So says Jay Mathews in his Washington Post column today--at least when it comes to education policy.
If you like the education policies (JUST the education policies) of the current president, you will like the education policies of his successor, no matter which man is chosen. If you don't, you won't.
How can that be? Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) seem to be very different people, with contrasting views of President Bush. But if you examine carefully what they say they want to do about schools, it is just more of the same.
Mathews rightly points out that surrogates to the candidates chat about a lot of the same ideas, from charter schools to non-traditional routes to the classroom to accountability. And both candidates have been careful to avoid talk of ???scrapping??? No Child Left Behind. And he's not the first to notice that there's a ???Washington Consensus??? in education that's long-standing and hard to budge. Yet I'm not entirely convinced that his thesis is correct. If Obama maintains his lead through the weekend and wins the election, we really don't know where he's going to come down on NCLB. Yes, he'll be for ???accountability,??? but the very broad label covers up a million and one specifics that matter a lot to the day to day operation of schools. It's obvious that Mathews wants Obama to maintain Bush-style policies on education, but whether he actually will is quite the open question.
