Not many things make me angrier than hearing someone who has nothing to do with education talk about how to solve our problems. I say "our" problems because I am a public school teacher. The success  of our educational system will determine the future of this great country, and I concede that we need reform. However, Obama's recommendations are just a continuation of the failed educational reforms of the Bush administration. I just want to note that I am very fond of Bush, but NCLB (No Child Left Behind) is the single worst piece of legislation in the history of education. What really troubles me is that the recommendations of conservative republicans are not any better.

Consider this scenario: Johnny chooses not to do his work because he does not feel like it. You tell Johnny that the assignment is not optional and a grade will be taken to which he responds, "Why should I care." You send Johnny to tutorials to do the assignment but Johnny just marks random answers and turns it in. Johnny is sent to the principal for punishment, and it seems to have motivated him to do his work. However, Johnny keeps reverting back to disrupting class and not doing his work. Johnny's mom wants to know why the teacher and the principal pick on good ol Johnny. After repeating this process several times, the state tells the principal that she disciplines Johnny too much, so the principal tells the teacher to try to stop sending Johnny to the office .  Johnny's laziness and misbehavior becomes more severe because he now knows that he will get away with it. Johnny fails for the year and has to repeat the grade. Johnny parents blame the teacher. Johnny fails the next year as well but the state pressures the principal to pass Johnny anyway so that Johnny will not be hurt psychologically. Johnny moves to the next grade level which is required to take a state assessment. Johnny fails the state assessment miserably.

The student that Johnny represents is not one in a million. It is conservatively 1 out of 20. The solution is not "we need better teachers in the classroom" Mr. President. In a class of 20, how does a teacher motivate and teach this student while still providing instruction to the other 19? Consider that next time you hear people call teachers failures because they don't "effectively prepare" students for state assessments. Think about how high the passage rates are in the suburbs and how low they are in the inner cities. Do all of the good teachers prefer to teach in the suburbs?  Not likely. Keep in mind that the inner city schools pay higher salaries than the suburb districts. You can be sure that higher salaries attract talented teachers.
 
 
 Politicians cannot get a handle on education because they approach it from a flawed paradigm. This paradigm is rarely challenged because most politicians (who at the state and national level run education) have never set foot in a public school classroom. Their kids very likely don't attend public school for that matter, which allows them to implement the policies that will get them reelected rather than the policies that will actually improve our public schools. The problems in education are not a result of lack of funding, bad teachers, bad administrators or any of the other nonsense you hear from the media. The real problem is the entitlement philosophy and the declining moral character that has infected and stifled the intellectual capabilities of our young people.

Liberals and conservatives like to say that we need to hold our public schools and teachers more accountable for the education of our young people. Fine, but if you hold the teachers accountable for the students performance can you at least let the teacher hold the student accountable for their performance?

We have a choice of either raising our expectations of student achievement to where it should be, the level that it was before standards based education, or we will keep the bar low. It sounds like a no-brainer but our state and national Congress are having a tough time with it and lean toward the latter because they don't want to see students fail. I guess we could ask our high school seniors to add, subtract, multiply, and divide in their math courses. What is incredibly sad, though, is that some (like Johnny) would find a way to fail that class. The former will result in students failing and repeating a grade if they do not work hard to learn the material. The latter will allows students to promote to a new grade level while learning nothing. Which is worse? For America's sake, I hope that we all know the answer to that question.