According to Lance T. Izumi, Republicans who are looking at the reasons which may have cost Mitt Romney the election this November are taking the wrong approach. Instead of trying to position themselves as moderates on issues like immigration, they should be trumpeting platform planks that enjoy universal support of people from both sides of the political divide.

In an editorial for the National Review Online, Izumi specifically cites parental choice in education as one big idea that will appeal to all parents — and could serve as a way to pry low-income and minority voters from their support of Democratic candidates. The Democrats’ ability to move to the center on school choice is substantially hindered by their dependence on the support of the teachers unions, who are some of the most vocal opponents of education reform. Even when paying lip service to education reform, President Obama is careful never to seem too enthusiastic of education policies that embrace full parental choice, says Izumi.

If publicized, this reluctance could substantially hobble the Democratic coalition, as in many parts of the country voucher programs and charter schools enjoy strong support not only among residents in general, but also among African-Americans in large urban school districts — historically reliable supporters of Democratic politicians.

The Washington, D.C., voucher-scholarship program, for example, has strong support among African-American parents in the nation’s capital. Among Latinos, the support for school-choice options is huge and exceeds that of the public in general. According to a May 2012 survey by the American Federation for Children and the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options (HCREO), an eye-opening 69 percent of Latino voters in five swing states supported vouchers, versus 57 percent of all voters.

As Julio Fuentes, who heads up HCREO, explains, nowhere do public schools struggle more than in poverty-ridden urban districts. That means that parents’ only option for a good education could be a charter school or a voucher grant that would allow them to take their kids out of the public school system altogether.

According to Izumi, voucher programs formed the backbone of Romney’s plan for America’s education system, yet over the course of the campaign he didn’t seem very committed to the idea and spoke about it only rarely and in mostly general terms. However, in the aftermath of the electoral defeat, putting education front and center seems like a no-brainer in light of the importance Latino and other minority voters place on it.

Latino voters are more likely than most to say education is a leading issue for them. Yet, says Mr. Fuentes, “The immigration debate from a national level has taken the spotlight, and this educational crisis that we find ourselves in, especially within our Hispanic community, just seems to never be discussed.” Republicans have to show that they care deeply about this critical issue, and there’s no better way to demonstrate that they care than by championing popular and beneficial parental-choice programs.

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The task of pulling off a win for President Barack Obama involved more than just the usual suspects found around political campaigns. In addition to people running donor relations and those in charge of setting up the vaunted Obama ground game were social sciences experts like Los Angeles-area psychologist Craig Fox and a group of unpaid volunteers from the field of behavior science, all helping Obama craft and effectively deliver a message that would deliver him a second term in the White House.

The New York Times details the work of the group, whose members referred to themselves as the “consortium of behavioral scientists” or COBS. Together members came up with good ways to counter rumors that had been dogging the President since his 2008 campaign: that he was a secret Muslim, that he wasn’t born in the United States, and the false impression formed around the key policy victory of his administration – “Obamacare.”

COBS also used their expertise to help those crafting attack messages on Obama’s Republican opponent, former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney. They provided insight into what kind of messaging would work best to mobilize Democratic voters and bring them to the polls.

“In the way it used research, this was a campaign like no other,” said Todd Rogers, a psychologist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a former director of the Analyst Institute. “It’s a big change for a culture that historically has relied on consultants, experts and gurulike intuition.”

Those looking for insight into the role played by the researchers have to look for answers somewhere other than the Obama campaign. Attempts to get a comment about the help provided by the COBS from the campaign spokesman Adam Fetcher resulted in nothing but reassurances that the campaign was grateful to everyone who provided aid. Aside from Fox, COBS themselves are not interested in touting their accomplishments. According to The Times, when asked, consortium members said they did nothing more than share their research with the campaign staff.

Dr. Fox called the collection of academics making up COBS “a dream team,” and said that they provided hints in how to make common aspects of human behavior work for the campaign.

For example, Dr. [Susan] Fiske’s research has shown that when deciding on a candidate, people generally focus on two elements: competence and warmth. “A candidate wants to make sure to score high on both dimensions,” Dr. Fiske said in an interview. “You can’t just run on the idea that everyone wants to have a beer with you; some people care a whole lot about competence.”

Fiske, of Princeton University, was one of the members of the consortium.

One of the hints provided by the scientists was that to counter a false rumor, it was more effective to affirm the opposite of what the rumor was claiming than attempting to repeatedly deny it. That is why it was common to hear President Obama affirm his Christian faith rather saying that he was not, in fact, a Muslim.

At least some of the consortium’s proposals seemed to have found their way into daily operations. Campaign volunteers who knocked on doors last week in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Nevada did not merely remind people to vote and arrange for rides to the polls. Rather, they worked from a script, using subtle motivational techniques that research has shown can prompt people to take action.

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The Daily Princetonian reports that when the disclosure forms were tallied, 99% of Princeton’s staff or faculty who gave money to a Presidential campaign donated to the campaign to re-elect President Barack Obama. According to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington D.C, Princeton accounted for nearly 160 donors, yet only two of them gave money to the campaign of Republican Mitt Romney. In total, the Obama campaign collected $169,000 in donations from the employees of the Ivy League school, while Mitt Romney’s campaign drew just $1,901.

Mitt Romney’s campaign received a donation from James Shinn, who was a visiting lecturer at the Kelley Center and who was the only faculty member to donate to the Republican presidential candidate. The other donor proved to be Mark Oresic, who works as a custodian for the 1903 Hall.

Sociology professor Douglas Massey GS ’78 led the faculty in presidential donations this year, donating $5,169 to Obama. University Provost Christopher Eisgruber ’83, politics professor Melissa Lane and humanities professor emeritus Toni Morrison all contributed $5,000 to Obama. Other top donors include psychology professor Susan Fiske, chemistry professor Roberto Car, Associate Dean of the Faculty Mary Baum GS ’89 and astrophysical sciences professor Robert Goldston ’77.

Both the former Dean of the College Nancy Malkiel and her successor Valerie Smith donated to the Obama campaign. University President Shirley Tilghman, however, did not donate money to any presidential candidate.

Wilson School professor Anne-Marie Slaughter ’80, a former top official in Obama’s State Department, donated $2,000 to her old boss, and former U.S. Ambassador to Yemen under Bill Clinton Barbara Bodine, who is now a visiting lecturer in the Wilson School, donated $2,500 to Obama. Economics professor and last year’s Nobel Prize winner Christopher Sims contributed $2,000 to Obama. Mitch Henderson ’98, the men’s basketball coach, gave $2,500 to Obama. Some employees said their contributions were inspired by their professions, while others were influenced by their personal political beliefs.

Goldston said that the large slant toward the Democratic President wasn’t surprising in light of the widespread belief that during his tenure in office, President Obama has done much to promote higher education in the United States. Still, even though the school’s staff and faculty donated overwhelmingly to the Democrats in the presidential race, some split the ticket and had also donated money to Republican politicians. Goldston himself also supported the campaign of Republican Congressman Rodney Frelinghuysen.

Oresic cited both his religious convictions and the fact that, like the candidate, he is himself strongly pro-life. However, he also believed that people should be allowed to donate to any candidate they prefer.

“I accept the political climate that is here at Princeton University, and I feel that people ought to have a right to vote with their dollars,” he said.

The post Of Princeton Staff Giving to Campaigns, 99% Gave to Obama appeared first on Education News.

The presidential election won’t be the only thing drawing voters to the polls next week, as residents in several states around the country are set to consider proposals that have the potential to drastically alter the public education landscape. From tenure to charter schools to new teacher assessment criteria, those casting their ballots next Tuesday will be making choices on some of the most controversial issues currently riling the country’s education system.

As usual, when the stakes are this high, the fight to put your own case to the voters can get heated. There are few surprises about how the two sides have aligned; education reform advocates are fighting what they see as the entrenched interests of the teachers unions who put the needs of their members above the needs of the students. The unions, meanwhile, are accusing their opponents of attempting to strip funding and resources from public schools, all in service of economic ideology rather than the best interests of the kids filling the classrooms.

Washington charter school advocates are hoping that fourth time is the charm for the measure that would allow charter schools to open in the state. Similar proposals have been on the ballot in the state on three other occasions, notably in 2004 when it was defeated by a margin of more than 15%. Opponents’ concerns range from the belief that charters will drain resources from a school system that is already considered underfunded by the courts, to a lack of data proving that charter schools produce better outcomes than public schools on a consistent basis.

Supporters, including Bill Gates and Wall-Mart heir Alice Walton, dispute the assertion that charter schools will end up costing more to operate. Instead, they argue that charters will bring innovation and improvement at the same price tag.

Georgia residents will also be weighing in on charter schools next week. Although charters have been operating in the state, the measure on the ballot would give the power of charter approval – which has previously been held by local school boards – to a state-level agency. Supporters say that adding flexibility to the approval process will both speed it up and make it easier for charter chains that operate in multiple districts around the state to seek and gain approval.

The ballot measure has drawn support from several out-of-state, for-profit companies that manage charter schools. The chain Charter Schools USA donated $100,000, as did K12 Inc, which runs online schools nationwide. Walton contributed $250,000. Several leading conservative and religious-right groups, including the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity and Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, have also backed the cause.

In education media, Idaho’s aggressive new schools chief Tom Luna has been getting more press than the man who appointed him, Governor Butch Otter. Luna is the author of the legislation that completes overhauls the state’s education system, including phasing out teacher tenure, limiting collective bargaining, and giving parents a voice in teacher assessment. Next week Idaho voters will get to decide if the law passed earlier this year will remain on the books.

The National Education Association has given more than $1 million to the ballot campaign and the state branch has contributed another $280,000. Their main argument in the deeply conservative state: The measures waste tax dollars and impose state rules and bureaucracy on school systems that should be run locally.

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Jill Stein, the Presidential candidate from the Green Party, isn’t projected to have a significant impact this November, much less win the election. Many guessed that she understood that fact herself when they heard of her promise to offer free higher education to everyone in the country once she’d taken the oath of office in January of 2013.

She made the pledge during the third-party debate hosted by Russia Today earlier this week. And she didn’t stop at free tuition. She called on the federal government to ”bail out” all outstanding student loans. She said that young people carrying loan balanced after graduation were “indentured servants” barred from fully participating in the economy and the entire country is the worse for that.

“Every generation, the economy needs to be rebooted by fresh imaginations and by the fresh genius of a new generation,” Stein said. “That doesn’t happen when a generation is locked into being indentured servants. That’s what our students are now. We need to bail them out and create free public higher education.”

Justice Party candidate Rocky Anderson said he agreed with Stein, though he stopped short of calling for “free” higher education.

“We cannot afford not to provide a great education and  equality of opportunity for all of our young people in this country,” Anderson said. “We need to insist on prosperity, not austerity.”

According to Red Alert Politics, Anderson closely echoed the words of Vice President Joe Biden who said in 2009 that as counter-intuitive as it is, the government should be looking to spend money to get the country and itself out of bankruptcy.

Stein continued using references to forced labor as she expanded on her student bail-out idea. Those who hold the IOUs – the federal government in this case – should use that power to free the students from bondage. She also encouraged those young people feeling let down by the current government to “surge” to the polls this November and vote for free education and, presumably, for Jill Stein.

“There’s a famous saying from Alice Walker: The biggest way people give up their power is by not knowing we have it to start with. In fact, there are 90 million voters who are not coming out to vote in this election,” she said. “I want to focus especially on those 36 million students, and young people, and recent graduates who are effectively indentured servants because of the high unemployment rate, and the draconian, unforgiving loans that have been customized especially for students lacking any consumer protections.

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This election day, voters will be deciding on more than just who occupies the Oval Office and who roams halls of Congress. The Wall Street Journal reports that in five states, ballots will also include measures that will hike tax rates to raise additional funding for the education system.

The measures on ballots in Arizona, Missouri and South Dakota are run-of-the-mill tax increases, while Oregon is asking its residents whether some of the money typically paid to corporations in the form of tax rebates should be redirected towards education funding instead. In California, meanwhile, Proposition 30 is seeking voter approvals for tax-hikes on households making more than 500,000 a year, without which automatic cuts could see public schools lose a large chunk of their state funding.

According to the WSJ, this is the largest number of education-related tax initiatives on the ballots at the same time in over two decades. Some are even arguing that these measures are actually a proxy for a vote of confidence on the state of the education system in the country today.

Although all sectors of the economy suffered greatly in the 2008 recession, education funding has taken a particularly big hit. As states adjusted budgets to fill fiscal gaps created by falling revenue, schools almost everywhere felt – and continue to feel – the pinch. According to the data collected by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, funding levels for education in 35 of 50 states continues to fall below the levels of 2008. For lawmakers seeking ways to make up these cuts, the path is much less smooth than it has ever been before.

Opponents of the increased taxes note that even though education spending is far higher now than it was a decade ago, academic performance has been basically flat in many grades and subjects. American elementary and secondary schools are projected to spend about $518 billion this year, not including capital outlays and interest on debt, or about $10,434 a pupil. That’s up from about $457 billion, or $9,480 a pupil—in inflation-adjusted dollars—10 years ago, according to U.S. Department of Education data. Tax-increase opponents contend public education needs a major overhaul before more money is pumped in.

Arizona State Treasurer Doug Ducey is one example of a politician who believes that states don’t gain much value from increasing education spending. He is on the record as strongly opposing the ballot initiative that would make permanent a 1% sales tax hike which is set to expire next year. The tax, which raises about $1 billion annually, is used to augment state education grants. Ducey believes that the new tax hurts businesses without offsetting that pain with academic gains.

“It’s just pouring more money into the system and hoping that, magically, it fixes the problems in the classroom,” said Mr. Ducey, a Republican who heads a campaign to defeat the measure. His campaign has raised $1 million, he said, coming mostly from 501(c)4 groups that don’t have to disclose donors.

Meanwhile Arizona school districts, which have lost more than 22% of their funding since 2008, are taking extreme measures to keep their doors open. Tuscon Unified School District has cut more than 900 staff positions due to funding cuts and is now contemplating a plan to close 31 schools.

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Although heavy student loan debt is on the minds of young people in the run up to election day, their main criterion for choosing which candidate to vote for seems to be who will do the most to shrink unemployment in the next four years. Generation Opportunity, a non-profit dedicated to raising the proportion of voters between the ages of 18 and 29, has been canvassing the political and social views of young Americans — and their data shows that the way the 18-29 demographic assigns importance to issues is quite different from conventional wisdom.

Paul T. Conway, who heads up Generation Opportunity, says that while politicians are playing up what they will do to lower interest rates on student loans, college students and graduates appear to care more about landing a full-time job after leaving school than saving a few points on their loan balances. They want to be reassured that after investing a lot of money into a college degree, they will have the opportunity to become independent and be able to plan for the future.

It is also heartening to find out that, for the most part, young voters aren’t interested in the government lending a helping hand, but rather want access to better job opportunities so they have more control over their own fate. Many don’t mind high loan balances as much as they mind the fact that they might not get into a position that would allow them to repay.

“This generation is very savvy – they are used to customizing everything from their coffees to their iPhones and do not appreciate the lack of choice in the most significant issues they face: planning for their future and building a career. The more politicians avoid discussing details on how they will get government out of the way of full-time job creation and reverse record high youth unemployment, the more politicians are viewed as either disingenuous or completely out of touch with the day-to-day concerns of young Americans. It should come as no surprise that young people don’t believe their interests are being represented in Washington and plan on making their voices heard in the presidential election in November.

Fueling their concerns are recent studies that show both a growth in student loan balances and a decline of opportunity for college graduates. Data collected by Project on Student Debt at The Institute for College Access & Success indicates that the loans carried by an average graduate this year went up by more than $1,000 from last year to an average of $26,600. At the same time, research out of Rutgers shows that only about 51% of recent college grads are currently employed full-time — a combination of factors that substantially alarms the Millennials as they prepare to go to the polls this November.

The post Young Voters Worry About Jobs, Not Student Loan Interest Rates appeared first on Education News.

Throughout the final campaign stops leading up to Election Day, President Barack Obama has been touting his plans to make college education more affordable for U.S. students. His policy includes a bigger role for the federal government, including increasing funding for Pell grants and Stafford loans, allocating more federal money to public – especially community – colleges and even taking some concrete steps towards curbing the rise of tuition.

Richard Perez-Pena, writing in The New York Times (re-published by CNBC), points out that President Obama feels that the issue both portrays him positively and sets him apart from his opponent Mitt Romney. Even though the second debate had no higher ed-related questions, he brought up the subject on his own while answering a question dealing with gender issues. The answer stirred up some positive buzz in the education blogosphere, yet, while many are support his efforts to broaden access to higher education, they are also wondering if the President has enough power to bring real change.

“I think the president deserves a lot of credit for putting emphasis on things that weren’t being talked about much — raising educational attainment, expanding community college, cost containment,” said Derek Bok, the former Harvard president who has written extensively on the problems and future of higher education. “But I think the jury’s out on whether it’s effective.”

Some, especially those in the conservative camp, believe that some of the policies favored by the administration will actually contribute to raising the cost of college. In particular, President Obama’s support for the Pell Grant program, the funding of which has increased from $14.6 billion to $40 billion over Obama’s term, could, via the laws of supply and demand, give colleges an incentive to raise tuition. Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute puts it bluntly: without the existence of federal aid, colleges would not have been able to hike tuition as high as they have.

Mitt Romney has also called the aid expansion unsustainable, and his campaign’s education plan says he would “refocus Pell Grant dollars on the students that need them most.” His stance was widely interpreted as meaning that he would cut the program, primarily by making fewer students eligible — the same approach that his running mate, Representative Paul D. Ryan, took in his proposed budget.

However, after listening to Romney during the first two presidential debates, some are wondering if he has begun to moderate his position. In particular, many are calling attention to his assertion that his deficit-cutting plans will not include any cuts to education spending or to the Pell Grant program. In his second debate he even praised the grant program he originated during his tenure as the governor of Massachusetts, and added that he was committed to keeping “our Pell Grant program growing.”

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During the course of a political debate, it is sometimes hard for candidates to go into depth on any single issue, but Michelle Rhee is frustrated that education received so little time in the first debate. Speaking to Huffington Post, Rhee felt the 15 minutes dedicated to the subject didn’t allow either President Barack Obama or Republican presidential Candidate Mitt Romney to do anything but skim the surface and remain on “very high level.” Like many voters, Rhee would like to see more substance.

Substance was the point of the day during the much less-publicized debate between the candidates’ surrogates who, with their background in education, were able to get into the nitty gritty of educational policy. Jon Schnur, the co-founder of America Achieves and New Leaders for New Schools, was there to represent President Obama while Phil Handy, the former chairman of the Florida State Board of Education and CEO of Strategic Industries, was standing in for Governor Romney. The debate, which lasted 90 minutes, was held on the campus of the Teachers College at Columbia University and was moderated by the school’s president Susan Fuhrman.

Despite the fact that the two candidates were closely aligned on the issues of school choice — and both have voiced strong support for charter schools — according to Kathryn Baron of EdSource.org, the focus of the debate was their disagreements.

And there were many. A major rift that occupied the first portion of the discussion was the issue of vouchers. For the Romney campaign, vouchers form the cornerstone of the education reform agenda. The ticket believes that the optimum system to fund education would give money directly to the family and allow them to make a decision about where and how their children are educated.

In a white paper, Romney has proposed a voucher system that would disburse the $25 billion in federal Title I funds for low-income students and IDEA funds for students with disabilities directly to the students’ families to spend at the school of their choosing, including other public schools, charters, and private schools. “We think there needs to be some disruption in the system and choice is part of that,” said Handy.

Schnur pointed out that such a system would be disadvantageous to children from low-income families since it would provide them with too little money to cover tuition at most good private schools, closing to them this academic avenue without providing a meaningful alternative. Instead, Obama favors an approach that would force underperforming Title I schools to implement drastic turnaround plans.

During the course of his presidency, Obama was stymied in his efforts to have the No Child Left Behind Act rewritten, forcing him to ultimately bypass it by having the U.S. Department of Education issue waivers to the states who wanted to implement their own accountability systems. Handy expressed disagreement with this approach, saying that doing so meant taking a step back.

Handy said that letting states set their own accountability standards had led to “racially defining proficiency,” and is setting education back to what former President George W. Bush called the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” An analysis by Education Week of state goals under waivers found a number of them have set “different expectations for different subgroups of students.” For example, Minnesota is requiring 82 percent proficiency in 11th grade math for white students, but just 62 percent proficiency for black students.

Handy reiterated that Romney’s plans to balance the budget didn’t include cutting education funding — although there were no plans to boost it, either. Like the candidate he was representing, Handy didn’t provide details on how the this commitment would square with Romney’s support for the Paul Ryan budget plan that would cut domestic spending by 20%.

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With the first presidential and the vice-presidential debates behind us — and the second debate Tuesday night — the candidates’ policy views are increasingly coming into focus. One of the issues where the gap is the widest between President Barack Obama and the Republican candidate Mitt Romney is on their views of the government’s role in higher education funding. For those who are attempting to understand where each candidate stands, The Prospector breaks down each aspect of the issue, including student loan financing, affordability and financial aid.

The one overarching idea that drives policy for Romney is that private entities do a better job of managing everything from loans to aid than does the government. Based on this, he believes that private lenders should play a bigger role in college financing, which could, according to Kathleen Staudt, who is a political science professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, lead to higher interest rates for students.

One of the main higher ed achievements of the first Obama administration has been fighting to maintain low interest rates on federally subsidized and unsubsidized Stafford loans, something that administration officials believe saved thousands of dollars for nearly 7 million college students in the country. To tackle the problem of crippling loan payments, Obama also introduced a program that capped monthly repayments to 10% of discretionary income.

“President Obama would be better for higher education in this country. It’s my understanding that he wishes to make college more affordable by lowering interest on government issued student loans,” said Jose Pineda, sophomore music major. “Plus he makes it easier to pay back our loans based on our annual income after college. He believes that a higher education should be a right that everyone has and that money should not get in the way of that. It is also my understanding that Romney wishes to either raise interest rates on student government loans or make the process of receiving loans much harder.”

During his tenure as the Governor of Massachusetts, Romney proposed a program that would have allowed any student that graduated in top 25% of their high school class to attend a public university in the state tuition-free. However, he has not talked about introducing anything similar on a national level if he is elected, and, according to Prospector’s Rebecca Guerrero, seemed reluctant to discuss higher ed, preferring to discuss his K-12 policy ideas instead.

According to the Center for American Progress Fund, an independent nonpartisan organization, Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s budget plan to reduce the national deficit—which is a key part of Romney’s platform—shows that it would slash more than $15 billion of mandatory and discretionary funding from the Pell Grant program beginning next year. That is a 42 percent cut to Pell Grants. The budget claims that this is to ensure that the money is going to the truly needy.

Prior to and after making Paul Ryan his choice for VP, Romney expressed his support for the Ryan budget — but if, as part of adopting the budget, Romney plans to slash Pell grants, he hasn’t explicitly said so.

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