OBAMA/ Education and the perils of repetitiveness

 “For decades,” President Barack Obama reminded the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce on March 10 when he addressed its concerns about education, “Washington has been trapped in the same stale debates that have paralyzed progress and perpetuated our educational decline.” Just as in the campaign, in which the idea of choice was fostered by our president as long as it did not center on parental behavior regarding where children are educated, so now all of the terms of the “stale debates” have once again been reiterated - “We’ve let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short…” - in addition to overarching platitudes: “The future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens…. We have a legacy of excellence…”. And then the statistics: “In 8th grade math, we’ve fallen to 9th place [in the world]. Singapore’s middle-schoolers outperform ours three to one. Just a third of our 13- and 14-year-olds can read as well as they should…”.

Where is the crack in the wall of all this repetitiveness? “I’m calling on our nation’s governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity,” Obama went on. Same ideas as last time out, different packaging: higher standards once again, only now, bigger promises of funding for No Child Left Behind but this time assuring “that the money is tied to results.” It was this very idea for which so many anti-Republican critics lambasted the previous administration’s take on education, accusing it of being too hard-edged in demanding results while being unwilling to fund them. Like Obama, Bush also lamented the dead weight supported by teachers’ unions -teachers in the system who are not functioning, not doing their jobs while retaining high salaries and coveted positions - and chose to rectify this by higher standards and assessments (which included, Mr. President, the thinking skills you mention here and not simply bubbling in test sheets - although many people I’ve encountered in my 20 years of teaching who have been against what they have alleged to be the Republican or conservative take on education have assumed, a priori - and it has become quite a cliché, I need to add - that when Republicans or conservatives talk about standards they are excluding any kind of higher thinking or creativity. And my hunch is that they assume this because the idea of conservativism, whether it be religious or political or both, is tied in their minds to an adherence to a moral tradition they feel must of necessity be questioned if one is to engage in higher thinking or creativity. Or to put it more crassly: conservatives are stupid because adhering to tradition implies that you don’t think independently.) Conservatively, Obama is stressing “greater accountability” again now, calling on states to reform their charter rules and “lift caps on the number of allowable charter schools.”

I could go on here listing the similarities as well as the nuanced differences between the stance of this new administration and that of the previous one, but what I’d rather point out is this: pick up a copy of the Torah and read the history of Israel from the creation account up through the death of Moses, and one thing will become clear: that over and over again, a nation that gets too comfortable with itself and stops looking for - betrays - its own origin, is defeated at the hands of its enemies. Or to put it in 2009 terms, whatever the ideological bent of the U.S. executive and legislative branches, no gaps in reading and math scores are going to get closed in a nation that does not first educate to a more fundamental need - the need for meaning and what that leads the human heart to once the human heart faces up to it. In that sense, education reform must begin at the top. Then and only then will reform trickle down to the young.