Warner pledges to fix No Child Left Behind

By Ray Reed

Published: October 15, 2008

Democrat Mark Warner promised Virginia’s school superintendents Wednesday that if he’s elected to the U.S. Senate the “No Child Left Behind” educational standards act will be “tops on my list” of things to change.

Warner also said “education has been the missing subject” in the presidential debates, and those candidates should be talking about schools as a way to make America more competitive in the global economy.

Mark Warner is running against Republican Jim Gilmore in the Nov. 4 election. Both of the former governors want the seat from which longtime Sen. John Warner is retiring.

Applause greeted him when he told the Virginia Association of School Superintendents, meeting in Lynchburg, that the federal act “needs to be either reformed or gotten rid of,” and said he was pledging to do that.

Warner assigned two grades to the six-year-old federal act that was intended to have schools meet government standards, particularly for reading.

“No Child Left Behind. ‘A’ on concept. ‘D’ on implementation,” Warner said to murmurs of agreement in the crowd.

The act was carried out bureaucratically and it punished local schools instead of offering incentives for improved test results, and it was “$70 billion underfunded,” Warner said.

Virginia suffered because the state already was raising its educational standards. Virginia’s federal goals were set artificially high as a result, he said.

Calling himself a “job applicant,” Warner reminded the superintendents he had worked with them to protect school funding from state budget cuts when he was governor.

“I can’t think of a group of people I had more interaction with,” he said.

Warner mentioned several national magazines that recognized Virginia for its management, but “the one I’m proudest of is Education Week saying the Commonwealth of Virginia offers the best opportunity for lifetime achievement for our children of any state in the country.”

Warner said he was also proud that “lots of legislators of both parties, at least for a moment in time, stopped being Democrats and Republicans and became Virginians first” to pass a tax package that stabilized the budget.

“If there ever was a need for that same kind of thinking in Washington, it is now,” Warner said.

He also drew applause when he said schools should place as much value on students “who choose to be plumbers and electricians as those who choose to go to college.”

Closer partnerships between high schools, community colleges and universities are needed so that students can start earning college credits earlier, Warner said. With college costing $15,000 to $50,000 per year, economic conditions require that artificial barriers such as four-year high school and four-year college be redefined, he said.

Warner left the superintendents with two political promises.

“I promise the same kind of focus on education at the national level that I tried to bring to the state level,” by setting goals and letting local schools decide how to reach them, he said.

Second, he said, he would “see if I can create a bipartisan coalition of senators that would be known as the ‘radical centrists.’”

“Our country desperately needs to move past the kind of partisan finger-pointing and wrangling that passes as serious debate in Washington,” he said.

“I promise that if I get hired, the chances are that I will make both sides mad, but I promise I will always put our country’s interests first.”