Education policy notes

One of the good things about being a new president is that you can address a lot of issues simultaneously, while the opposition can only block a few. While the Republicans in Congress are spending all their energon cubes blocking the stimulus, Obama is moving toward fixing a lot of the structural things that need fixing, like our education system.

In my (admittedly uneducated) view, there are four basic things holding down the U.S. education system:

1. Violence in schools

2. Poor teacher quality

3. Lack of national standards

4. Summer vacation

(Note that "not enough funding" is NOT on this list, since we spend plenty of money on education, even in most poor districts.)

The roadblocks to successful education reform have come from both sides of the political spectrum, and from pure institutional momentum. "Liberal" teachers' unions have blocked performance-based pay schemes, clung to tenure, and been suspicious of charter schools; conservatives have fought tooth and nail against national standards for tests and curricula, as well as against teacher pay raises and federal education spending. And no one is sure why summer vacation is still around.

Which is why it's impressive to see that Obama, according to his big educatin speech is tackling almost all these issues and taking on entrenched interests of both the liberal and conservative types. He wants to increase use of charter schools (and cull the bad ones), increase performance-based pay, reduce or get rid of teacher tenure, establish national standards, and cut down or get rid of summer vacation. All things I heartily support.

Education is one of our big glaring failures compared to other rich nations (the others being infrastructure, health care, and crime). We used to be the best-educated nation on Earth, but now we import much of our talent from other countries. Our native-born populace has been reduced to working for overpaid government contractors and selling overpriced houses to Indian immigrant entrepreneurs (OK, tat's a huge exaggeration, but doesn't it make a nice sentence?). Other countries caught up in the education race and then some, and it's time that we got up off our giant ignorant butt and clawed our way back up the ranks.

What it takes to do that is leadership that is intelligent, non-ideological, pragmatic, visionary, and aggressive. We did not have that before. We appear to have it now.