The Washington Post today published a story entitled "Obama to Schools: Change or Miss Out on Cash"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...
In it, the authors explain that Obama will be dangling $4.35 billion in funding for states only if they "ease limits on charter schools, tie teacher pay to student achievement and move for the first time toward common academic standards."
As a former public school teacher, National Board Certified Teacher, union representative, and a current PhD student in Curriculum and Instruction, I can tell you that Obama is dead wrong on all three of these issues and these policies will lead to greater drop out rates, greater segregation, greater narrowing of the curriculum to test-prep, less money and attention given to the arts/physical education/computer literacy and time for imaginative play such as recess, will lead to a more watered-down non-critical curriculum devoid of passion, and to even higher rates of teacher attrition (currently 50% of teachers stay in teaching for less than 5 years).
First, on charter schools: studies are all over the map on charter schools, but the largest and most respected studies on charter schools show they do not on the whole improve student achievement. See: http://credo.stanford.edu/...
Further, charter schools have been shown to exacerbate segregation and to take shortcuts on education for students requiring special education. See: http://www.amazon.com/...
Charter schools are also almost never unionized and have much higher rates of teacher turnover: http://www.unionvoice.org/...
Most researchers agree that the quality of the teacher is the biggest single factor that affects student achievement, so high rates of teacher turnover cannot be a good thing in the long run.
Many studies have pointed out the problems with raising the stakes on standardized testing. http://www.amazon.com/...
Obama's policy raises the stakes even further.
Tying teacher pay to student test scores is nothing short of evil. This has been tried before, many times. What it leads to are teachers wanting only to teach high-achieving, high-"potential" students. There is a reason teacher unions are against this.
Lastly, a national set of standards or curriculum is not a quality resource for teaching and learning--it is a set of priorities. If a national curriculum is enforced by this much cash from the federal government this means local communities will become increasingly disconnected from their schools (already the number of school boards in the country has diminished from nearly a half a million to tens of thousands). Effective schools and teachers use local knowledge, interests and expertise to create curriculum that is relevant and interesting to students. A national curriculum will limit that, turning schools even more into the assembly-line drop-out factories that they have become.
Obama might have more credibility on these issues if he wasn't sending his two daughters to an elite private Quaker school, entirely unaffected by these policies.
After working my butt off to get this man elected, I am more than disappointed. These policies are truly bad for public education.