You had to wait until the very last seconds of President Obama’s news conference to get to his most substantial comments on education spending. When he got there, in response to Mara Liasson’s question about the difficulties of forging a bipartisan compromise, Obama made it clear he favors using the stimulus package to create incentives for reform and used education as an example of one area where both Republicans and Democrats need to change their approach.
Both Democrats and Republicans are going to have to think differently in order to come together and solve that problem. I think there are areas like education where some in my party have been too resistant to reform, and have argued only money makes a difference. And there have been others on the Republican side or the conservative side who said no matter how much money you spend, nothing makes a difference, so let’s just blow up the public school systems. And I think that both sides are going to have to acknowledge we’re going to need more money for new science labs, to pay teachers more effectively, but we’re also going to need more reform, which means that we’ve got to train teachers more effectively, bad teachers need to be fired after being given the opportunity to train effectively, that we should experiment with things like charter schools that are innovating in the classroom, that we should have high standards.
“It does seem to signal that the president isn’t planning to boost education spending without asking for something in return from the nation’s school system,” Alyson Klein of Politics K-12 sums up. The full transcript of the press conference is here.
