President Obama's Weekly Address 2/14/15: Giving Every Child, Everywhere, a Fair Shot

WASHINGTON, DC — In this week’s address, the President laid out his plan to ensure more children graduate from school fully prepared for college and a career. Our elementary and secondary schools are doing better, as demonstrated by the news this past week that our high school graduation rate has hit an all-time high, but there is still more that can be done to ensure every child receives a quality education. That’s why the President wants to replace No Child Left Behind with a new law that addresses the overuse of standardized tests, makes a real investment in preschool, and gives every kid a fair shot at success. He reminded everyone that when educating our kids, the future of our nation, we shouldn’t accept anything less than the best.

Democrats For Public Education: Reauthorize The ESEA

Right now, Congress is working to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). This is important. At its core, ESEA is all about equality and ensuring a level playing field for all children. Originally part of President Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, ESEA provides critical support to programs which level the playing field for our most at-risk students by allowing them equal access to educational opportunities.

All children, regardless of race, background, or income deserve resources and opportunities which will help them to learn and to grow. It’s our responsibility to help them cultivate a lifelong love of learning. And we must also provide the tools they need to get ahead, even if their communities can’t afford them. Teachers should be given more time to teach, and children should be given more time to learn. Unfortunately, under “No Child Left Behind”, we’ve seen far too much focus on high-stakes testing and not enough on student learning.

So it’s crucial that states receive the funding needed to create that level playing field. A few weeks ago, DPE Co-Chair US Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) introduced legislation with Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) allowing states to use federal funds to identify and eliminate redundant tests. It’s one of many proactive steps Democrats all across America are taking to make sure we don’t lose the forest for the trees by focusing on high-stakes standardized testing. These exams and the time spent preparing for them cannot come at the expense of meaningful education opportunities for our kids.

For the United States to remain the world’s most creative, dynamic nation, we need to make sure we’re leaving room for all subjects – not just the ones on these narrow tests. And maybe Kindergarten students don’t really need to take “college and career readiness” tests after all.

As DPE Co-Chair Representative Marcia Fudge (D-OH) recently said, “Giving our children a head start is only the beginning. We must also provide sufficient funding for our educators' professional development, learning aids, education technology, and useful assessment tools. With consistent funding and policies that adapt to our students' changing needs, more students will actually graduate high school.”

DPE Co-Chair Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) has strongly advocated for robust funding for our public schools within ESEA and has criticized Republican proposals to slash funding for critical programs within ESEA.

As Democrats for Public Education, we believe we should dial back the obsession on testing that is stressing kids out and stopping teachers from doing their jobs. Instead, we must turn up the focus on learning. That means focusing on engaging kids, providing instructional funding and leveling the economic playing field. ESEA is largest source of federal spending on elementary and secondary education. Its reauthorization is a chance to set a new vision for public education - one that that promotes opportunity, equality and excellence for all kids in all communities.

Thanks,

Steve Rosenthal
Democrats For Public Education, President

Rush Holt: Education Reform Based on Evidence, Not Ideology

From Congressman Rush Holt's Newsletter:

Last week, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, on which I serve, considered a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), currently known as No Child Left Behind.

While I agree with the basic principles of ESEA – that schools should be accountable for demonstrating that students are learning and that any definition of success must include all students and not just the best – I believe that the law needs reforming. I am working to improve teacher training, to increase funding for science and foreign language education, and to strengthen collection of student data so that we can see how well individual students are learning.

Education reform has always been bipartisan in the past. Since the first ESEA in 1965, Democrats and Republicans have worked together to close the skills gap and eliminate inequality in education, not just provide additional funds for schools to use as they please.

Unfortunately, the Committee considered two partisan bills that would move away from the crying need to close the gap between good schools and the many underperforming schools that are condemning millions of children to diminished opportunities in life. These flawed bills would let states and local school districts reduce education funding and even shift funds away from the schools with the most need. Particularly glaring, they ignored science education all together.

I voted for a comprehensive alternative that would address the concerns raised by parents, students, teachers, principals, and other school officials. You can watch a video of my remarks here.

Federal Procurement Workshop on Wednesday

On Wednesday morning, I’ll join representatives from the U.S. General Services Administration, the U.S. Small Business Association, and the New Jersey Small Business Development Centers to host a free federal procurement workshop for Central New Jersey small business owners.

We will share information about doing business with the federal government, an overview of the federal procurement process, and insight on obtaining federal contracts.

For more information or to RSVP, click here or call
Andrew Black of my staff at (609) 750-9365.

Federal Procurement Workshop for Small Business Owners

9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Monmouth County Library Headquarters

125 Symmes Drive

Manalapan, New Jersey

Daylight Saving Time Begins on Sunday

As a reminder, daylight saving time begins this Sunday, March 11 at 2:00 a.m. Be sure to remember to set your clocks forward by one hour.

Sincerely,

Rush Holt

Member of Congress

President Obama's Weekly Address 1/21/12: America is Open for Business

WASHINGTON, DC— In this week’s address, President Obama told the American people about steps his Administration is taking to make it easier for travelers to visit the United States, because increasing tourism will help local economies and support businesses looking to expand and hire. This plan to boost tourism is part of a series of actions the President has taken without Congress, because we can’t wait any longer to take the steps we need to help grow the economy and create jobs. President Obama also said that in next week’s State of the Union Address, he will outline his blueprint for how our elected leaders and all Americans can work together to create an economy that is built to last.

President Obama's Weekly Address 9/24/11: Strengthening the American Education System

WASHINGTON—In this week’s address, President Obama told the American people that it is time to raise the standards of our education system so that every classroom is a place of high expectations and high performance. On Friday, the President announced that states will have greater flexibility to find innovative ways of improving the quality of learning and teaching, so that we can strengthen performance in our classrooms and ensure that teachers are helping students learn rather than teaching to the test. By modernizing our schools and improving the education system, the United States can continue building an economy that lasts into the future and prepare the next generation to succeed in the global economy.

President Obama's Weekly Address 5/21/11: Congress Should Reform No Child Left Behind This Year

WASHINGTON – In his weekly address, President Obama praised the progress that schools like Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis have made, and he called on Congress to fix No Child Left Behind this year. To strengthen education in this country, we need to encourage reforms not driven by Washington, but by principals and parents so schools can determine what is best for their kids. And that is why it is so important that Congress replace No Child Left Behind this year, so that schools have that flexibility. Reform just cannot wait.

Taking On The Teachers

Consortiumnews.com 3/23/11
by Lawrence Davidson

Editor’s Note: The American Right has fully embraced Ronald Reagan’s mantra that “government is the problem” – and that dogma is being applied in a wide variety of ways, including a nationwide assault on the pay and job security of public school teachers.

Republican-controlled state legislatures and Republican governors are in the forefront of this campaign, advancing under the cover of parents’ concerns about their kids' schooling and behind the idea that standardized tests can be a cure-all. In this guest essay, Lawrence Davidson challenges the assumptions behind this effort:

The Florida state legislature has passed Bill 736, and Gov. Rick Scott has signed it. So this effort to "reform" teaching practices in the Florida public schools is now law.

But reform them how? According to the Miami Herald, the bill will eventually "tie teacher pay to student test scores, eliminate so-called tenure for new hires as of July 1 [all subsequent hires will get only yearly contracts] and end layoffs based on seniority."

It was, of course, a Republican-sponsored bill and that had the Democrats looking for flaws. It did not take them long to spot an obvious one.

According to the Florida House Minority leader Ron Saunders, D-Key West, "if you are basing a teacher’s pay on test scores, there’s going to be a natural incentive for the teachers to teach to the test, instead of, maybe, expanding other areas of interest."

The Republican response to this concern was to dismiss it as a false issue. According to Rep. Eric Fresen, R-Miami, who sponsored the bill, "As long as the students are learning, I don’t think there’s a problem with that."

The state of Florida is actually rather late in coming to this. The bill largely mimics the still-extent Bush administration policy known as "No Child Left Behind" which came into existence in 2003 and was overhauled by the Obama Administration in 2010.

As the Florida legislation suggests, this approach relies on assessment based on standardized tests and has made a lot of money for companies who put such tests together.

There are number of assumptions that lay behind all these efforts and here are some of them:

1. The American public school system is performing poorly.

2. This is the fault of bad teachers.

3. Getting rid of the tenure system will get rid of bad teachers.

4. Using standardized tests will allow you to measure necessary levels of learning for specific ages.

5. Having instituted such tests, the attainment of adequate scores means that both the student has successfully learned and the teacher has successfully taught.

It just so happens that all of these assumptions are problematic. Let’s take them one by one.

1. Is the American public school system performing poorly? Well, yes and no. There are plenty of supposedly scary statistics out there that show that the majority of public school students are not fully proficient in a number of academic areas, given a definition of proficiency set by standardized tests.

For instance, the U.S. Department of Education reports that, as of 2009, 17 percent of 12th graders are proficient in math and 18 percent are proficient in Science (let’s keep these percentages in mind), and that "in comparison to 1992, reading scores were lower in 2009."

However, these statistics beg the question of what criteria is being used to determine proficiency? Or, if you will, just what does it mean to be educated?

Historically (and here I mean from the dawn of civilization onward), the notion of educational proficiency has always been tied to making a living. In other words, either through apprenticeship or formal schooling, what most children have learned over the ages is what their economic environments required of them.

Applied to our own time this means that, for all students in all schools, there are two curricula. Whether you want to be a lawyer or an auto mechanic, the primary curriculum is vocational and the second one is, shall we say, elective.

This elective category may or may not include independent critical thinking which, in any case, is a pursuit that is often disapproved of by local school boards.

By the time American kids are in junior high school, they usually know the difference between what is vocationally valuable and what is not, and most gear their learning efforts to what they believe are their future career interests.

That means vocational learning will most often trump elective learning. It also means that it is not the school per se, or the teachers, that are actually setting the criteria for learning. It is the economy and the student’s local culture.

So, if the economy demands reading and writing abilities at the level of business memos and technical reports, that is the proficiency, on average, that you will get. On average, all learning beyond that, regardless of the courses taken, will be seen by the student as elective and will be absorbed (or not) depending on personal interest.

Ask yourself how many American students want to – or will be required to – know anything beyond basic math in their future workplace? Seventeen percent sounds like a roughly accurate number. How many are going to want to – or have to know – much science? Eighteen percent sounds about right.

Thirty years ago, computer savvy was not a job-related skill. Schools largely ignored it and relatively few people had real proficiency in this area. Today, the situation is reversed. So you see for most students, and their schools, useful knowledge is deemed to be employment knowledge.

Actually, almost all American schools, even the "failing" ones, deliver employment knowledge. You might think that this claim is off-base, but it really is not.

High-end public schools cater to students, most of whom by virtue of their cultural background, have professional career expectations. And that is the educational preparation they get. Just so, low-end schools (admittedly underfunded) cater to students, most of whom have very different expectations, and they are educated accordingly.

I am not claiming this is a good thing, only that this is the way it works. If you want to change it, you have to change culturally driven expectations and the structural nature of the economy.

Just looking at tests and teachers won’t do it. To achieve this sort of change means a lot of social rearrangement and revenue shifting. Historically, the U.S. has never been willing to do these things.

2. And that brings us to our second assumption. If you are not satisfied with the status quo in education, but are not willing to acknowledge where the real problems lie, you might be tempted to find a scapegoat.

So, it all becomes the fault of bad teachers.

First of all it should be determined what is meant by bad teaching. Do we define it by poor student scores on a standardized test? Or do we define it as the failure or inability to make a good faith effort to address the required material?

It should be kept in mind that you can have the first without the second. I would be very suspicious of the first definition because of the reasons given above. So let use the second definition. Given that meaning, are there bad teachers in our public school system? Yes there are.

But it is highly doubtful if, in terms of percentage, they number any more than bad administrators, bad bank managers, bad lawyers, bad doctors, and even bad Florida state politicians, etc.

Nor is it true that, allegedly unlike the other categories, teachers are "insulated from accountability." Almost every public school teacher in the country is under contract.

One assumes that failure to teach competently is a breach of a teacher’s contract. Just as in all other contractually governed employment settings, it is the administrator’s (the principal’s) job to document the situation and fire the worker who is not doing his or her job.....

Finish reading this essay by Lawrence Davidson >>> here

President Obama's Weekly Address: 3/13/10 Education for a More Competitive America & Better Future

The President discusses his blueprint for an updated Elementary and Secondary Education Act to overhaul No Child Left Behind, the latest step from his Administration to encourage change and success in America’s schools at the local level.