Posted on 09/27/2010 10:39:07 AM PDT by Libloather
President Obama: Fire failing teachers
By KENDRA MARR
Updated: 9/27/10 12:57 PM EDT
President Barack Obama took aim at the nation’s failing schools Monday, saying bad teachers should be fired if they’re not cutting it and that students should stay in school longer each year.
Obama also leveled a critique of the Washington, D.C., public schools, saying his daughters wouldn’t get as good an education there as at their private school. "I'll be blunt with you,” Obama answered. “The answer is 'no' right now.”
"You can't defend a status quo in which a third of our kids are dropping out," the president said during a live interview on NBC's "Today Show." "You can't defend a status quo when you've got 2,000 schools across the country that are dropout factories."
The comments seem likely to further exacerbate Obama’s already-strained relations with the nation’s teachers unions, which have objected to Obama’s “Race to the Top” reforms and said Obama and his education chief, Arne Duncan, are scapegoating teachers when the problems are more systemic.
But Obama laid part of the blame squarely on teachers and said bad teachers should be fired if they can’t train kids to succeed.
“You’ve got to have radical change, and radical change is something that’s in the interest of students,” he said. “We’ve got to be able to identify teachers who are doing well. ... And, ultimately, if some teachers aren’t doing a good job, they’ve got to go.”
Obama did praise unions in the interview, pointing out that many are cooperating with states on education reforms.
"I'm a strong supporter of the notion a union can protect its members and be a part of the solution instead of the problem," he said.
And the White House announced Monday a new goal of recruiting 10,000 math and science teachers in the next two years. Over the next decade, the administration aims to prepare 100,000 science, technology, engineering and math teachers.
Obama also said “nothing's more important” than education, and he said if students stayed in class for one more summer month every year, they would retain more information. “I think we should have longer school years,” he said.
A Florida woman asked Obama if his daughters, Sasha and Malia, who currently attend the elite private Sidwell Friends School, would get the “same high-quality, rigorous education” at a D.C. public school.
“The answer is 'no' right now,” Obama said. “The D.C. public school systems are struggling. They have made some important strides over the past several years to move in the direction of reform. There are some terrific individual schools in the D.C. system ....
"I'll be very honest with you. Given my position, if I wanted to find a great public school for them to be in, we could probably maneuver to do it. The broader problem is that for a mom [and] dad who are working hard and who don't have a bunch of connections, don't have a lot of choice in where they live, they should be getting the same quality education for their kids as anybody else."
The Obama administration has introduced sweeping education reforms, exemplified by the $4 billion “Race to the Top” sweepstakes that gives states incentives to tie teacher performance to pay. Yet, during the nationally broadcast interview, Obama admitted that money alone won’t fix many of the problems in schools.
It is so easy for someone to say he wants to fire bad teachers when he refuses to allow for any way to measure “badness.”
Did he actually say something fairly intelligent!?!?!?!?!?!?!?
Old ‘Rat trick. Talk like a normal American in the weeks running up to the election. Act like a Pinko after the election.
Here’s the problem: According to him, I am a failing teacher. Why? Because I tell my students that the Constitution is neither living nor dead. I also refuse to consider our founders deists. My favorite activity for this is to list as many founders’ quotes about God as I can find, and then discuss the fact that our text claims they were deists. My head would be on the chopping block if obamy had a say.
Isn’t that one of the goals of the “No child left behind” act THAT THE DEMOCRAPS OBJECTED TO THE MOST????????
He must not realize that they are in a union...
The list, ping
Let me know if you would like to be on or off the ping list
My wife will leave teaching if she loses her summers off. She is a great first grade teacher, so its the schools stsyem’s loss.
Where does Parental responsibility fit in anywhere? It’s been my observation that children who have disinterested parents... do very poorly. Then you have kids who just don’t care......no matter how you try to motivate them. You can’t fit a square peg in a round hole......and firing teachers doesn’t solve anything. JMHO
no, he probably means white teachers. White = bad in his little world
Failing Teachers = Those who won’t join Unions, teach revisionist history and have moral objections to sexualizing children.
It may sound good but the concept of failing is much different in a communist’s mind.
true enough..sad but 99% of public school teachers give the others a bad name...
Must be election season.
How about firing failing Presidents like you loser?
I still remember one of Obama/Pelosi’s first acts was to eliminate the DC private school voucher program, basically kicking poor black kids out of his daugher’s private school. He was let completely off the hook for this outrage, I didnt hear anyone question it in the context of this interview either. It would have been a great question, “Don't you think it's hypocritical to send your daughters to private school at taxpayers expense when you kicked the poor kids out of their school?”
This simply means that in the hiring and firing of teachers, race is the top consideration.
LOLOL
Remember all those teachers in one school in Rhode Island that were fired.
They were all rehired.
Anyone surprised.
TELL IT TO THE TEACHERS UNION!
So dropout rates are due to the “bad” teachers. Now according to my somewhat backward figurrin’, I would have guessed that was the fault of the parents. But hey, I am not a President, so what do I know.
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