let me answer it this way: Wall Street is not to blame that we had a 7% graduation rate in city community colleges. I fixed it--it is now 14%. I doubled it in two years. Wall Street is not responsible for that. We allowed the colleges to deteriorate.
RUBIO: Actually, I think programs like Head Start are geared in the right direction in the sense that they're trying to get children educational opportunities as young as possible. I think where those programs can be completed and improved is that we create flexibility in them at the local level. So, I'm not saying we should dismantle the efforts, I'm saying that these efforts need to be reformed and I believe the best way to reform them is to turn the money and the influence over to the state and local level where I think you'll find the kinds of innovations that allow us to confront an issue that is complex, and quite frankly diverse. For example, rural poverty looks different than urban poverty. And there are different approaches to it.
BUSH: I think "No Child Left Behind" pushed states that refused to begin the process of reform into the arena. So now every state is on the journey. Some really slow and some far more advanced. But ultimately this is a state-driven kind of enterprise. But the jump start for a lot of states that refused to use accountability and testing and a focus on early literacy and all the things that began with "No Child Left Behind" wouldn't have happened. So I think it served a useful purpose.
Q: How bad is the current system?
BUSH: If you measure it by outcomes, 25% of kids pass all of the four segments of the ACT test which means that they're college-ready or career-ready. And about 20% don't graduate at all. That's failure.
BUSH: Well I think higher standards is really the element of this that's most important. So if you dumb down the standards, everybody feels good. Little Johnny's going to get a piece of paper that says he's graduated from high school. But this massive remediation that's necessary to access higher education is evidence that we're not benchmarking ourselves to college readiness. So higher standards matter. The commonality of them--in this case 45 states--voluntarily creating them.
Q: The common core?
BUSH: The common core standards in language arts and math is important because curriculum is developed in this kind of system where there's common expectations. You'll have one thousand different flowers blooming as it relates to curriculum. It won't be homogenized, it will be diverse and alive which is what we need.
Q: But a lot of conservatives, certainly Tea Party movement, are very suspicious of this process.
BUSH: Sure.
BUSH: Right.
Q: We study to the test. Do you agree with that? Do we test too much?
BUSH: I think we do test too much. You could have fewer tests and achieve the desired results of transparency and accountability for sure.
Q: It's hard to fire bad teachers. It's hard to reward good teachers. This has been a complaint in education reform circles for decades.
BUSH: Right.
Q: Has the system gotten any better?
BUSH: It has. In states like Florida we've eliminated tenure for new teachers. It's clear that we have to do this. But great teachers need to be rewarded more. Bad teachers, they should get out of the classroom. And those in the middle, there ought to be teacher development to help them enhance their skills. It's hard to do that in a system where collective bargaining based on longevity of service for all employees in school districts, not just for teachers, is the organizing principle.
The student insisted that he wanted assistance for his college education and asked if Rand Paul supported a culture change within the nation. Paul responded that he believed that government should allow people to believe whatever they wanted, and clarified that he didn't believe in the absence of government.
The Kentucky Republican added that he supported the idea of student loans from the government but added that the federal government shouldn't be allowed to spend more money than it takes in: "I think 'leave me alone' is a good mantra for government because government has to be involved in certain things but there are many things that we can leave government out of," Paul concluded.
Carson has spoken publicly about his views on evolution and creationism, once telling a convention of the National Science Teachers: "Evolution and creationism both require faith. It's just a matter of where you choose to place that faith."
But Carson said that the Review article had not published his complete quote and that he does not think evolutionists are unethical: "Those of us who believe in God and derive our sense of right and wrong and ethics from God's word really have no difficulty whatsoever defining where our ethics come from. People who believe in survival of the fittest might have more difficulty deriving where their ethics come from. A lot of evolutionists are very ethical people."
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| 2020 Presidential contenders on Education: | |||
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Democrats running for President:
Sen.Michael Bennet (D-CO) V.P.Joe Biden (D-DE) Mayor Mike Bloomberg (I-NYC) Gov.Steve Bullock (D-MT) Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D-IN) Sen.Cory Booker (D-NJ) Secy.Julian Castro (D-TX) Gov.Lincoln Chafee (L-RI) Rep.John Delaney (D-MD) Rep.Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) Sen.Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) Gov.Deval Patrick (D-MA) Sen.Bernie Sanders (I-VT) CEO Tom Steyer (D-CA) Sen.Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) Marianne Williamson (D-CA) CEO Andrew Yang (D-NY) 2020 Third Party Candidates: Rep.Justin Amash (L-MI) CEO Don Blankenship (C-WV) Gov.Lincoln Chafee (L-RI) Howie Hawkins (G-NY) Gov.Jesse Ventura (I-MN) |
Republicans running for President:
V.P.Mike Pence(R-IN) Pres.Donald Trump(R-NY) Rep.Joe Walsh (R-IL) Gov.Bill Weld(R-MA & L-NY) 2020 Withdrawn Democratic Candidates: Sen.Stacey Abrams (D-GA) Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-NYC) Sen.Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) Sen.Mike Gravel (D-AK) Sen.Kamala Harris (D-CA) Gov.John Hickenlooper (D-CO) Gov.Jay Inslee (D-WA) Mayor Wayne Messam (D-FL) Rep.Seth Moulton (D-MA) Rep.Beto O`Rourke (D-TX) Rep.Tim Ryan (D-CA) Adm.Joe Sestak (D-PA) Rep.Eric Swalwell (D-CA) | ||
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