Secretary of Education Arne Duncan rides the bus with Columbus Elementary students to the Mexico-U.S. border in Columbus, N.M. on Sept. 10, 2013. | The Washington Post via Getty Images
By Joy Resmovits| Originally Published at Huffington Post. January 27, 2014
President Barack Obama is widely expected to address income inequality in his 2014 State of the Union address Tuesday, and education advocates hope the nation’s schools will figure into that picture in a major way.
But despite huge racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps among public school students, many expect the president’s agenda-setting speech to focus once again on the system’s bookends: expanding preschool and making college more affordable. “I’m expecting pre-k mostly,” said Kate Tromble, legislative director for the Education Trust, a Washington, D.C. based education lobbying and advocacy firm. “He’ll just make a further call for how important it is and how we need to have it and how Congress isn’t giving him what he’s proposed.”
Few education observers say they expect Obama to issue any new, sweeping policy proposals. Instead, they anticipate he’ll put new rhetorical force behind the ideas he presented last year that have yet come to fruition — such as preschool expansion.
“It would be great if he talked more fundamentally about the inequity in our education system … as opposed 

Photograph; Schenk Elementary School fourth-grader Meadow Corfits solves a math problem on her classroom’s chalkboard in this September 2013 file photo. By MATTHEW DeFOUR and MOLLY BECK | Originally Published at Wisconsin State Journal. January 28, 2014 Wisconsin’s lowest-performing public schools would be forced to close or […]
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