Obama’s big second-term education problem
President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan. (ed.gov)
President Obama has a big problem in his second term in terms of education policy: his first term.
Obama and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, pushed hard in their first term to have a major impact on changing public schools with a larger-than-ever federal role in school policy issues that affected every single classroom in the country. And they did, with rare bipartisan support.
They borrowed tactics from the corporate world, setting up the competitive Race to the Top initiative, in which states competed for federal funds by promising to implement specific reforms. Those included new accountability systems that linked teacher evaluation to student standardized test scores, new standards that became known as the Common Core initiative, and an expansion of charter schools. Only 11 states and the District of Columbia won in the $4.3 billion state Race competitions, but other states, in hopes of winning some of the cash, signed on to these reforms, too. The administration’s attempt at leveraging the money they had to get more bang for their buck worked.
In 2008, Obama campaigned on rewriting the 2002 No Child Left Behind law — which was supposed to be done in 2007 because even its authors knew it had to be improved due to its