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Opinion: Up again on Obama’s list of things to call for others to do: Education reform

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Looks like someone in the White House has done some polling and re-discovered the evergreen PR value of calling for education reform.

Real honest-to-NEA education reform so that our precious children, those innocent darlings frolicking on some playground somewhere right now, can once again be the best-educated, the best-qualified youngsters in the entire world. That’s a big job; it might require a second term to talk about more.

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Because, never forget, those little people are our future. And if they don’t get smart enough to get a high-paying job, who’s going to pay off all this national debt we’ve just created by throwing billions of dollars out the window to keep the national unemployment rate under 8%, which didn’t work. Not to mention have them pay their FICA taxes to prop up the government-run Ponzi-scheme called Social Security.

President Obama’s been way too busy to get his hands dirty in the broken down budget-cutting talks that Joe Biden was too busy overseas to lead. So the next federal spending deadline is Friday. And two weeks after that. And....

Obama’s been busy not deciding to do much on the Libyan mess, which was what....

...he decided not to do during the Iranian uprising 19 months ago. He’s also been calling for a whole bunch of things, among them domestic energy independence, as if he hadn’t imposed drilling moratoriums and been president these last 783 days. School reform. He’ll call for more of that today during yet another visit to Virginia and what have become the most-presidential-visited schools in the country due to their White House proximity.

The Democrat hasn’t visited a Virginia school since last week when he took Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard for a history class photo op.

Obama also boldly took on bullying last week, calling on Americans to join him 100% against those who take advantage of others who are weaker. No, not Col. Kadafi’s planes erasing rebel insurgents with rockets. But schoolyard bullies back home. Think Scott Farkas.

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School reform is part of Obama’s spending program that isn’t really spending; it’s investment.

According to Monday’s advance presidential event sales brochure, the president will call on -- who do you think? -- Congress, that’s right, to ‘fix’ the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act from 2001 when you-know-who was president. And you-know-what-that-means.

Obama’s in favor of:

A fair accountability system that shares responsibility for improvement and rewards excellence, and that is based on high standards and is informed by sophisticated assessments that measure individual student growth;A flexible system that empowers principals and teachers, and supports reform and innovation at the state and local level;And a system focused on the schools and the students most at risk -- that targets resources to persistently low-performing schools and ensures the most effective teachers serve students most in need.

So, ‘the most effective teachers’ teach the ‘students most in need.’ Imagine the administrative fun (not to mention lawsuits) picking and herding the needy students into a separate class with no over-achieving role models.

And as a reward for all their hard work and diligence, the best students get who, the leftovers? And how, by the way, do you select the best teachers and dump the least effective teachers, who are in the union too?

‘We need to make sure we’re graduating students who are ready for college and a career,” Obama asserts. “In the 21st Century, it’s not enough to leave no child behind. We need to help every child get ahead. We need to get every child on a path to academic excellence.’ So, in other words, no child gets left behind.

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Sounds great. Like someone trying to climb out of a 46% job approval hole. Who can argue with fixing public schools, which Obama values so highly he didn’t send his daughters to one?

Next question: Who can pay for all this fixing? Along with the high-speed trains? And all the crumbling infrastructure repairs? And the necessary research?

The unspoken question: Who secretly doesn’t want all that change? Who just wants more of the same, throw additional money at the schools and get out of the way of the folks who’ve been doing those jobs the same for decades?

The political question: Which party of heartless fiscal hawks does the Democratic president hope will cruelly oppose education reform on the grounds of mere money by the billions? That would give Obama somebody new to call on for change in next year’s campaign.

Speaking of which, the president will headline yet another Democratic Party fundraiser tonight. What do you suppose he’ll call on them to do?

-- Andrew Malcolm

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