Last week, President Obama said he favored federal rewards for local school districts that fire underperforming teachers. As he was addressing a U.S. Chamber of Commerce gathering, President Obama also advocated closing failing schools.The president's definition of "failing" schools seems to be centered around those that had not fixed chronically troubled classrooms or graduated a high percentage of its students.
The cornerstone of this presidential outreach respecting the problem of poorly functioning public schools was the possible allocation of $900 million in grants for which districts could compete. States and local school districts stand a good chance of winning a portion of that federal educational pot if they can prove that they have aggressively sought to cure their low test scores and abysmal graduation rates. An indication that the Obama administration is very serious about this initiative is that the president has already included it in his 2011 budget request to Congress.
From President Obama's attention-grabbing keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention to his unjustifiably criticized post-Labor Day 2009 address to millions of American students imploring them to work harder in school, it has been evident that the president (himself a Columbia University and Harvard grad) will accept no excuses for poor, black and/or Latino kids not excelling in school. In this regard, he is quite similar to his predecessor, President George W. Bush. As many of us know, Mr. Bush received some well-deserved criticism for getting the United States involved in a foreign conflict (i.e. the war in Iraq), where the alleged antagonist didn't possess the nuclear arsenal Bush cronies Colin Powell and Dick Cheney assured us they did. At the same time, though, some of us would agree that Mr. Bush has never received the praise he deserves for launching (with invaluable support from the late Sen. Ted Kennedy) an educational initiative that had as its baseline objective narrowing the gap in test scores between the different socio-economic and racial or ethnic groups. I allude to the Bush-propelled landmark federal educational legislation of 2002, most commonly known as the No Child Left Behind Act.
Contrary to some public misperceptions about this groundbreaking Bush legislative package, it was never intended to preclude kids from getting left back when warranted. Rather, No Child Left Behind was initially crafted with an expectation that all American public schoolchildren would be reading, writing and computing on grade level by 2014. And, to President Bush's considerable credit, when he said "all" public school children, he meant all such children. Certainly, many black Americans (myself included) were not big George W. Bush fans. However, but for "W"'s insistence that it was time for America's educational leaders to finally address what he called "the soft bigotry of low expectations," folks like me (i.e. concerned parents) would not be able to easily access the test scores of the different demographic groups attending the public schools in my home community and surrounding towns. Availability of this data allows us to closely scrutinize achievement test performance of the different demographic groups and thus compare, for example, how our local white and black students are faring relative to one another.
It is with this in mind that I suggest President Obama -- perhaps like New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and his stated desire to "reform" urban education -- has gotten it all wrong when it comes to improving the performance levels of black and Latino kids mired in some of America's worst-performing schools. What the affected communities need isn't so much a purge of second-rate teachers as it is an "accounting," if you will, of non-supportive parents. Imagine inner-city cops getting fired because the streets they patrol are frequented by criminals. Or trash collectors getting canned because folks with little apparent home training throw gum wrappers, fast-food restaurant bags and empty soda bottles on the streets where hard-working (and many times, poorly paid) sanitation workers collect bagged garbage.
Accordingly, as the president's FY2011 budget gets dissected by an increasingly divided Congress,
I hope some elected person (Democrat or Republican) will have both the insight and the courage to share with the president's top educational advisors that it's been "enough already" with the media "beat-down" of teachers. Why? Because at the end of any school day, high test scores are directly related to how supportive parents are of their children's academic endeavors. Or, perhaps better and more succinctly stated: "It's the parents, stupid."
http://www.nj.com/opinion/times/oped/index.ssf?/base/news-0/126803072631350.xml&coll=5
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