Well, if there was any worry about tensions between Barack Obama and the Clintons creating havoc for the Democrats come November, one issue that shouldn’t cause any worry is education. In speeches this past week, Obama and Bill Clinton sounded as though they had worked together intimately to devise a proposal to improve education in the United States.
At a campaign stop in Fargo, North Dakota on July 3, Obama responded to a question from a young audience member regarding education, and proceeded to outline his views and plan. Here are some highlights from Obama’s response, which you can watch and listen to in full on YouTube:
- We are in an international education competition: “The most important thing to make sure we are competitive in the 21st Century is our schools, how well we are educating our children….Schools in other countries work harder.”
- Our schools are still designed for the agricultural age, so we should have longer school schedules.
- NCLB and testing: “You don’t measure the quality of a school only with a single high-stakes standardized test.” We are pushing out art, music, and civics and teaching to the test.
- BUT: We have to raise standards in our schools.
- Other recommendations: pay our teachers more, more professional development for teachers, invest in early childhood education, college tuition credit to young people who engage in community service
Unfortunately, most of his recommendations will only continue and expand the current standardized and hierarchical approach that alienates young people and burns out teachers. Even his critique of a reliance on high-stakes testing went nowhere new as he reiterated the line about “higher standards” without describing what an alternative conception of such standards would be apart from tests.
Now here are the highlights from Bill Clinton’s comments on education during an interview with Jane Wales at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on July 5 [you can listen to the full interview as posted by Minnesota Public Radio, the education question begins just before 38 minutes in]:
- We are in an international education competition: “American kids actually do pretty well compared to our counterparts at the 4th grade level…the gap shows up at the 8th grade level and then it’s a chasm at high school.” We need to work as hard as schools in other countries and have a longer school schedule.
- “We still are basically in an agricultural age educational framework.”
- NCLB and testing: Our resources are going to the tests, we are teaching to the test, and cutting out art, music, history, etc.
- BUT: We need “a national commitment to … principals and superintendents that can actually be held accountable for results.” We need national standards with local control within that. We should use the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) as an evaluative assessment 3 times in an educational career.
- Other recommendations: pay our teachers more, and have better professional development. Find the 20 schools that are “internationally competitive,” see what they are doing and pay for it everywhere else.
Take a listen to both of those excerpts and hear how similar these two are on education: support for more of the same conventional educational thought, a soft critique of high-stakes tests combined with standard remarks about the need for more standards, and recommendations that either support the current system or will do little to make positive change (paying teachers more and providing more and better professional development for teachers being one exception).
Bill’s suggestion of the NAEP given just 3 times in an educational career was the only hint at a suggestion to reduce testing of young people, though the NAEP is riddled with many of the same problems inherent in most standardized academic tests, as Susan Ohanian, FairTest.org, and Gerald Bracey make clear. (It should also be noted that President Clinton did more for national standardized tests than perhaps anyone in the 1990s, here’s just one of many speeches of his on educational standards).
Obama, Bill Clinton and other political leaders emphasize the importance of education for our young people and the country, yet they speak largely from an economic framework and ignore the humanistic framework of education for human growth and happiness, and they strengthen the conventional system of heirarchy and standardization in education even though that goes against our values of freedom and the right to participate in decisions that affect oneself. Anyone know of political leaders who are framing education in terms of these values and human rights? They seem unfortunately few and very far between.