Obama unveils $18B education plan

— -- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama laid out a plan Tuesday to spend $18 billion on early childhood education, dropout prevention and teacher incentives. His plan also touches on a hot-button pay issue on which he differs with education unions.

Like the other Democratic candidates, Obama wants to change the 2002 No Child Left Behind education law, which ties federal funding to student results on standardized tests.

He would end standardized tests in favor of more complicated assessments, fund early childhood programs, give teachers bonuses for working in high-needs schools, and fund schools that experiment with longer school days or school years.

"We've got to have a fuller and ultimately … more accurate way of assessing what's going on in the classroom. The main goal of testing should not be to reward or punish," Obama said in an interview Tuesday.

Among the Democratic hopefuls, only New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson would abolish the No Child law. "I would not scrap the idea of having standards that we want schools to achieve," Obama said.

In a speech in New Hampshire laying out the plan, Obama criticized Democratic rivals Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards for not voting in 2003 to make the law unenforceable without full federal funding. "I believe that was a serious mistake."

The Edwards and Clinton camps in turn criticized Obama for voting, as an Illinois state senator, to implement the education law. Campaign spokesman Bill Burton said Obama voted yes to get "what little federal money was available."

On teacher pay, Obama said he supports programs such as one in Denver, where a voluntary merit pay program is based in part on hitting student achievement goals. "Those are the kinds of experiments … that are worth pursuing," Obama said. "What we should not do is to have teachers either rewarded or punished based solely on the performance on a standardized test."

Obama said the same thing to the National Education Association, the largest teachers' union, in July. The union opposes merit pay for student test results, but Obama's support of the Denver program didn't alarm NEA President Reg Weaver.