Check out the Skiff’s full report on urban education

Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.

“No Child Left Behind has been false advertising. And there doesn’t seem to be a sense of urgency about improving the education system. … Across the board we’re going to have to recruit a generation of new teachers. We’re going to have to pay our teachers more, we are going to have to give them more professional development and we’re also going to have to work with them rather than against them to improve standards. We’ve got to improve early childhood education.”

Source: Huffington Post Mash-Up, Sept. 13, 2007

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y.

“I support school-based merit pay. We need to get more teachers to go into hard-to-serve areas. We’ve got to get them into underserved urban areas, underserved rural areas. The school is a team, and it’s important that we reward that collaboration.”

Source: Democratic Debate, Nov. 15, 2007

“Our families have to be their child’s first school, and every parent has to understand they are their child’s first teacher. And we need to help parents do that job. That’s why I started Early Head Start. That’s why I expanded Head Start when I was first lady. That’s why I want to have universal free kindergarten for every single 4-year-old.”

Source: 2007 NAACP Presidential Primary Forum, July 12, 2007

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

“If a failing school won’t change, it shouldn’t be beyond the reach of students to change their schools. Parents should be able to send their children to the school that best suits their needs just as Cindy and I have been able to do, whether it is a public, private or parochial school. The result will not be the demise of the public school system in America, but competition that will help make public schools accountable and as successful as they should be in a country as great and prosperous as ours.”

Source: JohnMcCain.com, April 1 speech transcript