First, the crass political comment: It's notable that Obama gave his first presidential address on education to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Fairly little in the speech specifically targeted the Hispanic community -- they got exactly one line on early education programs -- but choosing them as the site for the address fits into a broader narrative among education reformers that changing urban schools is a civil rights issue as much as a competitiveness question. Over at Tapped, Dana Goldstein breaks out the specifics of Obama's compromise:• Charters: In the biggest concession to reformers, Obama said he supported every state lifting caps on the number of charter schools allowed to open in a year, provided that states also have accountability guidelines for assessing charters and closing down ineffective schools. To put this in perspective, just two years ago, Randi Weingarten, now the president of the American Federation of Teachers, was aggressively lobbying in Albany to prevent New York from raising its charter school cap.• Curriculum: National standards are emerging as a consensus point between teachers' unions and free market education reformers. Obama also supported higher standards today, saying, "Our curriculum for eighth graders is two full years behind top performing countries. That is a prescription for economic decline." But his agenda stops short of pursuing national curriculum guidelines or tests, promising only "to promote efforts to enhance the rigor of state-level curriculum."• Teacher pay: Obama promised a federal investment in developing "performance pay" plans in 150 school districts. The language here is key. "Performance pay" is supported by teachers' unions, and awards salary bonuses to teachers based on a variety of factors, including classroom observations, teaching in hard-to-staff subjects and schools, and improving student achievement. "Merit pay," on the other hand, is understood as directly aligning teacher salaries to student test scores.• Higher-ed: Obama promised to cut out middle-men in federal student lending, simplify the FAFSA form, and invest in community college efforts to better prepare students for the job market.• Early childhood: Obama's budget will include "incentive grants" for states to develop uniform quality standards and target care and education to the most disadvantaged children.
Also notable in the speech is that Obama hates summer. "We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day," he says. "That calendar may have once made sense, but today, it puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea. That is no way to prepare them for a 21st century economy. That is why I’m calling for us not only to expand effective after-school programs, but to rethink the school day to incorporate more time – whether during the summer or through expanded-day programs for children who need it." This will certainly make Malcolm Gladwell happy: His book Outliers
