This is a snapshot at the moment. At some point, Obama may wish he had gone for unmoserated debates, if he decides not to do so. I just think that such debates would be great for the country and might be a template for future presidential elections. I have a sense - I could be wrong, of course - that this election is going to be a roller - coaster ride.

Somehow I am not a surprised that Republican thinks Obama should "join" Marion Barry in...just about anything, just as long as they can be connected.

wtf? Vouchers are a ticket to freedom out of hellish inner city schools... for POOR AFR-AMER KIDS. It's not only not "cymbolic", not "crass", its actually a civil rights issue, as Spitzer and Bloomberg agreed.

It's bizarre that Obama hasn't embraced this before now. Ditto for class-based instead of race-based aff action in school admissions.

I don't think that Obama is going to need any Sister Souljah moments.  He's not running against the legacy of the current sitting Democratic President, he's running against the Republican president.  And as long as Bush keeps giving the Democrats the ability to remind the voters of who McCain's friend is, his change statement is a given.

Also, as much as everyone wants to push for class based affirmative action, Obama cannot even mention this.  If there is one thing in America we don't do it's different classes.  Any talk of class based affirmative action gets translated by Repulicans into "he wants to keep you poor."

tep. the problem with vouchers is that, while they may provide a "ticket out of hellish inner-city schools" for a relative handful of students. Meanwhile leaving the vast majority of students in those still helliish (and now even more poorly funded) inner city schools.

If we had private school space (and voucher funds) for every student who wanted to go, then perhaps that would be one thing, but it's a drop in the ocean. What vouchers really end up doing is take dollars that could otherwise be used to improve public education use them to subsidize private schools. It's a huge transfer of public resources and, while it may be great for a few, it makes the situation worse for many others.

Perhaps our time and money would be better off spent figuring out how to FIX the schools we have. What a radical idea that would be.

"Plus the undying love of a great portion of the Fourth Estate."

I thought everybody loved John McCain? Oh, right -- liberal media bias. Dumb me.

anonevent - we do indeed "do class-based affirmative action", at least in Texas. While governor, GW Bush implemented a program that guarantees a spot in U Texas to the top (5%? 10%?) of each graduating public HS class in the state. It works there and can work across the country.

tjlinko - you're confusing the public and the Catholic schools in the big cities. It's the former that are rolling in money and the latter that are strapped for funds. Unsurprisingly, the schools with excellent teachers, discipline and effective authority do superbly; the ones that have massive corruption, waste, no discipline, lax standards and dopey educational theories do poorly.

Care to guess which of those two describes the urban Catholic schools in this country?

The best thing we could do for the urban underclass in this country would be to pay for a Catholic school education for as many of these desperate, rudderless children as we can possibly afford. It's a civil rights issue.

tep,

I agree with you on vouchers, but I think tjlinko's point was about a lack of capacity in private schools, not a lack of efficiency.  The issue he's raising is how many students would realistically be able to move to the private schools if they wanted to, and what would it mean for the ones who end up having to stay in the same public school as before, but with less funding.  It's a legitimate question.

The first part of the question (how to deal with a shortage of openings in private schools) is tricky; I don't have a very good answer right now except to say that improving the quality of education for some fraction of the students is still an improvement.  As to the second part (what happens to all those kids that get left in the old school with fewer funds), I think the problem might be a bit overstated.  The overall funds available would be lower, but the student population would also be lower, and the amount of funding available per student would be basically the same in either case.

It's been a couple of years since I read up on Texas' affirmative action program, but if memory serves (a medium-sized 'if'), then there are serious problems with it, precisely because the quality of public schools is so widely variable. Many kids at high-performing schools, who work hard and do very well, but not quite well enough to land in the top 5 or 10 per cent of their extremely competitive classes, are left out in the cold. They may, in many cases, be much better qualified academically than some of the top 10 per cent of students at less competitive schools, but it's the latter who get automatic admission to the top colleges in Texas. The former, many of whom are not from especially wealthy families, either have to resign themselves to a second rate college in Texas or pay much higher out-of-state tuition to go to schools that better match their level of accomplishment. And in some cases, they can't afford the higher cost out-of-state option.

This isn't to say that class-based affirmative action couldn't work. But for it to be truly fair -- i.e. for it to level the playing field in the way that affirmative action is supposed to -- it would have to take a much more nuanced, case-by-case approach to college applicants, like the points system now used by many selective colleges in the wake of the Supreme Court's Michigan decision, a system which gives students from historically disadvantaged racial groups an extra boost in admissions but does not allow race to be a singular decisive criterion. The points system would have to be modified to address class instead of (or in addition to) racial disadvantage.

I'm not sure what specific political hurdles this type of approach would face. I think what people may like about the clumsier Texas method is that it doesn't put the power to adjudicate among different degrees of disadvantage into the hands of particular individuals (admissions officers.) But it arguably results in admissions decisions that stray farther away from merit-based criteria than do the currently legal and fairly nuanced race-based programs.

Anyway, the main point is that the Texas approach is neither fair nor satisfying. (it's been cited approvingly a few times on these boards.)

On another note: more and more, selective colleges are practicing a new kind of affirmative action based not on race, class, legacy, or geography, but on gender. Since girls have been significantly outperforming boys (on average) in high school, admissions committees at selective colleges end up with a skewed gender balance among their students when they follow the usual admissions procedures. In some cases, they are "putting their thumb on the scale," so to speak, for less qualified male applicants, in order to maintain a more even gender balance. They believe this is necessary to ensure that prospective students of both sexes remain interested in attending their school. Interestingly, I haven't noticed much protest about this so far from traditional critics of affirmative action.

Beyond the hand wringing on the vouchers issue is a place where the public school system gets the idea that they are not an unassailable monopoly inperpetuity. Might get a few things moving in the right direction. Most folks involved can rightly but irrelevantly claim no fault and disadvantage. That will do nothing for the wasteland that the public school system has become.

I lived in Tejas for nearly a decade.  The public schools were a mess.  Quality within Austin (where I lived) was wildly varied due to 5 school districts in the city.  Some were of the school districts were excellent, some abysmal.  The reason was funding.  The rich school districts, with high school taxes, were the good ones (duh).  The ones with low funding stunk. Surprise surprise.  The correlation between money spent and quality was about 100% in Austin.

OK, tep, where exactly are you located?  I'm dreading the day when Bush leaves office, because he's planning on living about 20 miles from my house.  Way too close.

I was, and still am, all for the top 10% rule.  And yes, hemlock41, there was the problem of a student may have worked really hard at a tough school and may have just missed the top 10%, but 1) why should someone who worked real hard at what would be classified as a weaker school get punished, and 2) while most people like to talk in abstract about how someone gets punished when the bell curve is applied - a small percentage excel, most people are average, and a few are below average - people fall right about where the curve says they will.  Yes, you may punish someone right at the edge of that 10%, but when you have to assign one slot for two people you have to make the choice somehow.   And this is a lot better than  who has the most money.

When I was involved with an alternative school back in the 70's, I thought vouchers were a great way of allowing students to escape the deadness of many public schools that had enjoyed their monopoly status and not worried too much about satisfying their "customers".  Research, however, has not been kind to vouchers.  A recent study indicated that voucher students did not test better than comparable students remaining in public schools.  The good news was that while vouchers didn't seem to improve performance, charter schools did.  Not everyone loves charter schools either, but their expansion as an educational improvement strategy now has a nice wind at its back.

It seems to me that GOP political strategies have become more internalized by Americans that people realize.

"Obama's biggest advantage is that, between the money and all the energy on his side, he may completely drown McCain out."

Drowning out the opponent is a "old-school" political tactic. Obama's biggest advantage is that he uses Rove's strategy guide as a list of "thall shall nots" for running a campaign. Obama is more than happy to allow his opponent to dig trenches around their position, then use said trenches as graves when he attacks their position.

As for the unmoderated debates, that actually plays perfectly into Obama's strategy. He gets "decency" points for willfully giving McCain equal footing, and yet pulls McCain away from the protective crowd of conservative pundits and cronies who would otherwise be able to put up smoke screens as the debate played out in the nightly news.

"poke his finger in the Democratic Establishment's eye"

Obama has happily poked Democrats in their eye on several issues. Obama has not been trying to tow anyone's party line, and he will continue to ding any democrat that requires dinging. This scores him some credibility, and helps to disarm many lines of attack.

The thing that stands out to me about this interview is how the Republicans have trouble considering Obama outside of their own thoughts and beliefs regarding how politics should be played. I think this bodes well for Obama in the GE because it belies an inability to adequately defend themselves from the lines of attack that Obama will actually take when debating issues.

anonevent: I completely agree that money should not be what determines who gets into which college. That would be unfair to poorer students.  In my view, fairness requires colleges to ignore irrelevant admissions criteria (how rich/poor someone's parents are, what their skin color is, etc) and look only at their academic merits. Unfortunately, these merits are not just based on hard work but talent as well. A student can work very hard and still not necessarily get the best results. Admission to college is not a reward for past hard work, to which anyone who works hard has a right; it's about who's able to take most advantage of the college opportunity by performing well, getting the most out of their education and then indirectly or directly benefiting society as a whole. The farther admissions decisions stray from being based on merit, the more unfair they are. To the extent affirmative action can "level the playing field" by eliminating the competitive disadvantage that talented but historically disadvantaged students face (whether low-income students, or black students, etc) then I think it's desirable. The problem with the Texas program is that it doesn't give enough consideration to individual merit and I think that's as unfair as allowing class background or whiteness or being the child of a rich alumn to determine entry to college. And because the gap between the best and the worst schools can be so large, it's not clear that the program only punishes people at the "edge" of the top 10% of students in the state.

Basically, my own view is that affirmative action is a distraction from the real problem, which has to do with the inequalities of funding in the public school system. Those inequalities are what need to get fixed, so that all students can have a basically equal opportunity to learn and can compete on a level playing field for college admissions. Unfortunately, this problem is so politically intractable in the US that everyone just goes for affirmative action instead as a more do-able (if still controversial) quick fix. And to the extent that fixing the inequalities in public education is out of reach, I'm prepared to say that maybe affirmative action is better than nothing.

"Vouchers are a ticket to freedom out of hellish inner city schools... for POOR AFR-AMER KIDS. It's not only not "cymbolic", not "crass", its actually a civil rights issue, as Spitzer and Bloomberg agreed. "

One would have to be pretty dim to believe this.  All vouchers do is make private schools a little cheaper for those that can already afford them.  A private school vouhcer that covers some percentage of tuition isn't going to do anything for a family that can't afford the remainder of it.  And, of course, are these private schools going to be required to accept everyone with a voucher?  Private schools are in no way better than the public schools apart from the fact that they self-select for well-off kids who have the demographic likelihood of the pre-school age advantages of that group.  Make a private school educate all-comers, as the public schools must, and we will see hwo good they are.   I grew up in the south and this vouchers crap was tried to avoid intergration.  As if the tony private schools in Atlanta where I grew up are going to accept droves of inner-city black kids with a voucher in their hands (assuming hte voucher covered enough of the tuition so they could afford it, transportation to the school, etc.).  

Vouchers are a wealth transfer from poor schools to rich schools... and as far as outcomes, on the whole, they probably won't make much difference.

Education needs serious overhaul, and everyone knows what that overhaul entails, but it isn't vouchers.

Geez, I hope they DO agree on unmoderated debates.  They could be the best thing that's happened to presidential politics in this country for years.  As a genuinely uncommited voter, it would even help me make up my mind.  (Not that I matter, of course, I live in NY and McCain has about as much chance here as Obama has in Alaska).

For the first time in decades, you have two candidates that can speak coherently and spontaneously on nearly any subject that comes up.  Perhaps even truthfully.  That alone is an inspiration.  For the first time in decades, neither party has nominated somebody who makes me cringe every time they open their mouth.

Regardless of your affiliation, THAT is something to celebrate.

"For the first time in decades, you have two candidates that can speak coherently and spontaneously on nearly any subject that comes up"

You obviously haven't heard McCain talk about economics... but I take your point. It might be nice to have such a debate.