But on one important issue that proved to be a flash point — education policy — he doesn’t have much to say. The memoir’s index shows references to education policies on only four of 701 narrative pages — and none are more than a few sentences. What he doesn’t address says at least as much as what he does.
Meanwhile, his vice president, Joe Biden, will become president of the United States on Jan. 20, and the Biden education agenda will be compared not only to that of President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos did but also to Obama’s.
Biden has so far laid out an education overhaul agenda that does not resemble Trump’s or Obama’s, and he has promised to be a friend to public educators — but many are waiting to see what he actually does after they were disappointed by Obama.
Obama’s education agenda surprised many of his supporters, who had expected him to address inequity in public schools and to de-emphasize high-stakes standardized testing, which had become the key metric to hold schools accountable under the 2001 federal No Child Left Behind law.
But Obama did not. Instead, he allowed Education Secretary Arne Duncan to push a strident education overhaul program that made standardized testing even more important than NCLB had, and that became highly controversial across the political spectrum for different reasons. Critics called it “corporate reform” because it used methods more common in business than in civic institutions, such as using big data, closing schools that underperformed, and eliminating or weakening of teacher tenure and seniority rights. CONTINUE READING: The telling things Barack Obama wrote -- and didn’t mention -- about his education policies in new memoir - The Washington Post
