Obama Wrap-up Part III: Professor F and his own-goals on K-12 education

Not Hot for Teacher: We are dumber, weaker, and less inquiring after 8 years of Obama's education policy.

Whereas with many other policy areas, in particular healthcare, Mr. Obama was overbearing and inattentive to the objections of the public, with k-12 education he never attained the level of meddling that perhaps we would expect. 

Six of our presidents were schoolteachers, and three of them were professors (John Q. Adams, W. Wilson, Barack Obama) prior to reaching office. William H. Taft became a law professor after he was in office, as well as chief justice of the Supreme Court. Education in the United States is considered the foundation of raising children to be citizens that have the cognitive tools to be a well adapted and free participant in his/her community. 

I've personally always been an example of someone that typically didn't enjoy formal education, I like to read on my own, learn things by myself, and generally dislike authority. But for a broader community, there needs to be a system to educate the masses; after all can all children be self-taught or home schooled? Reasonably we can assume not. So how did our professor-in-chief do as the headmaster so to speak of the USA?

Drop-out rates

Is the failure of high school education affecting

us on a macro level? (John Trever, Albuquerque Journal)

In 2009 President Obama took the reins of the presidency and made a poignant statement during his first State of the Union address: 

"[E]very American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It's not just quitting on yourself, it's quitting on your country." 

Obama's statement made a salient point, but it in many cases just validated the unpopular and failed No Child Left Behind policy of George W. Bush. Obama's focus in that statement was on the finish line, not on the race path.  

Nevertheless, we should acknowledge that under Pres. Obama, HS graduation rates have risen from 79% in 2010-11 to 83.2% in 2014-15. Is the credit his? I'm inclined to say we should just be thankful that it's happening. There's no reason to gripe about the positive developments. Has it been great across the board? Bizarrely in the three terms between 2010 and 2013, the District of Columbia spiked its rates from 58% to 70% and then back down to 58.9% before climbing again over the next two years. In 2010 they had had the worst rate in the country besides New Mexico's. What the hell happened?

Note: Obama's Sec. of Education until 2015 was Arne Duncan, former superintendent of Chicago Public Schools. He was succeeded by John King, Jr., former Education Commissioner for New York State.

Obama actually had a very encouraging policy on
charter schools, perhaps as a concession to his inner-city
loyalists as opposed to the teacher unions. (Education
Writers Association).

Less is best?

One explanation for the successes that did come under Obama may be that he was aware through his close friendships with a number of pragmatic Democratic municipal officials such as former Newark Mayor Cory Booker that his own party's stifling of charter schools would do them no favours with African American voters on the local level. Under Obama, charter schools went from educating only 3% of American public school students in 2009 to 6% in 2016 according to the Washington Post. According to their analysis, this was not by mistake; Obama and his cohorts actively cooperated with state governors eager to raise their scores by embracing charter schools. In 2015 the administration asked the US Congress to increase funding by close to 50% to charter schools, a policy that left the far left Democracy Now! programme chagrined and asking about oversight and regulations over these schools.

Pardon me for speaking such words, but good job Pres. Obama (fingers uncrossed)! Apparently for the folks at Democray Now! the objective is not to increase high school students' graduations and success, but who we spend the money with to do it. My impression is that this was one avenue where Obama decided that it was better to be pragmatic as opposed to ideologically anchored. The critics of charter schools choose to focus on the failing ones, without acknowledging that it is much easier to revoke a school charter than it is to close a failing public school. Market information shows that in Detroit, considered ground zero for the failure of public education systems (a student enrollment that has plummeted by 60% from 2006-2015) while charter schools have blossomed with a growth in enrollment of 79% over the same period. The people that are in most need of a reliable and consistent education for their children are not choosing charter schools due to capitalist conspiracies, they have simply lost faith in public education. Mr. Obama may not wave the flag as proudly about his charter school policy, but these parents owe him a genuine and sincere debt of gratitude for giving them what they asked for. Politifact claimed that his promise to double funding for the charter schools was incomplete by the end of 2016, but in my view the relative success is enough, and I approve of the ground that was gained under this president.

Race to the wastebasket

In 2009 one of Obama's first legislative initiatives was approved, the American Recovery and 

Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and under it the educational system implemented the Race to the Top (R2T) competitive grant for public schools, disbursing $4.35 billion in funding to qualifying institutions. Instead of being a boon to public education, however, R2T proved to be just as much of a dud as the rest of Obama's stimulus packages. California failed three times to qualify for R2T, while Washington state qualified eventually in 2011. Now that Obama's term is running out, California ranks near the bottom of the rankings for K-12 achievement with a D+, while the best scores are earned by Massachusetts with a B according to EdWeek.

Common Confusion

Common Core's key flaw was that its reliance

on alternative methodologies alienated parents 

that could not help their children with their

homework.

One  federal education initiative that became a major issue during Obama's term was not necessarily his brainchild in the same way as the ACA and ARRA were. Nevertheless, as Common Core began to gain the support of America's corporate and financial all-stars like Bill Gates, Obama plugged Common Core as an essential innovation in American K-12 education. Until his entrance onto the scene however, no one on either the right or the left had much paid attention to this initiative, which was backed both by Democratic educational professionals and big business executives. 

What the new standards' advocates failed to reckon with was the natural distrust of centralized authority among the American Right, and the natural opposition to corporate involvement in any publicly owned enterprise among the American Left as in the profits that would go to text  book companies. Parents were also incensed at the convoluted methodology, particularly in mathematics, of the new teaching styles included in Common Core. Among the strange advice given by its advocates was that parents shouldn't try to help their kids with their homework if they couldn't use these methods. This bizarre suggestion runs counter to years of viewing parents as an important source of support in a child's education.

Unlike the ACA, Common Core failed to attain the public support that the healthcare bill did, mostly because its corporate and federal government backing made it suspect among the progressive base, while it was also left to languish in the queue behind the ACA past the 2010 Midterm elections which precipitated gridlock between Congress and the President. By 2015, content to make any progress at all on instituting national standards, Pres. Obama instituted the Every Student Succeeds Act, a watered down version of  the No Child Left Behind Act. Conspicuously, one compromise made was that student performances on statewide exams would not be instituted. This was a clear concession to teacher unions. 

It is yet unknown whether the ESSA legislation will lead to any improvement in nationwide educational standards, but one thing that it did leave out was a mandate obligating states to adopt Common Core. It is very likely that this massive federal government intervention into the state-run educational standards had been successfully adopted, the incoming Trump administration would have set to work dismantling it. Several states that had once instituted Common Core had by 2016 already repealed it. 

Overall Grade: C+. Even if Obama did not make the major education reforms necessary to completely overhaul the nation's public school system, he also did not institute many of the most invasive and destructive intrusions that his party has advocated for years. His charter school policy also helped provide needy parents with choices in their child's preferred method of education.