He’s not going to get much attention right now with a serious policy proposal about K-12 Education.
With three Democrats bump drafting in the final lap of a contentious and unpredictable primary.
It’s a lot more fun to see who’s going to wreck and who’s going to victory lane.
Than to be talking about public policy.
We can get to that later.
We will.
McDonnell’s plan calls for putting “Virginia in the vanguard of the charter school movement.”
He’s serious.
As I read it, the plan is not just standard GOP boilerplate, but a genuine expression of the values and policies he intends to pursue if he’s elected.
His determination is in the details.
He says that charter school “have been largely closed off to Virginia students who need them most.” Our laws, he avers, are too restrictive and need to be changed so that the power to authorize charter schools is not held only by local school districts. (emphasis mine) McDonnell notes that he’ll bring in experts from the across the country to “review and offer advice and guidance in the authorization of charter school applications.” He even mentions that the nationally recognized expert on charter schools who was on the State Board of Education wasn’t asked to serve on the committee that offers guidance on charter school applications.
That’s detail.
McDonnell’s release deftly positions his stance as a bipartisan one, quoting President Obama’s support of charter school experimentation and pointing to Newt Gingrich’s and Al Sharpton’s agreement that educational opportunity shouldn’t be dependent on the zip code of your residence.
Virginia Democrats are not going to take on Obama. Nor are they going to endorse a zip code based system of school quality.
But I also don’t imagine that the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, whoever it is, will believe that “putting Virginia in the vanguard of the charter school movement” should be a major priority.
A few tweaks to the approval process here, a university lab school there- the Democrats might live with this.
But putting Virginia in the charter vanguard?
Over a traditional Democratic issue such as teacher pay at the national average?
Over committing to fully funding the rebenchmarking of the SOQ’s?
Over dealing with the eventual removal of stimulus dollars from the schools?
Priorities.
I think that this is where the debate is going to occur.
And I believe that it is going to be a real contrast.
McDonnell deeply believes that Virginians should have more educational choices and that parents desperately want them. He intends to fight for them.
The Democrats may not be opposed to all of McDonnell’s ideas. But they are going to want to fight for their own priorities not his.
And when you factor the influential education interest groups into the mix, there is a real debate on education shaping up for the fall campaign.
It’s been 15 years since the SOLS were proposed.
Not a bad time to think about what’s next for our schools.
I saw McDonnell at the VEA forum. This was one of the issues that he discussed there, invoking Obama’s support of it. It’s going to be a tough question in the fall, because you are right: the Ds aren’t going to take on Obama.
It would be truly refreshing if Republicans would also talk about the economies involved in tax credits. Just by way of example: it costs me less to send my two sons to a private school than Prince William County government schools spend per capita.
Government schools are a sinkhole for public funds without much public responsibility. Even a 50% (refundable) tax credit for parents sending their children to private schools would bring the cost of private school in the reach of most parents, AND would free up massive amounts for per capita spending on government schools.
These economic facts demonstrate that the refusal to adopt tax credits is not about efficiencies; it’s about CONTROL.