Voluntary efforts by parents, educators are foremost in the president's speech. He also details plans for merit pay hikes for teachers and financial incentives for states that cut the drop-out rate.
By Christi Parsons
12:26 PM EDT, March 10, 2009
Reporting from Washington
President Barack Obama laid out his vision for a 21st century education system this morning, unveiling plans for federal grant programs meant to inspire better performance but also calling on states, schools and parents to take part even where there is no financial incentive.
Obama's blueprint includes a controversial plan to hike pay for high-performing teachers, as well as money for states that raise student standards, track student progress and cut the drop-out rate.
Yet much of Obama's speech to business leaders with the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce -- his first address on education since taking office -- focused not on detailing federal programs but on encouraging Americans to raise the standards on their own.
He called for longer school days and school years, more charter schools and a greater effort to recruit promising candidates to the teaching profession, as well as a renewed commitment from parents to support their children's education.
"Yes, we need more money," Obama said. "Yes, we need more reform. Yes, we need to hold ourselves more accountable for every dollar we spend. . . . The bottom line is that no government policies will make any difference unless we also hold ourselves more accountable as parents."
The plan echoed themes of Obama's presidential campaign, including his controversial call for merit pay for teachers. It also built on recent remarks to a joint session of Congress, in which the president set a national goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by the year 2020.
After months of deriding President Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program for having "left the money behind," Obama talked about specific funding decisions in his budget and in his recently passed economic stimulus plan.
But in the most detailed description of his education reform plan to date, Obama dwelt on changes he hoped academic and governmental institutions would undertake voluntarily and without any federal spending at all.
The president's plan includes grants for states that improve their early-childhood education, push for uniform quality standards and boost efforts to help disadvantaged children.
With money available through the stimulus plan, the U.S. Department of Education will work with states to collect data about student and teacher performance.
The White House plan promises to invest in scaling up innovative teacher preparation models, and to support drop-out prevention programs with federal money.
It would also expand a federal program that hikes pay for teachers based on their performance.
The president promised to raise the maximum Pell Grant for college students and to index it to inflation and to expand the Perkins Loan Program.
But the president also devoted much of his time describing his vision of an American public education system that challenges students from "cradle to career" and prepares them to compete with students around the world.
"It is time to prepare every child, everywhere in America, to out-compete any worker, anywhere in the world," Obama said. "It is time to give all Americans a complete and competitive education from the cradle up through a career. . . . America's entire education system must once more be the envy of the world, and that's exactly what we intend to do."
