What will be Obama’s lasting education legacy? asks PBS NewsHour.
“In President Obama’s first state of the union, he said . . . that every American needs at least one year of post-secondary training to succeed in today’s economy,” says Inside Higher Ed’s Scott Jaschik.
Congress “never touched” the president’s proposal for “free” community college, but “districts all over the country took the idea and ran with it,” he says.
President Obama scored some first-term “victories on teacher quality, academic standards, and school turnarounds,” writes Ed Week‘s Alyson Klein but second-term “backlash threatened the longevity of his signature initiatives and made it virtually impossible to enact similarly sweeping change in new areas, including early-childhood education.”
On the new administration’s way in the door, Obama and (Education Secretary Arne) Duncan were handed $100 billion for education, including more than $4 billion to push almost any K-12 policy they chose, thanks to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which was crafted to jump-start the stalled economy. Obama and Duncan took the money—which came with few congressional strings—and . . . created the Race to the Top competition, which sought to reward states with grants of up to $700 million for embracing the president’s priorities on school turnarounds, tests, state data systems, and teacher evaluation based in part on student outcomes.
Obama’s Education Department used its financial clout to push states to adopt Common Core standards, undercutting its credibility as “state standards.”
Graduation rates are up. Reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are down.
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