Barack Obama affirmed the key themes of his education agenda on Tuesday.
1) "Investing in early childhood initiatives" like Head Start;
2) "Encouraging better standards and assessments" by focusing on testing itineraries that better fit our kids and the world they live in;
3) "Recruiting, preparing, and rewarding outstanding teachers" by giving incentives for a new generation of teachers and for new levels of excellence from all of our teachers.
4) "Promoting innovation and excellence in America's schools" by supporting charter schools, reforming the school calendar and the structure of the school day.
5) "Providing every American with a quality higher education--whether it's college or technical training."
Good stuff. And there was this characteristically Barackian sentiment too:
It is time to start rewarding good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones.
But then on Wednesday he signed the omnibus spending bill. Aside
from being laden with thousands of earmarks he had earlier promised to
stop, this included something else, as Roland Martin notes:
Refreshing to hear a Democrat talk about a union's "death grip". Onward to card check!When President Obama signs the $410 billion omnibus spending bill, there will be shouts of joy from both sides as Republicans and Democrats get their cherished earmarks. Yet tucked into that bill is an amendment pushed by the president's former colleague in the Senate, Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin, who used his influence to essentially kill the District of Columbia school vouchers program.
Oh sure, it will be portrayed that the Democrats aren't killing the program, but the initiative calls for no new students to be allowed entry, unless approved by Congress and the District of Columbia City Council. And considering that the teachers union has such a death grip on both Democratic-controlled institutions, you can forget about that happening.
But the politicization of charter schools is so sharp that as far as I can tell there's almost no reporting on that amendment -- which, granted, there might not have been anyways because there's, um, other things going on, but the timing of the President's speech would seem to've made it pretty newsworthy. Sad.
I just can't believe Obama, who understands and has communicated so well the idea of change from the bottom up, is taking such a top-down approach to education. Let me explain my perspective first: I became a teacher at 40 and have taught for 15 years. I was a National Merit Scholar in high school, graduated with honors from a prestigious national university, have had some stories, poems, and essays published over the years in small but earnest magazines and was also a professional athlete for 8 years, which really does turn into something useful to offer kids in public schools through coaching positions. Long story short - I'm pretty well qualified to teach and I like kids and have received uniformly excellent evaluations for my classroom work - and I think the national debate about education is pretty absurd. The crucial elements in education, I'm convinced, are curiosity and a desire to learn and you can't just drum those into little minds. Our educational system is a mirror of our culture - adult Americans are not readers, aren't curious about ideas and meaning, and - surprise! - neither are our children. It's a long, hard slog to tell kids for 13 years they need to study hard just so they "can compete in a global economy." But not only is that basically what we're reduced to as our core goal in education, it's also simply just a lie, or so I have come to believe, about the reason to become educated in the first place. Try reading an American textbook sometime - any subject. It's impossible for an intelligent, self-motivated, genuinely curious mind to find it interesting on any level. How is that ever going to work?
So if I understand what your saying correctly, you wanted Obama to open up this bill to the process again and try and make it perfect or better rather than go on and do other things and maybe fix the problems that are in it later. You seriously want Obama to tell congress that they need to spend the next month redoing the appropriations they already did rather then concentrate on other things.