Education Reform and Obama

Here is what the President had to say recently about education in America.

Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding
excellence in teaching with extra pay, even though we know it can make a
difference in the classroom…. It’s time to start rewarding good teachers, stop
making excuses for bad ones….let me be clear: If a teacher is given a chance or
two chances or three chances but still does not improve, there’s no excuse for
that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and
protects a person from its consequences. The stakes are too high. We can afford
nothing but the best when it comes to our children’s teachers and the schools
where they teach.

I am impressed and encouraged. It seems to me, though, that President Obama is always saying all the right things (well, except when he is saying things like this and this and this), but his actions don't measure up. Is he saying this to score some easy political points with no intention of actually doing anything? Will he support Ms. Rhee in her efforts in DC schools or will he ignore them? Will he support charter schools or is he going to let them die under the Durbin bill?

Killing Off School Choice in DC, Eliminating Hope for Poor African American Kids

Despite the $1 billion budget that DC's public schools receive each year (roughly $12,000/student, the third highest in the nation*), it ranked last in math and second to last in reading on the 2007 National Assesment of Educational Progress. Only 43% of the students entering 9th grade will actually graduate within 5 years. Only 9% will receive a college degree within 5 years from graduation. There is no doubt that the DC public school system needs major reform.

Unfortunately, DC's school children are about to suffer another injustice. The (Democratic) Senate has undertaken a new bill (proposed by Dick Durbin) to silently kill off the District's voucher program. Essentially, the scholarship program will simply terminate after next school year unless Congress reauthorizes it and DC approves. Whoever supports this measure will throw 1700 poor minority kids back into the failing public schools where it is a demonstrable fact that virtually no learning takes place.

One of the biggest hypocrisies of the left is that of education reform. Teachers, who should be most concerned about educating the kids in their charge, are part of a union that balks at the idea of a merit-based salary system, revolts at accountability measures like No Child Left Behind that insist teachers teach basic skills such that students can pass standardized tests, and riots when anyone suggests that teachers be able to pass such tests themselves. And the teacher's union makes up one of the most powerful forces in the Democratic party, the party that supposedly champions society's underdogs. Would that it were true.

The same liberal politicians who send their own children to exclusive, expensive private schools want to bar the doors of these very schools to poor minority kids whose only hope of getting out of a ghetto school is through a scholarship program like the one Dick Durbin is striving to dismantle. Obama himself sends his own kids to Sidwell Friends. If the DC public schools are not good enough for Al Gore's kids or President Obama's, why do these politicians feel that they should be good enough for anyone else's?

*When you exclude preschool, higher education and charter school expenditures, this per-pupil expenditure jumps to $22,000. In other words, DC spends $22,000 per K-12th grade student each year).

Read more:
http://http//online.wsj.com/article/SB123604286020215187.html
http://http//www.theatlantic.com/doc/200811/michelle-rhee/3 http://http//www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/mar/12/congress-vs-dc-kids/