President Obama’s Plan for Education
President Obama made his first speech yesterday about the state of education in America and what his plans are for fixing it. His education reform plan is heavy on the charter schools, which I admit I haven’t yet gotten off the fence about. While I like the idea of a charter school, I’m wary of any new plan that could conceivably take money away from the standard, run-of-the-mill public schools.
The whole point, to me, of a good public school system, is that every kiddo has access to well-taught knowledge and information, not just the kids with parents who have the time and energy at the end of the day to create, and fight for, a new and different kind of school.
Generally speaking, the kids whose parents have the get-up-and-go to battle the powers that be for their kids’ educations are usually the kids who will grow up knowing, and possibly taking for granted, that they’ll be going to college after high school. I want everyone to have a solid education, but I especially want it for the kids who are shuffled off into the under-funded public schools with burnt-out teachers.
Obama’s merit-based teacher pay idea concerns me because as much as I want the awesome teachers to bring home a living wage, I really don’t want the teachers who are trying to perform miracles on little or no classroom funding to get low pay (or the boot) because they haven’t figured out how to grow six more arms and do open-heart surgery using only a rubber band and some paper clips.
I’m stoked about Obama’s support of preschool programs and early education; that’s huge. Also, I’m happy that he’s trying to lengthen the academic calendar. He’s right, most of us aren’t farmers who need the kids home for the summer to help out. The ten-year-old Alexa of Summer Vacations Past is going to show up and slap me for supporting a summer-vacation decrease, but there it is.
Finally, I agree with President Obama that the old education system isn’t working. Everyone can sit around discussing change indefinitely, but at some point jumping on in and implementing the changes has to happen or we’re all just talking heads who get nothing accomplished. If the changes work, we can all smile for a while and breathe big fat sighs of relief. And if they don’t, we can start over and make some more changes.
So I’m taking a deep breath and letting the education reform begin. And by “letting,” I mean that I’m accepting what will occur regardless of how I feel because (a) I’m not the President, and (b) I don’t have a direct line to the Oval Office (if I did, we could have avoided that whole NCLB debacle…all I need is a red phone and a little more power and I think we would all sleep easier at night).
Posted by Alexa Harrington
