President Barack Obama defends his legislative priorities in an interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters that airs Friday night, while hinting at a greater focus on education and research in the future.
“We have got a lot more work to do, but I am confident that if we make the investments we need to make sure our kids are getting the best education…if we are investing in our infrastructure…We have got a lot more work to do, but I am confident that if we are investing in research and development that continues to make us an innovation leader for the future, that we are gonna do great,” Mr. Obama says, according to excerpts released by ABC. “I am very, very confident that our best days are still ahead of us.”
Education has emerged as a possible focus of bipartisan compromise in Congress next year, as lawmakers look to reauthorize the Bush-era No Child Left Behind law. That legislation itself was a product of bipartisan compromise between then-President George W. Bush and Democrats led by the late Sen. Edward Kennedy.
He's talking about bipartisan compromise on NCLB Jr. now, but we'll see.
I suspect Republicans aren't going to want to give him any legislative victories at all.
Plus they won't have much time to compromise with all those subpoenas they plan on sending his way.
With any luck, maybe Obama will spend the next two years playing more basketball...
It's a bitter irony that Republicans, who've always used the rhetoric of local control of schools as a smokescreen for their racism, may be the one's who protect us from Obama's efforts to turn the public schools over to his Wall Street backers.
ReplyDeleteSad to say, but other than what autonomy you can still maintain in your classroom, obstruction is about the best that can be hoped for.
There's not much autonomy in classrooms anymore either. Every week we have meetings to look at data, discuss how we use that data to inform our instruction, and make sure that we are all keeping up with the standardized curriculum put in place by the ap for E1-E6. Benchmarks, semester goals, unit goals, lesson goals, and SMART goals - that's what we MUST follow.
ReplyDeleteI think I will hang around another couple of years and if this pendulum doesn't swing back, I might have to re-evaluate my career goals.