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Our two main presidential candidates are offering progressive, however wishful, ideas to help advance education in America.

What will the presidential candidates actually do regarding education if elected? It’s anyone’s guess. All we know for certain is what they say they will do. It should come as no surprise that both parties are presenting strategies, perhaps better termed “wish lists,” with which anyone however remotely or intimately interested in education would have to agree.

Perhaps a more interesting article would be to review previous campaign pledges and contrast them with the agendas actually promoted once the candidate was in office–so that we could determine if history supports our taking the time to pay attention to the proposed planks–but we’ll save that one for a later day.

In the meantime, here’s a quick glance at the current campaign promises.

George W. Bush proposes:
• To strengthen teaching by offering rewards to teachers whose students achieve at high levels.
• To fund $250 million annually for increasing the amount of state assessment in reading and math for grades 3 through 11.
• To use 8th grade test data to help establish “performance plans” for entering high school students.
• To encourage low-income students to take a demanding high school curriculum by providing them with up $1,000 in additional Pell Grant funding to augment funding from the State Scholars program.
• To provide additional funding for community colleges that offer dual enrollment programs that enable high school students to earn college credit.

John Kerry proposes:
• To initiate a “School’s Open ‘Til 6″ program to provide an estimated 3.5 million youths with after-school activities.
• To offer a College Opportunity Tax Credit on up to $4,000 of tuition for four years of college.
• To create a National Educational Trust Fund to give education programs the full amount of funding they have been promised.
• To provide teachers in troubled schools with better training and better pay.
• To allocate $24.8 billion in school modernization bonds for improving old schools and constructing new ones.

Any discussion of Bush’s agenda on education is not complete without mention of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), for it is sure to be one of the most contentious education issues. NCLB was implemented by the Bush Administration to ensure that America’s schools improved by holding them accountable to higher performance standards. Under the Act, each school’s progress is monitored with annual math and reading assessments. Federal funding for individual schools is determined, in part, by whether their students show signs of improvement.

No Child Left Behind offers students the option of transferring to better schools if their current school is deemed below acceptable standards. NCLB has also altered the funding process so that individual states have more control in how they spend their federal funding.

While NCLB was met with overwhelming support at the start of Bush’s term, it has been received with growing opposition since its inception. Critics point out that teachers have become too focused on, “teaching to the tests” while other valuable skills are being neglected. President Bush’s defense is as follows: “They talk about ‘teaching to the test.’ But let’s put that logic to the test. If you test a child on basic math and reading skills, and you’re ‘teaching to the test,’ you’re teaching math and reading. And that’s the whole idea,” (Message to Congress (Budget outline) Feb 27, 2001). However, in response to much of the recent criticism of NCLB, President Bush has relaxed many of the rigid rules that states had found problematic.

John Kerry plans to reform the assessment process with more sophisticated tests and has criticized Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act for underfunding public schools. As part of his education platform, Kerry is promising to provide the $27 billion, which he believes will fully fund NCLB.

So where does all this leave us? Both candidates’ proposals sound clear enough, but the difficulty, as always, remains in achieving results, not in promising them. While education has taken a back seat to issues such as national security and the economy, it could become a more prominent piece of both candidates’ election efforts as we near November 2. Now that Kerry has turned his focus more towards domestic issues, pointing out what he views as the Bush administration’s largest domestic failures, Bush’s record on education may become an easy target.