EDUCATION AND THE STATE OF OUR UNION Posted by Matthew McKnight

  • Notes on Washington and the world by the staff of The New Yorker.
JANUARY 26, 2012

EDUCATION AND THE STATE OF OUR UNION

In today’s political climate one wouldn’t have to be reminded of which party the President belongs to. In his State of the Union address, President Obama told us anyway:

I’m a Democrat. But I believe what Republican Abraham Lincoln believed: That government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more. That’s why my education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and states.

Obama often couches discussions of education in other terms—economic, environmental, of immigration—rather than as a political tool. This makes sense, of course, given the broad effect education has in a modern society. More to the point, many believe—and Obama seems to agree—that at the heart of solving long-term economic, environmental, and immigration concerns lies the need to fix education. “To prepare for the jobs of tomorrow, our commitment to skills and education has to start earlier,” the President said in his address.

On primary and secondary education, Obama essentially advocated three directives: raise the dropout age to eighteen, continue his Race to the Top program, and loosen the standardized restrictions on teachers. Obama is right to say that the minimum requirements set by No Child Left Behind, in the ten years the law has been in effect, have done little to shrink the achievement gap, and to consider an alternative. But it’s too early to know if Race to the Top is the right one. The first, sufficiently rigorous evaluation will begin in March, and will only be completed and released two years later. He’s also right to say that “teachers matter,” and that good ones ought to have the freedom and income to do their job well.

That education cannot be treated in a bubble is an important truth that should not be missed. And yet, while the President’s diagnosis—even with its simplifications—was accurate, his prescriptions were light on details. “Challenges remain,” he said, but “we know how to solve them.” Do we? It was not even clear how to resolve tension between his stated desire not to confine educators to “teaching to the test” and the way the Race to the Top rewards testing, aside from handing it off to individual states. Injunctions like “more competition” miss the wide scope of the problem. Indeed, in a country where the fault lines in education align so neatly along economic, racial, and geographic divisions, there’s almost an urge to accept rhetorical shows of confidence, and not look too far beyond them.



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