Philadelphia was the site of the Democratic presidential debate Tuesday night and provided an interesting context: home to the inventive genius of Ben Franklin, the site of the Declaration of Independence, a center of manufacturing during America’s industrial revolution and now reinventing itself for the knowledge based competition of the 21st century. Which candidate has the vision to dramatically transform the current education system to a future oriented learning system?
Brian Williams MSNBC moderator of the debate at Drexel University asked a lightning round question about trends in international mathematics and science study called TIMS. Transcript excerpts below.
Williams: “It (TIMS study) found that, overseas, students spend an average of 193 days, annually, in school. The deficit, compared to the U.S., where it's 180 days, over 12 years, that adds up to a one-year gap between education in the U.S. and overseas. Do you believe we in this country need to extend the school day and/or extend the school year, and will you commit to it?”
Richardson: Yes, I'd commit to it. And I'm glad, finally, education is coming up in a major debate. This is what I would do. We are 29th in the world in science and math compared to the E.U., to countries in China and India. They graduate four or five times more engineers. There is a competitiveness gap here.
This is what I would do. One, I'd have 100,000 new science and math teachers. But we have to pay our teachers what they deserve, a minimum wage of what I believe is $40,000 per year. I'd get rid of No Child Left Behind. I would have science and math academies, but in the high school curriculum it is critically important that we have more civics, more language, and art in the schools to provoke creativity in science and math proficiency.
Kucinich: …….If we cut the Pentagon budget 15 percent, $75 billion will go into a universal pre-kindergarten program so our children ages 3, 4 and 5 will have access to full-time day care and more money would go into elementary and secondary education.
In addition to that, our college-age students need to know that with a Kucinich administration they're guaranteed a two- or four-year college, tuition free, and it'll be paid for by the government investing in our young people. That's the kind of approach I'll take to education.
Obama: …… we have to have more instruction in the classroom. We're going to have to pay for that, and the federal government has to help strapped local districts in order to make that happen. We also have to, if we want to development math and science curriculums, we've got to make math and science jobs attractive, which means increasing research grants. And this is something that is important not just for our competitiveness, but also for our long-term national security. And when George Bush requests $196 billion for next year's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and is seeing a flatlining of investment in science research that makes it more difficult for us to encourage our children to go into sciences.
Clinton: …….. We need to do more to help our families prepare their children. A family is a child's first school. The parents are a child's first teacher. This is something that I've worked on for many years. We need to really support it through nurse visitation or social work or child care. We need to do more with the pre-kindergarten program that I have proposed. In addition, though, this has to fit into an overall innovation agenda, which I have also set forth.
Because we can't just say, go to school longer. We need to do what happened when I was in school and Sputnik went up, and our teacher said, your president wants you to study math and science. That's what I want kids today to feel, that it's part of making sure we maintain our quality of life and our standard of living.
Edwards: I think we still have two public school systems in many ways in America. We have one for affluent communities, and one for everybody else……we should have universal pre-K for all 4-year-olds. We ought to deal with nutritional and health care needs of younger children -- young than four years of age, starting at about age two.
We should have a national teaching university so that we attract our most talented young people, send them out across America to teach in the toughest places to teach. We should give incentive pay to teachers who are willing to teach in the most difficult places.
We should have second-chance schools for kids who are dropping out and college for any kids who's willing to work when they're in college.
Biden: Yes, I proposed it in 1987. We should go to school longer. We either have to assume that our kids are (inaudible) brighter every other child in the world, or that somehow we have to go to school longer. Secondly, we should have a minimum 16 years of education. Thirdly, we should be focusing on the socioeconomic disadvantaged, mostly minorities in inner cities. That's something we've ignored. We pay no attention to it. We pretend they're the same circumstances as every other kid in America. They start off with half. Half of the education gap exists before they set foot in the first classroom. That should be the focus.
Dodd: …..I've been asked the question over the years, "What's the single most important issue?" I always say education because it is the answer to every other problem we confront as a people here…..I'm proud to have been named "Senator of the Decade" by the Head Start Association. All the ideas that are being advocating in early childhood education are critical. The federal government needs to be a better partner in all of this, not take away control locally. But a child's quality of education shouldn't depend on the accident of birth, and that's what happens too often in our country. The children of Philadelphia or in Connecticut or wherever else are going to be competing with children in Johannesburg, in Sydney, in Moscow, in Beijing.
We need to make the kind of investments jointly with our local communities. Higher education community colleges need to be more tuition-free -- I have an idea on how to do that -- so that we provide that continuum from the earliest stages through higher education to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Read the full report (PDF). 
