Obama and Education

AMERICAN RECOVERY AND REINVESTMENT ACT:

With Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, $53 billion will be pumping into the country’s education and training programs—besides new K-12 reforms, the Act will focus on early learning programs (i.e. Head Start) and programs for children with special needs.
The money going into elementary and secondary schools also comes with new reforms and goals for states including: improvements in teacher effectiveness; have more college and career-ready standards to prepare students; improve achievements in low-performing schools, and; continue extensive research to improve these things further in the future. Working for Obama on this plan is Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Duncan sees big things for the country’s educational future. The first thing he has in mind is a reform of the No Child Left Behind Act. Duncan will be meeting with teachers’ unions and finding other peoples’ opinions on it and what can be done to improve it, focusing on learning and not simply performance in standardized testing.

Soon, $140 billion will be going toward education—both for teachers and students. The money will go toward expanding early childhood education, creating better student assessments, and improving teacher quality. The White House says, “providing a high-quality education for all children is critical to America’s economic future. Our nation’s economic competitiveness and the path to the American Dream depend on providing every child with an education that will enable them to succeed in a global economy that is predicated on knowledge and innovation.”

Obama and Duncan believe that “investment in education must be accompanied by reform and innovation.” They will be tailoring the new education programs to foster learning and development in pre-school aged children, support successful charter schools, reform standardized testing, and change academic standards to better align with other leading nations.

“President Obama will reform America’s public schools to deliver a 21st century education that will prepare all children for success in the new global workplace. He will foster a race to the top in our nation’s schools, by promoting world-class academic standards and a curriculum that fosters critical thinking, problem solving, and the innovative use of knowledge to prepare students for college and career. He will push to end the use of ineffective, "off-the-shelf" tests, and support new, state-of-the-art assessment and accountability systems that provide timely and useful information about the learning and progress of individual students.
“Teachers are the single most important resource to a child’s learning. President Obama will ensure that teachers are supported as professionals in the classroom, while also holding them more accountable…

This mission statement also talks about encouraging students to continue higher education, but the majority of the focus is raising the standards for students in schools across the country. The new President seems especially eager to help children receive and continue in good education from the very first few years. Hopefully all the new funding will help our schools to better prepare children for facing the great, big world we live in!


http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/2009/02/05/what-arne-duncan-thinks-of-no-child-left-behind.html

(http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/education/):