President's online town hall

President Barack Obama had an online town meeting yesterday, and the L.A. Times has posted the full text. A few questions and answers of interest from here:


The very first question was about education: Our first question comes from Boston, Massachusetts, on the topic of education: "The Founding Fathers believe that there is no difference between a free society and an educated society. Our educational system, however, is woefully inadequate. How do you plan to restore education as a right and core cultural value in America?"

His answer?
I'm here only because of the education I received. I wasn't born into wealth, I wasn't born into fame, but I had parents who cared about education and grandparents who cared about education, and I was lucky enough, through scholarships and sacrifice on the part of my family, to get the best education that America has to offer.

Too many of our children aren't getting that kind of education. It's not because their parents don't believe in the value of education; it's not because these young people are less talented. It's because of two reasons: One, in many cases, our schools are under-resourced.

There aren't enough teachers; the teachers aren't getting enough of the training they need for the classroom; there's a shortage of supplies. Some of the schools that I visited during the course of traveling around the country just shock the conscience. There are schools that I've seen that were built in the 1850s that are still being used but haven't been upgraded the way they need to.

That sounds familiar! But he isn't done yet:

Now, there's a second problem, though, and it's one that money alone cannot solve, and that is that we have a school system that was designed for the agricultural era -- there's a reason why we've got three months off during the summer. That's supposed to be when everybody is working on -- out on the farm and bringing in harvest. Okay, I've got to interrupt here. Could we PLEASE GET RID OF THIS IDEA! It isn't true! What are farmer doing in July and August? Maybe a bit of weeding. Worrying about rain. Tending to animals. THEY AREN'T HARVESTING. In fact, (any Laura Ingalls Wilder readers out there?) in farming communities they would run school during two times of the year: the winter and the summer, because that's when the kids were NOT needed on the farm. I would be really happy if I never heard this fallacy again.

Back to the president:

And it's not just the amount of time our kids are spending, it's how our classrooms are designed, how curriculums are structured, how things like teacher promotion and training happen.

So a lot of times in Washington we get an argument about money versus reform. And the key thing to understand about our education system is we need more resources and we need reform. If we just put more money into a system that's designed for the 19th century and we're in the 21st, we're not going to get the educational outcomes we need. On the other hand, if we talk a lot about reform but we're not willing to put more resources in, that's not going to work.

If we set aside his lamentable lack of knowledge about the school calendar, I'm still a bit unclear on how our schools are running in a way that's appropriate for the 1800's. Any ideas?

He goes on to call for more early childhood ed, more about science, and then goes on to teachers:
...let's focus on the most important ingredient in the school, and that's the teacher. Let's pay our teachers more money. Let's give them more support. Let's give them more training. Let's make sure that schools of education that are training our teachers are up to date with the best methods to teach our kids. And let's work with teachers so that we are providing them measures of whether they're effective or not, and let's hold them accountable for being effective.

Now that doesn't mean just a single high-stakes standardized test. It also means that we're working with teachers to determine, what's the best way to discipline -- maintain discipline in a classroom? What's the best way to get kids excited about science? Giving them the time and the resources to improve, but also having high standards of expectation in terms of their performance.

And then he talks again about charters and performance pay. Unfortunately, while he seems to be beginning to grasp the notion that one cannot measure teachers based on how that year's class does on a standardized test (something which I worry his Secretary of Ed is not as clear on), he does seem to want to beat away at the notion that there some way of "measuring outcomes" with teachers, as if they had a certain number of whoozits they had to assemble in an hour.