In outlining his plan to improve America’s schools, President Barack Obama pointed out that “what’s required is not simply new investments, but new reforms.”
While the reforms championed by Obama are worthwhile, none is new. Charter schools, merit pay for teachers and expanded early childhood education have been discussed in every state, including Georgia, for a long time. As state officials and educators recognize, such steps could go a long way toward raising student achievement.
The problem, in other words, isn’t a lack of ideas, but a lack of political will to implement changes that will be costly, unpopular and a threat to cherished institutions such as teacher tenure.
For example, despite research showing that preschool enhances the odds of educational success for poor children, many state legislatures have resisted investing in such programs, arguing that it amounts to free day care. Even Georgia, which pioneered universal pre-k for 4-year-olds, never expanded its efforts to at-risk 3-year-olds.
Charter schools have also encountered resistance. With the freedom to hire staffs without standard contracts, charter schools have drawn disdain from teacher unions and hostility from local school boards who resent their loss of control over those schools.

Basing teacher pay on merit also makes sense to most Americans, but education groups have fought to preserve lock-step salary systems in which all raises are across-the-board, paying a mediocre teacher as much as a great one. They argue that there are no fair ways to assess how well teachers have performed, which, if true, would make education different than virtually every other field.
The president has set aside about $100 billion in new funding for public schools in his economic-stimulus package. But that money comes with expectations. Obama has signaled that he’s unwilling to accept the tired old excuses for doing nothing and is more than willing to call out those who fall back on those excuses.
In a speech earlier this month to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, he assailed the shell game that some states are playing with standards.
“Today’s system of 50 different sets of benchmarks for academic success means fourth-grade readers in Mississippi are scoring nearly 70 points lower than students in Wyoming — and they’re getting the same grade,” Obama said.

“Eight of our states are setting their standards so low that their students may end up on par with roughly the bottom 40 percent of the world. That’s inexcusable,” he said. “That’s why I’m calling on states that are setting their standards far below where they ought to be to stop low-balling expectations for our kids.”
He also pointed out that schools can no longer tolerate poor teaching.
“If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances but still does not improve, there’s no excuse for that person to continue teaching,” he said. “I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.”
Obama encouraged innovation, noting the success of some charter schools. Charters are public schools that operate under customized contracts that free them from most outside regulations as long as they reach specified achievement benchmarks.
The president encouraged oversight of charter schools to ensure that they’re held accountable for the promised results, but he also urged states to “lift caps on the number of allowable charter schools wherever such caps are in place.”

Georgia now has 113 charter schools, a number that is expected to grow as the Legislature continues to remove funding obstacles.
The president also criticized the failure of many states to build comprehensive student-tracking systems that follow a child from pre-k to college. While Georgia finally has a system up and running, the state probably wasted as much money as AIG paid out in bonuses in botched efforts to develop it. (At least $50 million was frittered away on technology that never delivered its promised results during convicted felon Linda Schrenko’s reign at the state Department of Education.)
Obama acknowledges that excellent schools are not the result of raising the bar and advising students to jump higher, that teachers have to be better trained and better paid, that states have to lengthen school schedules and school days and that parents have to take a more active role in their child’s education “because government, no matter how wise or efficient, cannot turn off the TV or put away the video games.”
Obama recounted his own mother’s dedication, waking him at 4:30 a.m. to teach him lessons from a correspondence course. She wanted to fill in the gaps she felt existed in his schooling. “And it’s because she did this day after day, week after week, because of all the other opportunities and breaks that I got along the way … that I can stand here today as president of the United States,” Obama said.

None of the president’s reforms should be regarded as a panacea. Early childhood education gives poor kids a boost in kindergarten and first grade, but the head start erodes if children later attend low-performing schools.
Nor will attaching “charter” to a school’s title or extending the school day foster achievement unless real, meaningful change happens inside the classroom. Teaching the same “one-size-fits-all” curriculum in a charter school or for an additional two hours a day won’t do anything.

The research on salary incentives for teachers is limited, although several studies are under way. In 1998, Massachusetts offered a $20,000 signing bonus to attract and keep teachers in struggling schools, but it discovered that day-to-day working conditions played a far larger role in teachers’ decisions than money. One of the nation’s experts on teacher retention, Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania, has found that working conditions matter a lot more than policy-makers realize.
“Look, I am a former high school teacher,” he said. “I would still be doing it, even with the low pay. But it was all the other stuff, the discipline problems, the lack of support and the lack of say, that made me leave.”
Judged on funding, the federal government is a bit player on the education stage, providing about 9 cents of every dollar spent on k-12 schools. But by speaking out so early and so emphatically in his presidency on education, even amid the deepening economic crisis, Obama has delivered a message that everyone, from the federal government to parents, must recognize as urgent.