Roy Romer on Presidential Candidates Education Items

Roy Romer, who heads the group Ed in '08, has blog about education.

Here is one item about how the presidential candidates are talking about education: I’ve noticed in recent days a few presidential candidates talking a bit about education. For the most part, they are calling for programs to make it easier for students to get into college.

Now that’s good. Everyone who wants to go to college should have an equal shot at it. No question about that.

But getting into college does not mean you will graduate.

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We need to focus on our elementary and high schools, making sure that our students are challenged to do their best and that our teachers have the time and resources to help students learn.

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Now here are two more statistics that support my point. They come from a Department of Education study that came out last year. This thing showed that success in college – did you graduate? – had a direct relationship to how tough your high school classes were. So the tougher your high school curriculum, the more likely you were to graduate.

My point is this: 82 percent of students who had the toughest curriculum in high school graduated from college. Only nine percent of the students who had the easiest curriculum graduated.

Now that’s something we can focus on. We can toughen our curriculum. We can have national standards so a high schooler in Iowa will meet the same criteria as a student in California or South Carolina.

Romer points out a real schizophrenia we have in this country. We want every kid to go to college (whether or not that is a good thing) but we don't want to make sure our K-12 education is worth the money we spend.

Presidential candidates have such an opportunity to talk about it. But the niche candidates we get (the ones with the best chance to really talk about an issue) never talk about education.