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McCain Promises to 'Shake Up' Schools

U.S. Sen. John McCain waves to Republican delegates as he prepares to accept the GOP nomination.

—Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Republican nominee focuses on choice, quality of teachers

St. Paul, Minn.

As the long race for the presidency enters its last two months, John McCain is offering positions on educational accountability and school choice that most of his fellow Republicans are likely to support. But those ideas don’t address the sharp divisions within the party over the No Child Left Behind Act, the centerpiece of President Bush’s agenda for K-12 education.

“Education is the civil rights issue of this century,” the Arizona senator said in his Sept. 4 speech accepting the Republican presidential nomination. “Equal access to public education has been gained. But what is the value of access to a failing school? We need to shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition, empower parents with choice, remove barriers to qualified instructors, attract and reward good teachers, and help bad teachers find another line of work.”

Sen. McCain’s statement on education drew some of the loudest cheers from the delegates in the convention hall here. But his remarks didn’t answer important questions about how he would craft policies to achieve those goals or alter the NCLB law and other existing federal laws. The NCLB law, in particular, faces opposition from small-government conservatives in the Republican Party, as well as teachers’ unions, others in the field, and pockets...