I have a sinking feeling about President Obama's policy toward public education. On the surface it sounds reasonable, but there are red flags: promoting charter schools, merit pay, and teacher accountability. So, what's wrong with that?
The fact is, these key points to Obama's education plan are rightwing talking points. And rightwing code terms for continuing privatization and union-busting in education. In other words, some of Obama education plan sounds horribly like the Republican platform on education. Alarm bells are going off.
This is President Obama's plan for education.
And this is a sample:
And yet, despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short, and other nations outpace us. In 8th grade math, we’ve fallen to 9th place. Singapore’s middle-schoolers outperform ours three to one. Just a third of our thirteen and fourteen-year olds can read as well as they should. And year after year, a stubborn gap persists between how well white students are doing compared to their African American and Latino classmates. The relative decline of American education is untenable for our economy, unsustainable for our democracy, and unacceptable for our children – and we cannot afford to let it continue.
To take just one point: "Our teacher quality falls short ..." On what does President Obama base that rather comprehensive, damning, and potentially disastrous judgement?
Certainly not on direct, personal experience. From the the time he was in the fifth grade, he was in private, expensive schools.
From Wikipedia:
Punahou School, once known as Oahu College, is a private, co-educational, college preparatory school located in Honolulu CDP, City and County of Honolulu in the U.S. State of Hawaii. With about 3,750[1] students attending the school, in kindergarten through the twelfth grade, it is the largest independent school in the United States.[2] ....
Along with academics and athletics, Punahou also offers visual and performing arts programs. Students have access to a jewelry studio, a pottery studio, a photography darkroom, and glass-blowing facilities....
Tuition is $16,675 for the 2008-2009 school year[7][8], not including optional and mandatory fees. Tuition charges do not cover the entire cost of the education of a student, and this "deficit" is met by the school's endowment,[9] which the Washington Post recently estimated to be $174M,[10] bizjournals and CBS news put at $180M,[11][12] and Business Week recently claimed as high as $501M....
Then he spent two years at Occidental College, in California, a small, private, pricey, liberal arts college where tuition and other costs as of this year are over $50,000. A year. Then Columbia University in Chicago. Then Harvard Law School.
So President Obama has little direct personal experience with or in public education. But can that gap can be rectified by his Department of Education Secretary?
Department of Education Secretary Arne Duncan, via Wikipedia:
... was raised in Hyde Park, Chicago, where his father Starkey Duncan was a psychology professor at the University of Chicago, and mother Susan Morton runs the Sue Duncan Children's Center, an after school program serving African American youth on Chicago's South Side. Duncan spent a great deal of his free time at his mother's center tutoring children and sharpening his basketball skills with the neighborhood children....
Duncan attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where he aspired to a future career coaching basketball or playing the sport professionally.[2] He then graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in sociology in 1987. His senior thesis, for which he took a year's leave to do research in Kenwood, in inner-city Chicago, was entitled The values, aspirations and opportunities of the urban underclass....
The Lab School was founded on the principles of hands-on learning and exploration by American educator John Dewey in 1896 in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. The school began as a progressive institution that goes from nursery school through 12th grade. It is affiliated with the University of Chicago, and about half the students have a parent who is an employee of the university (and thereby receive a discount off the full tuition, normally as much as $20,000 per year).[1] It is considered one of the top preparatory schools in the United States, reflected in the Wall Street Journal's findings that the school is amongst the top five feeder institutions in the nation for elite colleges....[
At Harvard, Duncan was relegated to the junior varsity basketball squad his first year by coach Frank McLaughlin, but later became co-captain of the varsity team and named a first team Academic All-American....
From 1987 to 1991, Duncan played professional basketball in Australia with the Eastside Spectres of the National Basketball League,[11] and while there, worked with children who were wards of the state....
Duncan has extensive experience in educational policy and management, but has not been a teacher. In 1992, Duncan became director of the Ariel Education Initiative, a program to enhance educational opportunities for children on Chicago's South Side that was started by John W. Rogers, Jr., and in 1998 he joined the Chicago Public Schools.[14] He became Deputy Chief of Staff for former Schools CEO Paul Vallas in 1999....
Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed Duncan to serve as CEO of Chicago Public Schools on June 26, 2001.
So Duncan went to an expensive prep school and not public schools; but, hey!, he's from Chicago, he's been a CEO in public education, and he can play basketball.
Perhaps his deputy, Raymond Simon, is an education populist ...
Raymond Simon is an American educator and the current United States Deputy Secretary of Education. Simon leads the Office of the Deputy Secretary (ODS) which serves the administration of Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings. Simon was nominated by U.S. President George W. Bush and confirmed by the United States Senate on May 26, 2005. He is primarily focused on the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act that aims at reforming primary and secondary education. (Wikipedia)
So he was Bush's "No Child Left Behind" implementer and probably tasked with drowning public education in a bathtub. I am not reassured.
The California Federation of Teachers has a useful and interesting policy paper on the subject of merit pay, as proposed by Governor Schwartzenegger, starting with:
Our Perspective
The Governor has proposed to institute merit pay, rather than adequately fund teacher salaries, in the name of teacher retention, and to reward effective teaching and learning. This tired and discredited idea is put forward now to divert attention from the Governor’s broken promises to the education community and the people of California. Research and past practice doesn’t support merit pay; it does support numerous other tools to boost excellence and retain good teachers.
It looks to me like President Obama, who lacks personal experience in public education and has equally limited and/or biased backup on that subject in his own Department of Education, has drunk the rightwing propaganda on the subject down whole.
Since one of my children is a teacher in California, I know that educational standards for teachers are high. I know that they work long hours for little pay. I know that they are up against major difficulties with complex and wildly varied student bodies and limited resources. I think that what they don't need is an education program based on destructive, rightwing, anti-union education policies.
Talk me down.