Day Three, March 27

This afternoon I was reading my daily chapter from Barack Obama's eye-opening book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream. Today's selection, a chapter entitled Opportunity, is the longest chapter in the book, and also one of the most practical from a political standpoint. Considering the many opportunities that Barack has been afforded in his life, one might expect to encounter inspiring tales of his youth spent living in Hawaii or Jakarta, or how he overcame racial or economic hardship to go on to attend Yale law school. Instead, almost the entirety of the 58-page chapter gives the Senator an opportunity to expand on opportunity of a different type, those that can (and must) be seized by all Americans if we are to compete in a global marketplace. He also uses the, er, opportunity to expand on his specific platforms regarding education policy, science and technology, and the environmental and energy crises we face in the 21st century.

It should come as no surprise that for this reader, a teacher, I am particularly interested in--and supportive of--Obama's outlook on education. I'm not a single issue voter, but education is one of my top three issues when it comes to any candidate, and Obama's views on the importance of education reform is one of the key things that draws me to him, not the other way around. In this selection from The Audacity of Hope (pgs 159-163), the author clearly outlines what American education is lacking, how he plans to reform it for students today as well as tomorrow, and what we stand to gain by putting such a plan into action. What follows is both a demonstration of Obama's understanding of the problems that are plaguing teachers and students around the country every day, but also proof-positive of his solid judgment and understanding of the importance of education reform to the continued well-being of the United States as a whole.


Throughout our history, education has been at the heart of a bargain this nation makes with its citizens: If you work hard and take responsibility, you'll have a chance for a better life. And in a world where knowledge determines value in the job market, where a child in Los Angeles has to compete not just with a child in Boston but also with millions of children in Bangalore and Beiking, too many of America's schools are not holding up their end of the bargain.
In 2005 I paid a visit to Thornton Township High School, a predominantly black high school in Chicago's southern suburbs. My staff had worked with teachers there to organize a youth town hall meeting--representatives of each class spent weeks conducting surveys to find out what issues their fellow students were concerned about and then presented the results in a series of questions to me. At the meeting they talked about violence in the neighborhoods and a shortage of computers in their classrooms. But their number one issue was this: Because the school district couldn't afford to keep teachers for a full school day, Thornton let out every day at 1:30 in the afternoon. With the abbreviated schedule, there was no time for students to take science lab or foreign language classes.
How come we're getting shortchanged? they asked me. Seems like nobody even expects us to go to college, they said.
They wanted more school.
We've become accustomed to such stories, of poor black and Latino children languishing in schools that can't prepare them for the old industrial economy, much less the information age. But the problems with our educational system aren't restricted to the inner city. America now has one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world. By their senior year, American high school students score lower on math and science tests than most of their foreign peers. Half of all teenagers can't understand basic fractions, half of all nine-year-olds can't perform basic multiplication or division, and although more American students than ever are taking college entrance exams, only 22 percent are prepared to take college-level classes in English, math and science.
I don't believe government alone can turn these statistics around. Parents have the primary responsibility for instilling an ethic of hard work and educational achievement in their children. But parents rightly expect their government, through the public schools, to serve as full partners in the educational process-- just as it has for earlier generations of Americans.
Unfortunately, instead of innovation and bold reform of our schools--the reforms that would allow the kids at Thornton to compete for the jobs at Google---what we've seen from government for close to two decades has been tinkering around the edges and a tolerance for mediocrity. Partly this is a result of ideological battles that are as outdated as they are predictable. Many conservatives argue that money doesn't matter in raising educational achievement; that the problems in public schools are caused by hapless bureaucracies and intransigent teachers' unions; and that the only solution is to break up the government's education monopoly by handing out vouchers. Meanwhile, those on the left often find themselves defending an indefensible status quo, insisting that more spending alone will improve educational outcomes.
Both assumptions are wrong. Money does matter in education--otherwise why would parents pay so much to live in well-funded suburban school districts?--and many urban and rural schools still suffer from overcrowded classrooms, outdated books, inadequate equipment, and teachers who are forced to pay out of pocket for basic supplies. But there's no denying that the way many public schools are managed poses at least as big a problem as how well they're funded.
Our task, then, is to identify those reforms that have the highest impact on student achievement, fund them adequately, and eliminate those programs that don't produce results. And in fact we already have hard evidence of reforms that work: a more challenging and rigorous curriculum with emphasis on math, science and literacy skills; longer hours and more days to give children the time and sustained attention they need to learn; early childhood education for every child, so they're not already behind on their first day of school; meaningful, performance-based assessments that can provide a fuller picture of how a student is doing; and the recruitment and training of transformative principals and more effective teachers.
This last point--the need for good teachers--deserves emphasis. Recent studies show that the single most important factor in determining a student's achievement isn't the color of his skin or where he comes from, but who the child's teacher is. Unfortunately, too many of our schools depend on inexperienced teachers with little training in the subjects they're teaching, and too often those teachers are concentrated in already struggling schools. Moreover, the situation is getting worse, not better: Each year, school districts are hemorrhaging experienced teachers as the Baby Boomers reach retirement, and two million teachers must be recruited in the next decade just to meet the needs of rising enrollment.
The problem isn't that there's no interest in teaching; I constantly meet young people who've graduated from top colleges and have signed up, through programs like Teach for America, for two-year stints in some of the country's toughest public schools. They find the work extraordinarily rewarding; the kids they teach benefit from their creativity and enthusiasm. By by the end of two years, most have either changed careers or moved to suburban schools--a consequence of low pay, a lack of support from the educational bureaucracy, and a pervasive feeling of isolation.
If we're serious about building a twenty-first-century school system, we're going to have to take the teaching profession seriously. This means changing the certification process to allow a chemistry major who wants to teach to avoid expensive additional course work; pairing up new recruits with master teachers to break their isolation; and giving proven teachers more control over what goes on in their classrooms.
It also means paying teachers what they're worth. There's no reason why an experienced, highly qualified, and effective teacher shouldn't earn #100,000 annually at the peak of his or her career. Highly skilled teachers in such critical fields as math and science--as well as those willing to teach in the toughest urban schools--should be paid even more.
There's just one catch. In exchange for more money, teachers need to become more accountable for their performance--and school districts need to have great ability to get rid of ineffective teachers.
So far, teacher's unions have resisted the idea of pay for performance, in part because it could be disbursed at the whim of a principal. The unions also argue--rightly, I think--that most school districts rely solely on test scores to measure teacher performance, and that test scores may be highly dependent on factors beyond any teacher's control, like the number of low-income or special-needs students in their classroom.
But these aren't insoluble problems. Working with teacher's unions, states and school districts can develop better measures of performance, ones that combine test data with a system of peer review (most teachers can tell you with amazing consistency which teachers in their schools are really good, and which are really bad). And we can make sure that nonperforming teachers no longer handicap children who want to learn.
Indeed, if we're to make investments required to revamp our schools, then we will need to rediscover our faith that every child can learn. Recently, I had the chance to visit Dodge Elementary School, on the West Side of Chicago, a school that had once been near the bottom on every measure but that is in the midst of a turnaround. While I was talking to some of the teachers about the challenges they faced, one young teacher mentioned what she called the "These Kids Syndrome"--the willingness of society to find a million excuses for why "these kids" can't learn; how "these kids come from tough backgrounds" or "these kids are too far behind."
"When I hear that term, it drives me nuts," the teacher told me. "They're not 'these kids.' They're our kids."
How America's economy performs in the years to come may depend largely on how well we take such wisdom to heart.

This passage was taken from pages 159 through pages 163 of The Audacity of Hope, copyright 2006, Barack Obama, published by Three Riverse press, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.