The Achievement Gap

Does Obama “Get” Education?

The President in interview mode

Even if it’s not, I’m pretty excited to learn more about it, mostly because of something that the President said in a recent, fairly lengthy press conference on education.

“…what we want to do is raise standards, but also provide the kinds of best practices, with money behind it, that evidence shows allows every child to meet these standards. And that’s what this Race to the Top is all about.”

To me, that’s a compelling statement, because it sure as heck sounds like Obama gets it.

What do I mean by “gets it?” Well, if you follow the media coverage of education reform, you might think that it’s a battle between people like Michelle Rhee (Chancellor of the DC Public Schools), who’s focused on high standards and strict accountability, and people like Linda Darling-Hammond (Stanford professor shortlisted but not picked for the Secretary of Education job), who’s focused on figuring out how to support teachers to improve teaching and learning. The solution to the education problem, according to this narrative, has to involve a tradeoff between the two: you can’t have both.

The truth, of course, is that this line of reasoning is wrong. Improving education will surely involve tradeoffs, but that isn’t one of them. We need both accountability and resources; high standards only work if we can build the capacity to help students meet those standards.

That’s why Obama’s interview is so exciting. That statement – and others like it throughout the interview – seem to indicate that, on a fundamental level, the President understands that schools will get better when we give teachers and students the resources to meet high standards and hold them accountable. That reality has been missing from the last twenty years of education reform. If Race to the Top is based on that understanding, then the President’s new program could be a very good thing, indeed.