Republican presidential candidate John McCain on Friday told an influential black organization that Democratic rival Barack Obama opposed private school vouchers and was beholden to the teacher’s union, both at the expense of underprivileged students.
McCain said that Obama sent his own children to private school while holding back efforts to give more choices to low-income families. The Arizona Republican acknowledged that he and his wife sent their children to private school, too, saying that “everybody should have the same choice Cindy and I and Sen. Obama did.”
McCain continues:
“My opponent talks a great deal about hope and change, and education is as good a test as any of his seriousness,” he said. “If Sen. Obama continues to defer to the teachers unions instead of committing to real reform, then he should start looking for new slogans.”
…
“If there’s one thing he always delivers it’s a great speech,” McCain said. “But I hope you’ll listen carefully, because his ideas are not always as impressive as his rhetoric.”
Thats a true and fair criticism.
McCain makes some good points, but ultimately they’re irrelevant. You see, McCain has already convinced me to vote for him by pointing out that Obama is exactly like Paris Hilton - plus Obama thinks he’s Moses!
No need to discuss issues further - I’m in McCain’s camp!
LaurenceB,
Since when did Obama say hes Moses? Mccain has been making disgusting ads comparing Obama to Paris Hilton and Moses, which also insults the Jewish comunity. Mccain defends this as “having fun”, but this is not a 5th grader’s project, this is the fight for the presidency.
LaurenceB,
Since when did Obama say hes Moses? Mccain has been making disgusting ads comparing Obama to Paris Hilton and Moses, which also insults the Jewish comunity. Mccain defends this as “having fun”, but this is not a 5th grader’s project, this is the fight for the presidncy.
suck it
Bob,
Precisely my point. McCain has now stooped to roughly a fifth-grade level, as you say. I was perhaps too subtle.
Actually it’s the New Yorker that accurately depicted on how the Jewish community views barack obama “That’s all”.
So the guy wants to run the most powerful country in the world and your crying about being compared to Paris Hilton? Wouldn’t that kinda prove the point?
Your absolutely right Stephen!
We McCain voters don’t need “issues” and “policy”.
Obama’s a a dumb celeb with a messiah complex, AND a cry-baby! Who cares where he stands on the “issues”, right?
Correct me if I’m wrong here LaurenceB, but wasn’t that the very thing McCain is trying to bring to focus by the commercial: the issues?
His point in the ad is straightforward to me: Yes, Obama is popular, but is he ready to be president…which, is, we all agree, more than a mere popularity contest.
In other words, look past the popularity and look at the issues…and on the issue of education, McCain is miles ahead of Obama.
Good one HP! (giggle)
The Moses ad was especially good, being completely free of any mention of even one issue, it was even more effective in reminding us to focus on the issues.
LOL
McCain is definitely right on the school voucher issue, but our nation is facing far more pressing issues at this time. The directionless war in Iraq comes to mind. I’m not that big a fan of Obama’s plan to transfer troops in Iraq to Afghanistan but I think it’s far better than leaving them in Iraq.
As a New Yorker, I detest anyone who praises Rudy Ghouliani. While Rudy did clean up the streets, he did absolutely nothing for the one million students in New York City’s public school system, where theft, muggings and various incidents of violence raged on in junior high schools as well as high schools. I’d rather have eight more years of George W. Bush before I endure four years of a President Giuliani.
Obviously McCain knows he cannot woo black voters with his undying love for George W. Bush and Rudy Ghouliani, so he figures he’ll drag out the old school voucher argument. With blacks and Latinos making up the lion share of soldiers stationed in Iraq (blacks make up 1 out of every 5 Army soldiers and 1 out of every 10 Marines), the Urban League will happily applaud John McCain’s stance on school vouchers and then head to the polls to elect Barack Obama so that their brothers and sisters stationed in Iraq can get the hell out of that cesspool which is post-war Iraq.
Minorities are not disproportionately represented in the military, nor are the disproportionately represented among the casualties. I don’t know where you are getting your data from, but there have been many studies on this. Heritage has one posted.
http://www.heritage.org/research/nationalsecurity/cda05-08.cfm
There are branches of the military that, for one reason or another, has more of one group than another, but overall, its generally not true that minorities are carrying the lions share of the burden. Their contribution is largely proportional to their population.
The school voucher argument isn’t old, its rather recent and it still hasn’t caught on in large urban environments that are heavily influenced by the teachers union. Why you detest Guiliani for not caring for New Yorks kids, yet give the unions a pass on the “old voucher argument” is more indicative of how one’s own personal biases can get in the way of making logical and reasoned opinions about a candidate.
HP,
you know as well as i obama has at least a nuanced position on vouchers. http://www.nysun.com/national/obama-open-to-private-school-vouchers/71403/ at worst, obama is pandering to the democratic base which both candidates are guilty of one way or another. mccain’s “obama is a kid and i know everything” tone is getting old.
for a third viewpoint, see http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-applebee1-2008aug01,0,6288101.story
her inherent point basically suggests that neither solution will solve the problem due to families who don’t care — its at least a reasonable argument.
cfe
(sorry to get back to the point of the post ;))
cfe,
There are indeed parents that don’t care about their kids, but you are more likely to get parents who care about their kids than union bosses who care about someone else kids. Vouchers aren’t perfect, but they are definitely better.
Stephen,
I actually came across the Heritage article two nights ago, and while I read the article and charts, I kind of dismissed it because it focused on new recruits and not the total number of soldiers in the Army.
As for where I got my data from, I got them from the U.S. Army. Why go to secondary sources? Don’t get me wrong, Heritage, who also admitted that African-Americans were overrepresented in terms of recruits to general population, did a great analysis of the data. But I preferred to obtain the data from the source itself. Download the briefing file (it;s in PowerPoint format) titled “Blacks in the U.S. Army-Then and Now.”
http://www.armyg1.army.mil/hr/demographics.asp
It includes the following black officials: Active Duty, Reserves, Army Civilians and Army National Guard. It compares the population of black soldiers to the U.S. population of blacks ages 18-55. Perhaps that’s why Heritage and other right-wing organizations spin the stats by using the U.S. Black population of all ages. Maybe next time you should go straight to the source as opposed to quoting spin doctors.
The Army data reads that Blacks ages 18-55 make up 12% of the U.S. population whereas Blacks make up 20% of the U.S. Army. That doesn’t sound like much, but in an army of 1 million soldiers, that’s at least several thousand soldiers.
I’ll admit that minorities in fact do not make the lion share of soldiers in the U.S. military. But even Heritage admits that Blacks are overrepresented among all soldiers.
As for school vouchers, I’m not sure what your definition of recent is. Private school vouchers first appeared in the South in the late 1960s by Democrat politicians to allow white children to attend all-white schools. When Rudy Ghouliani ran for Mayor of New York City in 1993, he was originally in favor of school vouchers, but for some reason gave in to the Teachers’ Unions a year later and said he opposed private school vouchers. Milton Friedman has been a huge supporter of school vouchers since the 1950s. I have no idea how old you are, Stephen, so I have no clear picture of what “recent” means to you. I was born in 1978, so I consider anything from the 1950s and 60s to be old.
I never said I gave a pass to the teachers’ unions on the voucher argument. I strongly oppose teachers’ unions because they do not reward good teachers or punish bad ones and also because they oppose school vouchers. But regardless of how poor the quality of education has become because of teachers’ unions, they cannot be blamed for an unsafe learning environment. Teachers are supposed to teach, not provide security services.
Ghouliani did not create the mess that was the NYC public school system. He inherited it from David Dinkins, who inherited it from Ed Koch. But like the two Mayors before him, he did absolutely nothing about the corruption from both the UFT and the Board of Ed.
I can see why Ghouliani did not do well among conservatives in the Republican Primary. A New York Times article from 1997 quoted him as saying “Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do and how you do it.” In other words, we are free to do as we’re told. Sounds like communism to me.
As a New Yorker who endured his Mayoralty, I would have to say that making New York safer was the only thing Ghouliani did right. He is great at law enforcement and would make a great Attorney General or perhaps a head warden at some detention center, but in terms of general leadership, Ghouliani is a horrible leader. Some non-New Yorkers would say that he did a great job on 9/11, but don’t say that to a New York City firefighter, as 300+ firemen perished because their radios, which were purchased under Giuliani’s reign and were of inferior quality to the police radios, failed to receive the call to evacuate the Twin Towers. Also, the decision to have the City’s Office of Emergency Management based solely in a building that had been attacked by a terrorist bombing in 1993 wasn’t that great an idea, either.
Police brutality and harassment was at an all-time high when Ghouliani was Mayor. Even his African-American Deputy Mayor Rudy Washington filed a complaint that police officers had harassed him. Then there’s the case of Abner Louima, who was arrested in Brooklyn, taken back to the precinct where the arresting officers shoved a plunger into his rectum several times. Then there’s the case of Amadou Diallo, who was shot dead (the police fired 41 times at him) by 19 bullets when he pulled out his wallet, which police thought was a firearm. How many bullets would it take to immobilize you? Apparently, this was an impromptu execution, and because the NYPD was Ghouliani’s favorite agency, they felt they could do anything they wanted and get away with it. Studies have shown that that the reduction in the crime rate in New York City during the late 90s probably had more to do with the improvement of the national economy during the Clinton Administration and federal funding for 7,000 additional NYPD recruits in 1992 than anything Ghouliani did.
So am I biased about my hatred for Rudy Giuliani? I guess so, since I actually had to live in New York City and watch him control the Big Apple with an iron fist. I won’t compare him to Hitler although I do feel Giuliani is a narcissist whose only idea of maintaining order comes from watching over the shoulder of every citizen at all times. I’m surprised my family’s mail didn’t already come opened while Giuliani was Mayor.
As for my failure to make logical and reasoned opinions about a candidate, I cannot support a candidate who is endorsed by an idiot (Bush) who will spend this country into the Third World and who wants to keep troops in Iraq for the next hundred years. I cannot support someone who wants to build a wall to keep out illegal aliens along the Mexican border but fails to build a barrier along the much longer Canadian border, especially when studies have shown that most illegal aliens enter this country legally and then violate the terms of their green cards or student visas. That’s interesting considering McCain claims to be against pork barrel spending and pledges to reduce government spending overall.
McCain’s Senate record is impressive, and I definitely would’ve voted for him in 2000 if he hadn’t been defeated by George W. Bush. But the John McCain running for President seems to be very different from John McCain, Senator and former POW.
Like I said, McCain figures he cannot argue to the Urban League about his support for a war that so many Americans, especially minorities, are skeptic about so he pulls out the school voucher argument. Public schools may be dangerous, but it’s not teachers’ unions that have led to the deaths of over 4,000 Americans.
As I said, some services are overrepresented and you are selecting the branch of the military that has generally done well at recruiting blacks. Same with the Marines and Hispanics. Don’t think, off memory, that the Heritage numbers were inconsistent with the official ones.
The voucher argument has been around for a while, as you pointed out. I am a big supporter of Friedman’s foundation promoting them, but as a political issue, vouchers are only a few presidential cycles deep. Vouchers in the south was not a quality issue, it was a race issue. Different issue.
I could care less about Giuliani. I’m glad I don’t live in New York. I’ll defer to you on that.
Food for thought.
Each year I get to celebrate Independence Day twice. On June 30, I celebrate my independence day and on July 4, I celebrate America’s. This year is special because it marks the 40th anniversary of my independence.
On June 30, 1968, I escaped Communist Cuba, and a few months later I was in the United States to stay. That I happened to arrive in Richmond on Thanksgiving Day is just part of the story, but I digress.
I’ve thought a lot about the anniversary this year. The election-year rhetoric has made me think a lot about my native Cuba and what transpired there. In the late 1950’s, most Cubans thought Cuba needed a change, and they were
right. So when a young leader came along talking about change, every Cuban was at least very receptive.
When the young leader spoke eloquently and passionately and denounced the old system, the press in Cuba and even the USA fell in love with him. They never questioned who
his friends were or what he really believed in. When he said he would help the farmers and the poor and bring free medical care and education to all, everyone believed. When he said he would bring justice and equality to all, everyone said ‘Praise the Lord’ finally. And when the young charismatic leader said, ‘I will be for change and I will be the arbiter of that change, everyone yelled, ‘Viva Fidel!’
But everyone was so excited about the change, nobody bothered to ask about the details of the change. Well, by the time the executioner’s guns fell silent and the people’s own guns had been taken away. By the time everyone was equal, they were equally poor, hungry, and oppressed. By the
time everyone received their free education it was worth nothing. By the time the press noticed, it was too late, because they were now working for him. By the time the change was finally implemented Cuba had been knocked
down a couple of notches to Third-World status. By the time the change was done way more than a million people had taken to boats, rafts, and inner tubes, risking sharks or drowning to escape the change. You can call those who made it ashore with us to Florida or anywhere else in the world, the most fortunate Cubans. And now I am getting a very familiar feeling that goes back to the beginning of my story.
But, we would never fall for that in America. We wouldn’t put a young leader in charge of this great country who promised
change without asking: What change? How will you carry it out?
What will it cost America? Would we?
Manuel Alvarez, Jr.
Sounds like Castro and Obama were cut from the same cloth.
Can someone tell me how these vouchers are suppose to work? I’m interested in knowing the plan that McCain has set forth to make this voucher system work.
This is my take on this:
#1 - We (United States) currently have a voucher system for housing and another system for Magnet Schools. In my opinion some people are reaping the benefits of both of these system. BUT, what about those whose number hasn’t come up to receive these vouchers? What happens to them and their children? Who is taking these children to these schools miles away when you have some single moms who don’t have vehicles or are working 2-3 jobs to support their family.
#2 - Why do our children (blacks, hispanics & lower class whites) have to go out of our communities to receive a so called better education. Why can’t the government invest monies into rebuilding better institutions and equip the teachers witht he necessary tools to teach our students? Why uproot a community of children to a school that could be replicated within their own community?
As far as #1, this is how I’ve explained it in the past:
As far as #2, its important to remember that government cannot fix the problem - it is the problem. The fundamental problem of public schools are that they are a monopoly, a government monopoly. Which is the worse kind. Vouchers changes all of that.
Thanks for the response. I was feelin the first few paragraphs. When you got down to final paragraph from question 1 it sounds like the “No child left behind” program which sounded extremely good initially but was a huge joke. There seems to be too many what if’s just simply too many possible loopholes. I can see the attempt for this to be implemented but later on finding out that the voucher I recieved isn’t enough for the school I’d like my son to go to or somehow the vouchers given within the inner cities come with many stipulations. You say don’t worry about the details but when all is said it won’t benefit those who really need it. I can promise you that! I personally would like to see all schools no matter what the location (inner city or suburb)no matter what ethnic background have the SAME educational opportunity. A voucher won’t solve that.
You know it would serve the American people well if they didn’t have these soo called Liberals & Republicans!! What is up with all these labels. It was created to keep people divided. I agree on some issues with liberals and republicans.
Dude, I don’t think everybody is looking for the government to fix all the problems. What’s interesting though is that the freakin elected officials within the government have created these darn problems and the irony to that is that you don’t want them to fix the problems they have created! America was built on GREED, RACISIM, SEXISM & CLASSISM.
Let me address some of your concerns:
I can see the attempt for this to be implemented but later on finding out that the voucher I recieved isn’t enough for the school I’d like my son to go to
Yes but, remember, even the school your son currently goes to will be better under vouchers. Because of competitive pressure, the floor level should pick up.
In addition, even if vouchers helps some students and not all…that is still a better situation than helping none. And lastly, your argument is not against vouchers per se, its an argument for more voucher money.
I personally would like to see all schools no matter what the location (inner city or suburb)no matter what ethnic background have the SAME educational opportunity. A voucher won’t solve that.
If this is your goal, then you are right, vouchers will never accomplish this. But you know what, nothing will. No matter what education system you design, families with more money, or more political connections, or more power will always be able to provide superior education for their children.
Your criteria reminds me of the famous quote from Churchill who said, “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
I will be happy when even the worst school teaches its students proficiently in english and math…even if the kids up the street can do Calculus III.
Lastly, its important to remember that Vouchers have already been implemented and they do work. In fact, whether its vouchers or charter schools, the trend towards greater autonomy and less dependence on state and union entanglements have shown to be a boom to students - especially students in poor, minority areas.
Highly effective schools have highly effective teachers and highly effective administrators. Until the universities stop churning out so many marginal teachers and administrators the overall situation will not improve. A more rigorous selective process must be in place long before a person is granted a teaching credential or is given an administrator’s endorsement on their teaching credential. For aspiring teachers,there must be an active weeding out of candidates that do not demonstrate subject knowledge and the ability to effectively engage children in the learning process.
It is equally important that Education graduate departments institute an equally rigorous process in their post-graduate programs. Aspiring administrators should demonstrate ability and knowledge of what constitutes mastery teaching. In addition, there needs to be a proven track record of successful leadership experiences.
After 23 years as an educator (teacher & principal)in public and private schools, I can tell you that there is no difference in either setting when it comes to the quality of teachers and principals. The only difference is that private/magnet/charter schools have populations of like-minded and highly motivated families. Those populations tend to be successful for that very reason.
Until serious reform occurs at the university level everything else is just a bandaid.
As for my view of NCLB, the real reason it is universally despised by teachers is because of the accountability.