San Francisco State University Professor Mark Phillips wants to break it down ‘cause he’s a homie for political awareness. So what’s the gist?

1) John McCain is all over those vouchers.
2) Barack Obama hates on vouchers.
3) Vouchers get strong schools stronger and weak schools weaker.

Phillips wrote in the Marin Independent Journal:

All political candidates share the same platitudes in support of excellence, high achievement and accountability. But McCain and Obama are light years apart on how to get there.

McCain, the more conservative candidate, in one respect has the most radical educational agenda. He strongly advocates school choice and has publicly declared his support for a voucher system through which parents would be given a stipend to enable them to place their children in whatever schools they choose.

This would be federally supported, implemented with a degree of flexibility by each state and initially targeted towards the poorest children in the worst schools.

He believes that "all federal financial support must be predicated on providing parents the ability to move their children, and the dollars associated with them, from failing schools."
Volumes have been written about the dangers of vouchers. It's a bad idea educationally.
Where vouchers have been tried there has (a) been no evidence of improved achievement, (b) the creation of a two-tiered system in which the strongest schools get stronger and the weakest schools deteriorate further. It's a bad idea socially, encouraging further segregation and stratification, with no evidence that it helps low-income children and families…

He wants to significantly overhaul No Child Left Behind. In a recent speech at a school of the arts in Colorado, he noted, "We must fix the failuresÉ(and) provide the funding we were promised." Then he added, "We also need to realize that we can meet high standards without forcing teachers and students to spend most of the year preparing for a single, high-stakes test."

In an earlier speech, he noted that the law had done more to "stigmatize and demoralize our students and teachers in struggling schools than it has to marshal the talent and the determination and the resources to turn them around."

Obama proposes giving states money to help schools implement broad-based assessments that will "provide immediate feedback ... so that teachers can begin improving student learning right away." He also wants to see parents, not just schools, held accountable by requiring districts to adopt school-family contracts that lay out expectations for student behavior, attendance and homework.

Additionally, Obama wants increased funding for pre-kindergarten education and has proposed a "Zero to Five" plan, at a cost of $10 billion a year, providing incentives to states to expand early education for young children.

Homie P’s analysis may not seem all that succinct, but compared to legislative plans, they’re like reading the label on a bag of chips. Keep breaking it down Phillips. Fo reelz. And would you mind clearing up the lipstick on a pig thing?