President Obama on education

The president spoke last week about education reform. He laid out a five part plan to raise our standing as a nation in our efforts to educate our children.

• First he'd like to see us reinvest in early childhood education programs, including a process that shuts down ineffective and wasteful programs.
• Second, he'd encourage high standards in all states. NCLB has encouraged a "race to the bottom" by allowing each state the ability to set and define its own educational standards. That has created a very wide range of standards, some of which are pitifully low. Success is not lowering standards so everyone can achieve them. Success is moving larger and larger percentages of our students into positions to achieve difficult standards.
• Third, he mentioned a merit pay system for teachers. He sees this as a way to supplement the next point and to reward effective teachers and encourage struggling teachers to improve. He is also sure that merit pay will have a real impact on student achievement.
  
• Fourth, the president seeks to promote innovation in our schools by removing limits on innovative charter schools that work. He also seems willing to make charter schools accountable for reporting their results in a manner consistent with how public schools now do.
• Finally, he'd like to see barriers to higher education removed for more students. Colleges and universities are the crown jewel of our educational system. A college degree has never been more important for students entering the job market. It has also never been more difficult to achieve, financially. More tech schools and two-year program offerings will help as well. So will reforming student loan programs that have proven to be sources of greed and corruption, not support for financially needy students.
• He spoke to parents and to students, and encouraged the kind of values regarding education we all know to be valuable--and in increasingly short supply, especially where they are needed most. And he finally highlighted the following video as an example of the things we should be addressing as a nation. It's a lovely compilation. Watch it.