If You Were John McCain's Education Advisor...

After much breathless anticipation, John McCain will finally be addressing education in a formal campaign appearance a week from now at the NAACP. Let's imagine you were given free rein to write that speech. Assuming the senator would give the remarks as delivered, and, as speechwriter, you would not be bound to the letter of what he's said in the past (not that he's said that much about education). What would you say? What could you say?

For all the edublogosphere's patter about the education ideas of the two major candidates, McCain's opponent is the one in the best position. Read this excerpt from the AP article announcing McCain's coming address for proof:

Unlike Democratic candidate Barack Obama, McCain is not calling for increasing the roughly $23 billion the federal government now spends to implement the law. Much of that goes toward educating poor children.

Keegan said McCain would reallocate how the money is spent. For example, more would go toward merit-pay programs for teachers. School districts are increasingly experimenting with programs like that, in part because of a Bush administration program that helps pay for the initiatives.

The national teachers' unions oppose linking student test scores to teacher pay. Obama supports the idea when teachers help negotiate and craft the merit-pay plans.

These are absolutely perfect paragraphs for Obama. In the first graf, McCain doesn't want to increase spending for "educating poor children." Instead, he'll take that money and reallocate it for merit pay for teachers. Obama supports that too, but only if the merit pay plans are structured with teacher buy-in. Obama comes off as reasonable and measured, while McCain comes across as the guy down the street grumbling about his taxes.

McCain is left in a pretty tough position. Education is not his passion, and it shows with how little he's put into the issue. His choices at this point are:

• supporting the strong accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind. That's defensible but not politically popular.
  
• promoting red-meat conservative education priorities like vouchers and school prayer. He did that with moderate success in 2000, but that seems a little tired this time around.
  
• passively ignoring it, answering questions when pressed but offering no real substance on his own volition, and letting Lisa Graham Keegan do all his education bidding.
  

He's clearly chosen a small helping of each of the first two and a massive portion of the last one. It's only July, but it's amazing how out-maneuvered he's been on this issue. I'll be shocked if next week's speech changes that.