Education Challenges for A New President
President Barack Obama
Now that the pomp and circumstance, majesty and multitudes of the inauguration of our 44th President is in the history books, President Obama has “hit the ground running”.
He’s commanded a timeline for troop withdrawals from Iraq, mandated the closing of Guantanemo Bay within one year, and gathered his advisors to work on the economic catastrophes that seem to get worse each day. It remains to be seen just how quickly he can start tackling two other BIGGIE problems in the U.S. – jobs and education.
Economy, Jobs and Education are Closely Linked
President Obama ran on a platform that promised to fix jobs and the economy, and several well-intentioned ideas about fixing public education. What I hope is that he’ll see all three are interrelated.
Arne Duncan has been selected as Obama’s Secretary of Education. Everything I read about him offers conflicting theories on why he will/won’t be good at the job. Apparently, he has both fans and critics in Chicago, where he ran the schools. Latest statistics out of Chicago show a 25-50% graduation rate. Not much to commend there, but we shall see.
No Child Left Behind is due for revamping this year. Like Mr. Duncan, NCLB has fans and critics also. It remains to be seen how NCLB fits into the President’s agenda for stronger schools, or if it does.
Illiteracy, Jobs and the Economy
The Department of Education just released a report that shows one in seven (some 32 million U.S. adults) lack the reading skills to understand anything more difficult than a children’s picture book.
In our state, it is estimated that one in three adults are illiterate. And many of our children across the country are graduating without being able to read at a functional level, or compute basic math. And those are the lucky students who graduate. The statistics are much worse for dropouts.
Colleges and businesses spend billions of dollars remediating new students and employees to be able to function in classes or at a job. It’s no wonder businesses are seeking employees from other countries when those employees are not only cheaper to hire, but can perform their jobs without expensive remediation.
There are lots of people losing their jobs in our economy. It’s also true that many people in the U.S. are not qualified to hold the jobs available, especially the best jobs.
Any attempts to fix the economy MUST involve improving our educational system.
We need to be graduating students that have at least basic life skills and, hopefully, enough common sense to not be fooled by the likes of Bernie Madoff and his ilk.
Good Luck, Mr. President!
Brennan
