John Edwards (D) On Education
Ledyard King / USA Today
On No Child Left Behind law
As a senator representing North Carolina, Democrat John Edwards voted in 2001 for the education bill known as No Child Left Behind. Now, he says, the law should be “radically overhauled.” The law requires every state to test students annually. Schools failing to make academic progress over several years could be closed or have their faculty replaced.
Edwards wants better tests that measure true skills (essay questions instead of multiple choice, for example) and an assessment system that takes actual student progress into account. “We need to find out if schools are working, but I think we need a more precise way to measure what’s happening. And the parameters of what we’re measuring need to be more diverse, not just whether you can fill in a bubble in response to a math or science question,” he said at a community meeting in Dubuque, Iowa, in August 2007.
On making college affordable
Edwards would create a national program to pay for one year of public-college tuition, fees and books. He has predicted the program would allow more than 2 million students to go to college who might not be able to afford it otherwise. In return, Edwards says, students would be required to work part-time in college, take a college-prep curriculum in high school and “stay out of trouble.” He would pay for the $9 billion cost of his initiative through changes to the federal student loan program.
Other education priorities
Edwards wants to tackle the nation’s dropout problem (three out of 10 ninth-graders don’t finish high school) by creating “second-chance schools” that he says would help dropouts by offering them one-on-one attention and a chance to earn a diploma. He’s also proposing to help states provide universal pre-kindergarten for 4-year-olds; parents would pay on a sliding scale based on their income.
