Obama's Top Ten Pre-K Promises

As the students in my classroom watched the inauguration, my assistant cried. (Just a little bit.) It was an amazing thing to see history in the making. It affected everyone in our economically challenged urban elementary school. Yesterday, as I listened to the post-party coverage and people talking on their cell phones in the grocery store, I was struck by how many people are concerned about President Obama moving left or right of where they think he stood on issues. This morning I heard a radio comment that now is the time for everyone to make their opinions known and that they should remind our president of where he has come from. So here is my "don't forget the pre-k" post-it note for President Obama.

We seem to be on the right track. The House economic stimulus package in Congress already has 2.1 billion for Head Start in it as described in this Wall Street Journal article about the loads of promises the president made on the campaign trail.

President Obama has mentioned funding early childhood education many times since 2007. So in the spirit of David Letterman, I give you President Barack Obama's Top 10 quotes on early childhood education as found on the website On the Issues. and Youtube.

10 Obama supports increasing funding for the Head Start program for preschool children. Obama has called on states to replicate the Illinois model of Preschool for All.

Campaign website, BarackObama.com, "Resource Flyers" Aug 26, 2007

9 We can start by investing $10 billion to guarantee access to quality, affordable, early childhood education for every child in America. Every dollar that we spend on these programs puts our children on a path to success, while saving us as much as $10 in reduced health care costs, crime, and welfare later on.
Source: Speech in Flint, MI, in Change We Can Believe In, p.249 Jun 15, 2008

Put billions of dollars into early childhood education
8 Latinos have such a high dropout rate. What you see consistently are children at a very early age are starting school already behind. That’s why I’ve said that I’m going to put billions of dollars into early childhood education that makes sure that our African-American youth, Latino youth, poor youth of every race, are getting the kind of help that they need so that they know their numbers, their colors, their letters. Every dollar that we spend in early childhood education, we get $10 back in reduced dropout rates, improved reading scores. That’s the kind of commitment we have to make early on.
Source: 2008 Democratic debate in Las Vegas Jan 15, 2008


7 Teachers don’t go in to education to get rich. They don’t go in to education because they don’t believe in their children. They want their children to succeed, but we’ve got to give them the tools. Invest in early childhood education. Invest in our teachers and our children will succeed.
Source: Take Back America 2007 Conference Jun 19, 2007

6 If you’re a progressive, you’ve got to be worried about how the federal government is spending its revenue, because we don’t have enough money to spend on things like early childhood education that are so important.
Source: 2008 Politico pre-Potomac Primary interview Feb 11, 2008

5 Children’s First Agenda: zero to five early education

High-Quality Zero to Five Early Education: Obama will launch a Children’s First Agenda that provides care, learning and support to families with children from birth up to five years old.
Source: Campaign booklet, “Blueprint for Change”, p. 20-23 Feb 2, 2008

4 We’ve got to have early childhood education.
Source: 2007 NAACP Presidential Primary Forum Jul 12, 2007


3 We’ll invest in early childhood education programs so that our kids don’t begin the race of life behind the starting line and offer a $4,000 tax credit to make college affordable for anyone who wants to go. Because as the NAACP knows better than anyone, the fight for social justice and economic justice begins in the classroom.
Source: McCain-Obama speeches at 99th NAACP Convention Jul 12, 2008

2 Michelle and I are here only because we were given a chance at an education. I will not settle for an America where some kids don’t have that chance. I’ll invest in early childhood education.
Source: Speech at 2008 Democratic National Convention Aug 27, 2008

1 This clip really seems to show where his heart is on the issue of voluntary Pre-K. Hopefully, he won't forget.

Gerald Bracey Buries The LDH Hatchet

Gerald Bracey wrote an excellent post on the Huffington Post about what the heck happened with the Secretary of Ed nomination. He describes how the "frame game" was played and the people who have the most expereince with actual kids (teachers and teachers unions) got labeled as anti-reform or for those not familiar with right wing edu-speak as not caring about kids and the quality of their education.

The history of the Ed Sec position has seen only two ED Secs with actual experience in education. Only one, Terrel Bell, was a K-12 teacher. What did Terrel Bell do? He changed the future of education in America through bringing together countless stakeholders to create the National Commission on Excellence in Education, and publish a Nation at Risk. And he accomplished this while Ronald Reagan was trying to dissolve the USED and cut funding for all of its programs.

We could only have been so lucky as to have a "non-reformer" like LDH in the position. Teachers don't mess around with reform because it is a code word for privatizing education these days. Why hire somebody to fix education when everyone you need to do it is in a classroom. Hire a teacher for the job and then you have buy-in from the most important group, the people actually doing the teaching. Bracey did an excellent job explaining what happened this fall. The real reformers (people who care about kids) got beat by the fake reformers (arm chair quarterbacks) with no experience actually playing the game on the field. Who do you want to coach your team, someone who has played the game or someone who has watched it from the stands.

image from:http://www.objetsobjects.com/id1.html

Thanks to Thompson @ This Week in Education

Dear Mr. Obama, Re: LDH

Dear Mr. President-Elect Obama,

I wanted to ask you to consider the rare opportunity you have to select Linda Darling-Hammond as Secretary of Education.
You see, the ED Sec position has always been a political decision, based on repaying the service of select individuals who have worked hard for a new president's campaign.

Here is a brief history of Secretaries of Education. It is from wikipedia so possibly incorrect, but it shows who held the position previously.

• Carter: Shirley Hufstedler had a distinguished career at the highest levels of legal and public service.
• Reagan: Terrel Bell, the impetus for a Nation at Risk, had a doctorate in education and had been a high school teacher as well as a superintendent.
• Reagan: William Bennet was an American neoconservative pundit, politician, and political theorist. He went on to become the "drug czar" for Bush 1.
• Reagan/Bush: Lauro Cavazos was the first Hispanic to serve in a cabinet post. He held B.A. and M.A. degrees in zoology from Texas Tech University, and a Ph.D. in physiology from Iowa State University. He was forced to resign as Education Secretary, amid an investigation into improper use of frequent flyer miles.
• Bush: Andrew Lamar Alexander (born July 3, 1940) is the senior United States Senator from Tennessee and Conference Chair of the Republican Party. He was previously the 45th Governor of Tennessee from 1979 to 1987.
• Clinton: Richard Riley Riley was elected governor of South Carolina in 1978. Riley made a huge impact by bringing the voices of teachers into the policy arena through teacher in residence program and supporting the establishment of the the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.
• Bush II: Rod Paige began his career in college athletics. Later, as ED Sec Paige criticized the National Education Association (NEA) for obstructing "No Child Left Behind's historic education reforms," calling the NEA a "terrorist organization." He later said it "was an inappropriate choice of words" and apologized later the same day, but maintained that the NEA uses "obstructionist scare tactics" in opposing the law.
• Bush II: Margaret Spellings was the political director for Bush's first gubernatorial campaign in 1994, and later became a senior advisor to Bush during his term as Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000.

The history of the position has seen only two ED Secs with actual experience in education. Only one, Terrel Bell, was a K-12 teacher. What did Terrel Bell do? He changed the future of education in America through bringing together countless stakeholders to create the National Commission on Excellence in Education, and publish a Nation at Risk. And he accomplished this while Ronald Reagan was trying to dissolve the USED and cut funding for all of its programs.

Darling-Hammond is a real threat to efforts to privatize education. She is a friend of unions because she believes in teachers, one the most leftist ideals you can maintain these days. One can hardly imagine what our school systems would be like if teachers were empowered to be the good guys. Mr. President give it a try and watch the inherent heroism of impassioned teachers transform out schools. Let a teacher lead us.

Please.

How Many Presidents Does it Take to Turn-On a Light Bulb?

My buddy Bill "The Tempered Radical" Ferriter posted about the above visual on his blog. He had this to say...

"Because we're working on identifying main idea in our reading classes, I asked my students a simple question: "What point do you think the artist was trying to make with this image?" My students' answer:

"Well, that's pretty obvious, Mr. Ferriter. He's trying to say that the United States has never had a woman president."

Amazing, huh?

That's got me feeling pretty good about the future of our country. Sure, there are people who will always look at other individuals through the lens of skin-color. While racism is abhorrent, it's also a sad truth of the human condition.

But as more and more children grow up in an increasingly tolerant world with successful role models of every shape and color, our country---like my kids---becomes increasingly color-blind...and that' just plan cool."

I found Bill's post interesting but perhaps a little naive. I never thought I would say that about a post that Bill wrote but our cultural circumstances are so entirely different I thought that I should leave a comment. Here it is.

I think that you may be on to something but, I am not sure that racism is a condition of the human race or that being color blind is a good thing.

What does color blindness in ed policy lead to? What does it lead to in our classrooms?

As you may know I am the minority, a white man, in my school. The more I talk about, and joke about race the less of an issue it becomes for my colleagues and myself. I am also taking all these doctoral classes and let me tell you that race blind researchers are the last thing we need. Sometimes researchers forget that race is not the cause of the poor performance it is the name for the poor performance. It is a descriptor for a group of students who historically have been under served by education.

It is in naming the unnamed so that it loses power that we create a color "full" America. Maybe Bill's students were afraid to name the unnamed and address race head on. Maybe it was the safe route to talk about something they were all obviously comfortable with, gender equality.

Some thoughts from an embedded reporter. What are yours?

Image from: Patrick Moberg's Illustration Blog:

Yes We Can

I try to avoid overt politics on this blog so, I offer this as a commentary. This is an example of what it takes to reach the youth vote. Pop culture icons lip syncing to a political speech. At least it isn't the other way around. Politicians lip-synching to pop culture icons. I guess we had that with the last Democrat elected president. (Don't stop thinking about tomorrow. Remember the saxophone?) Mr. Tilson, thanks for the heads-up. Who knew the guy who wrote DOn't Phunk with My Heart" and "My Humps" could write a politcal song. Well I guess Obama( 's speech writer) really wrote it.