Last Monday, President Obama released to Congress the brand new “Blueprint for Reform”, or his administration?s attempt to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. However, this Blueprint is no more than the product of the pressure that the Democratic Party put on Obama to overturn No Child Left Behind (NCLB), Bush?s 2001 reauthorization of ESEA. Despite NCLB?s overwhelming faults, it at least was somewhat successful in the area in which the Blueprint completely fails: the articulation of actual, specific steps to reform education.
Obama?s Blueprint reads like an invitation to attend public school in some distant, wealthy utopian society. Tossing around buzzwords like “raising standards” and “accessing achievement”, this plan aspires to perfect public education through a passive method of “supporting progress.” Besides its imprecision, the Blueprint?s problem is that it recommends solving America?s education problems by throwing money at the issue without priorities. For a country $12 trillion in debt, does blindly “creating grants” and “accessing funding” seem like a plausible solution to an enormous problem? In two words: absolutely not.
The Blueprint identifies five major goals to be completed by 2020: to foster college- and career-ready students, implement effective educators, provide equal opportunity, raise the bar for excellence and promote continuous improvement. Accompanying each vague goal is a ?detailed? list of even vaguer sub-goal objectives, called “A New Approach”. The ?college-ready students? objectives, for example, are “preparing college- and career-ready students”, “rewarding success” and “turning around low-performing schools”, begging the question: why are these objectives entitled A New Approach when they are exactly what ESEA, and each of its reauthorizations, set out to do?
The most atrocious aspect of the Blueprint, the School Turnaround Grants program, suggests taking “rigorous interventions” in failing schools. These interventions include the “Turnaround Model”, in which a school?s principal and entire staff will be fired, with no more than half of the staff rehired, and the “School Closure Model”, in which a school is closed and students are relocated. Firing teachers and overcrowding schools is undeniably against everything that the concept of education reform stands for. Instead of threatening the jobs of hardworking educators whose schools most likely fail due to a lack of funding and opportunity, Obama should be allocating his limited resources to improve at-risk schools.
So here are the breaks: while a policy outline of this nature is not meant to provide absolute steps to rectify a problem, but rather inspire specific laws to correct it, the Blueprint for Reform is still too vague to instigate tangible change. And while billions of dollars will be necessary to redeem the public school system, a failure to prioritize and allocate money effectively will dry up the last remnants of the American cash pool before any of the Blueprint?s goals are met. Obama needs to take a hard look at the future of education and recreate a Blueprint that can successfully make a difference within the next 10 years.