That may be true, however, the govt monpoly on public education has clearly produced horrible results at a terribly high cost.
We pay more per student than most other nations with a sub-par result. Why do you think that is?
And please dont give me class size or teacher pay as the answer as those are clearly union slogans meant to get more $$$$ from the taxpayer.
The quality of teachers is poor due to lack of merit based pay by teacher Unions. Obama is Taking on the Teacher Unions right now. Check it out.
Obama takes on teachers' unionsBy JONATHAN MARTIN | 3/10/09 5:59 AM EDT Updated: 3/10/09 1:28 PM EDT Text Size:
After weeks of pleasing Democrats by overturning policies set by the previous administration, President Barack Obama Tuesday for the first time confronted a powerful constituency in his own party: teachers’ unions.
Obama proposed spending additional money on effective teachers in up to 150 additional school districts, fulfilling a campaign promise that once earned him boos from members of the National Education Association.
“Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement, and asked to accept more responsibilities for lifting up their schools,” he said in a wide-ranging education speech before a meeting of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Washington.
Obama’s embrace of merit pay won’t go over well among a group that often provides key funding and foot soldiers for Democratic campaigns.
Teachers’ unions say merit pay causes teachers to compete against each other, rather than collaborate, and is unfair to those who work in disadvantaged areas where it can be harder to boost student performance.
But polls show the policy is overwhelmingly supported by the public, and it offers Obama a chance both to burnish his reformer credentials and point to a split from party orthodoxy.
In addition to rewarding good teachers, Obama also said he’ll seek to push out those who aren’t getting results, another proposal that may rankle a profession that prizes tenure.
“Let me be clear: if a teacher is given a chance, or two chances, or three chances, and still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching,” he told the business group. “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 to the schools where they teach.” The White House didn’t specify how the president would like to see poor-performing teachers removed from the classroom.
Obama did lavish praise on the profession – going off script at one point to note that his sister is a teacher – but his remarks offered as much tough love.
Gone were such assurances from the campaign where he would frequently say of merit pay: “I’m not going to do it to you, I’m going to do it with you.”
Instead, Obama confronted the powerful bloc of his own party – one in ten delegates at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 belonged to teachers unions – with unambiguous language.
He said the country had let its “teacher quality fall short” and said reforms were needed as much as the additional funding the unions crave.
“It is time to start rewarding good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones,” Obama declared.
It wasn’t just teachers, though, that came in for some tough talk. He seemed to also address students and parents in calling for consideration of expanding the school-year into the summer and adopting a calendar that many other industrialized nations already have.
“We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day,” Obama said. “That calendar may have once made sense, but today, it puts us at a competitive disadvantage.”
To students, the president warned them to not “even think about dropping out of school” and to parents he urged accountability and a recognition that the government “cannot turn off the TV or put away the video games.”
Notably, Obama said little about No Child Left Behind, the federal education standards set by President George W. Bush that are despised by teachers’ unions.
Obama railed against it during the campaign, where it was listed as the very first issue on his website’s education page.
On Tuesday, he only mentioned it only to say that later this year he would see that it “lives up to its name by ensuring not only that teachers and principals get the funding they need, but that the money is tied to results.”
In a move that may make the merit pay proposal more palatable for teachers’ unions, Obama did speak out against the current standardized tests so loathed by educators and promised funding for better data systems to track student progress.
