McCain’s Education Plan Gets an F: A Cross-Generational Opinion

The next President of the United States will likely have a great impact on our nation’s educational policy in the next four years and for generations to come. As a student, it is something that is very important to me, but it is also important to others as I found out on a recent visit to the local Jewish Community Center. Recently, our class met with our partners in a cross-generational voting project to determine the most important issues facing voters in the Pennsylvania presidential primary.

Through a conversation there with a senior citizen woman named Roz Smulowitz, it became obvious to me that education was an issue she felt very passionately about. Surprisingly, although our age difference was significant we found some common ground along with a few differences on this topic, especially when we discussed John McCain’s position.

John McCain supports a plan to improve and equalize education throughout the country by offering parents the “voucher” option of using taxpayer money to send their children to private schools. He believes this will provide parents with the power and financial ability to remove their children from those public schools which are failing. Neither Roz nor I see this an effective plan, but we have different primary reasons for why we disagree with it.

In my opinion John McCain’s plan does not address the actual problem at hand, which is the fact that there are many public schools of poor quality. What the United States government needs to do is work to improve these schools by increasing their funding and working to attract good teachers to these schools. Instead McCain would simply help some students to leave these schools and then let the institutions continue to grow worse.

Roz had a different reason for disagreeing with McCain’s plan. She believed that this idea could not work because a large number of students would overcrowd the private schools. Consequently, the quality of these schools would then decrease. While I agree with this point, I see it as secondary to the fact that this plan is not designed to meet the real need in the first place.

Obviously there are some possible flaws in McCain’s plan for education on several different levels. However, I think that John McCain, Roz, and myself can all agree that the current inequality in the quality of education that children receive across our nation is unacceptable.

Christine Zavaskas '09
Wilkes University
Communication Studies