is for two reasons.
You probably have already guessed that one reason is much of what Obama had to say about education. I will discuss that in detail below the fold. For now consider just this: Race to the Top is the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation.. I would have to describe RttT as the most destructive imposition on our public schools in my life-time. And I don't care that Obama says the changes are being driven by Governors. Most of them know even less about education than he has demonstrated.
The other reason is the sheer stupidity of saying he will veto any bill with earmarks. That is as ridiculous as the statement John Edwards made at Ykos 2007 in Chicago, calling on all the candidates to reject any money from Washington lobbyists. Edwards didn't even say registered lobbyists. He didn't exclude state lobbyists. And a lobbyist can give no more than anyone else. Both Edwards statement then and Obama's statement last night are cheap political theater, only what Obama did just made things far more difficult for the average Congressman.
Let me continue with the earmark. One very senior member of the House of Representatives asked me after the speech if I had noticed that there was not all that much applause for that statement. Congressmen have regularly pointed out that earmarks by and large do not ADD to federal expenditures or to the deficit, but rather direct where expenditures are going. They ask who better knows the district, someone in Washington - whether the White House or the bureaucracy - or the Congressman supposed to represent his district. In the past I have had heard Members and Senators note that the argument against earmarks often seemed intended to give the President even more power over directing spending than he would have had with a line-item veto.
Perhaps it is because I know a number of Members and Senators that I tend to come down on their side on this issue. By all means disclose all earmarks, so people know who is designating and for what.
But let me give you an illustration of the benefit of earmarks. Gabby Giffords is alive, in large part because there is a world-class trauma center at the University Medical Center in Tucson. Oh, by the way, that center is still functioning in part because of earmarks, ironically obtained by one Gabrielle Giffords. Before one goes on a rampage against earmarks, maybe one ought to consider the benefits obtained from them, and the entire question of separation of powers and proper role of the legislative and executive branches. All spending is supposed to be approved by the legislative branch. Let's see if earmarks are included in a bill the president absolutely must have if he will truly veto it as promised. Attacking all earmarks is Tea Party argumentation, and not worthy of our side of the political spectrum.
One last point on earmarks. The attacks on earmarks realistically began in Arizona. The biggest proponent of the attacks was one John McCain, but only AFTER he got caught up in the Keating Five scandal. My reaction to his opposition to earmarks then might be best phrased like this - Sen. McCain, just because you couldn't control yourself in the process of designating expenditures doesn't mean others are as weak and undisciplined as you are. That it the kind of logic that lead to the 18th Amendment, which did this country great damage, which is why it is so far the only Amendment we have ever repealed.
Education. Of course you will expect that I would not be happy. Obama is trying to rush re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, to get his Blueprint enacted into law.
Let me go through several issues.
I already noted his remarks on Race to the Top. The approach was not based on research. For example, none of the four methods that are to be used for schools considered failing has a research base that demonstrates it works. Several of the approaches have a research base that shows they do not work. Second, Race to the Top mandated states lift their caps on charters, without requiring any requirement that proposed charters meet even minimal standards, and in the face of a strong body of evidence that on the whole charters do not perform any better than public schools. Again, on this point I remind people of the CREDO study run out of Stanford by Margaret Raymond, which found that twice as many charters performed worse than local public schools as did those that performed better. Please note - I am NOT opposed to charters in principle. I know some excellent charters. By and large they are not part of chains (whether those are officially non-profit or not). I see far too many abuses to make me comfortable. I see excessive salaries paid to managers of charter school operations.
The administration has rightly noted that the quality of test we have is poor, which is why it is putting over $300 million into to consortia to design and construct a new generation of assessments. Yet in the meantime under Race to the Top and the continuation of the clock on AYP under No Child Left Behind, we are using the very same bad tests about which Obama was critical during the campaign to designated schools as failing.
Finally, there is the insistence in Race to the Top that states JUST TO BE ELIGIBLE for the funds had to remove any laws prohibiting tying teacher evaluation to student assessment scores. Some, including the administration, argue that any problems can be addressed by Value Added methodologies, despite the fact that the professionals in the field of assessment have shown clearly that the scores obtained by VAM are unstable and therefore more an artifact of the particular group of students at any moment rather than the effort of the teachers.
That's only part of the problem with Obama's remarks on education. We elect Congressmen and Senators to participate in the crafting of policy. They can serve as our eyes and ears, our voices in the exploring proposed policies. That did not happen with the Race to the Top. Remember that when David Obey proposed taking less than a billion of unspent Race to the Top funds to help pay for the 10 billion to save jobs of teachers and other local government employees - a proposal in which he was backed by the entire Democratic leadership of the House starting with Pelosi - the President threatened to veto the entire bill if that provision remained therein. He was insisting on doubling down on the policies he was shoving down the throats of public schools - even though Congress had never had an opportunity to vet those proposals.
Obama continues to use scare rhetoric on education. Last night I read the speech about 90 minutes before he delivered it. This just jumped out at me:
The quality of our math and science education lags behind many other nations. America has fallen to 9th in the proportion of young people with a college degree. And so the question is whether all of us – as citizens, and as parents – are willing to do what’s necessary to give every child a chance to succeed.
The first sentence there is simply wrong. When we disaggregate our international scores by economics we perform as well as any nation in the world. In fact, we have 25% of the top scorers in the world, even though we have less than 4% of the world's population. We certainly need to address the problem of students in situations of poverty. Health care, nutrition and other things are a part of that. It might have been nice to hear that connection last night. I did not.
As far as the proportion of people with a college degree, it will continue to drop as college becomes increasingly unaffordable. Did you hear anything about Pell Grants last night? I did not. They are a primary means of people from low income families being able to pursue higher education. Yet the funding for them is insufficient. Yesterday I was told by someone involved in lobbying for higher education that the average grant is likely to be cut by more than $1,000. This is at a time when the cost of college is going up, in part because of the loss of the value of and income from endowments (although the recovery of the stock market is addressing some of this). It is also occurring at a time when increasing numbers of Americans are slipping down the economic scale, and families are therefore less able to help their children with college expenses.
The president may also be very wrong on the percentage of jobs that will truly require a college education. Just because an employer will not consider someone who does not have one does not mean the skills necessary for the job require even an Associate's degree. Surely the President understands that.
And surely those around him realize that unless we rebuild our manufacturing sector, the largest proportion of new jobs will be in the retail and service sectors, they will not pay all that well, and they sure as hell will not require one to have a higher education to be able to do them.
As for manufacturing, yes it will be increasingly high tech. But many of the people running the machines will not need advanced education. They will need training in running those specific machines. It will be far less expensive to run apprenticeship programs and those in such programs will far more quickly be earning decent incomes than by delaying their earning for education that in most cases is irrelevant to the work they will be doing.
Before you attack me, understand these points.
- I believe in lifelong learning. I am all for people being able to improve their education throughout their lives.
- Education should be about something far more than job-related skills. It should be about learning how to learn - on this one could ask my AP students about their current assignment, which requires them to wrestle with metacognition. It also should have the possibility of expanding one's horizons beyond the immediate question of return on investment in sheer monetary terms.
- Perhaps because I admire Mike Rose out at UCLA, I have come to respect the intellectual content of much of what many dismiss as less important work - that includes a fair amount of what is still dismissed as manual labor.
- Our approach to education, with its emphasis upon college readiness at the immediate end of K-12 is leaving ever more kids behind. Some because they develop at a different rate. Others because their education is being narrowed to what can be easily tested. Many because the way we are still shaping schools is alien to the world in which they are growing up - some of those making educational policy are trying to keep kids from using what they have already learned about technology with the various devices a regular part of their lives and this further turns kids off. It might be of more importance to equalize the access to such technology than it is to fret whether a kid can read fluently by 3rd grade. Many of our kids are auditory learners, and we do not support them as well by the way we have been structuring our educational policy.
Finally, there is this. I am going to push back every time I hear the rhetoric I heard of teacher bashing. Yes, I know the President talked about encouraging more young people to consider teaching. That isn't going to work over the long term when teachers are not giving ownership of their own profession. Are their people who should not be teaching? Yep. But ask yourself how they got there, and you will find most often it is because of flawed policies of how they are trained, how they are certified, how they are hired, and how they are supervised, none of which realistically falls on the teachers, but on others. No Child Left Behind required Highly Qualified teachers, which usually meant fully certified. What if you have a horrible teacher but s/he is certified in a hard to staff field, say physics? As a principal you are damned if you replace that teacher with someone who is not fully certified, and you are damned if you keep that teacher.
Many teachers who are not performing as well as they could are capable of effective of teaching with the right support and the right structure. I have seen nothing from this administration that addresses those issue, and i did not even hear a whisper of it in the President's words.
In fact, the entire structure of teaching needs to be rethought. That does not mean replacing people dedicated to teaching as a career with those committing to only two years. It should not mean turning ever more classrooms over to those with less than two months of training. It should not mean demeaning advanced training for teachers - which by the way far too often they have to pay for out of their own pockets. If you want teaching to be a profession, treat it as one.
I do not doubt that the President means well - he wants every child to have access to a good and appropriate education. Unfortunately, I do not believe he or his Department of Education fully understand education, learning, and teaching. I find that they listen to too narrow a spectrum of views, that they ignore the research that is available that contradicts the positions to which they have already committed themselves.
Some other parts of the speech were better. It was somewhat different for a SOTU address in that it was tied together thematically.
Our schools are closed today because of winter weather. Thus I will not be able to get feedback from my students (who were required to watch it) until tomorrow, by which time it is possible their memories will have started to fade.
I do know one reaction. It will be to the catch phrase repeated several times in the speech. That phrase is win the future
My students will quickly look at the initials. I don't think the President will be pleased by the reaction to WTF because that combination of letters has a meaning he will not be able to replace. I think that was unfortunate phrasing.
But what do I know? I am only a teacher. Apparently what I have to say, even about the field to which I am dedicating my efforts, does not matter. By that I don't mean me, teacherken. I mean all of the millions of teachers who dedicate themselves to our young people.
I gave the speech a C. I liked the stuff about the Dream Act, even if he did not specifically mention it. I liked that he dealt with repeal of DADT. He is right about our need to rebuild our infrastructure (although it is not clear how he expects to do that with a budget freeze).
I teach government. I know people on both sides of the Capitol. I think he is flat out wrong on earmarks.
I teach. I think he is very wrong on much of what he said about education.
That's me.
This my response.
Ultimately I don't like one-time grading. I prefer to say of student work either that it is good enough, or that they need to go back, redo it, fix the mistakes, and get it right.
On earmarks and education, Mr. Obama, you need to go back, redo it, fix the mistakes, and get it right.
Peace.