Institutional/Multimedia

Title: “Debate: Education and the New President”

Summary: The educational advisors for presidential candidates, McCain and Obama, participated in a live debate at Columbia University’s Teachers College discussing their candidate’s agenda for education.

Topic: Accrediting all schools of education

Category: Institutional, Governmental/Multimedia

What is it? A webcast by edweek.org of a debate between educational advisors to Senator McCain and President Obama during the election campaign

Publication Information: Education Week, Oct. 22, 2008

Author: None listed

Location: http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/video-galleries/tc_debate.html

Accessed: Mar. 15, 2009

Support:

Audience and Agenda: The audience is the nation and the purpose of the debate is to persuade the general public that their presidential campaign has the best interests for education.

Usefulness: This debate gives some insight as to Obama’s priorities and plans for education. In most of President Obama’s speeches he merely brushes on his educational intents, and here his educational advisor, Linda Darling-Hammond elaborates. Darling-Hammond talks about the need to look at value-added and see how well students do in the systems in place. She also talks about adding new methods, other than standardized tests to keep up with the 21st century. The contradiction in this is that the accreditation that Obama wishes all schools of education to have is nothing but standardized assessments and tests. Not only that but there is no evidence of “value-added” due to the accreditation system.

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