Obama's Education Reform Leaves Little Room For Optimism

At the beginning of last week, I made the following comments regarding Obama's education reform proposals:

"I read yesterday the Free Press' brief account of Obama's response to the education crisis, and found myself a bit concerned. A couple of his direct quotes stood out to me when reading the article. Obama explained, 'The future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens.' He then further explains,

'We have everything we need to be that nation ... and yet, despite resources that are unmatched anywhere in the world, we have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short and other nations outpace us.'

I think, first of all, that this identification of a problem - several problems - that has catalyzed the education crisis is myopic in nature. He in no way addresses systemic inequities that have perpetuated the failure of teachers and students to perform at specific levels of success and enabled to structural compromise of many of the schools that deteriorated. Moreover, he has overlooked financial mismanagement - and for what purpose this mismanagement has occurred - that also enabled this deterioration. I also believe that, as I will address in a minute, he has placed an unfair onus of responsibility on the shoulders of individuals who are now being told to be responsible for the crises they face rather than exploring creative, alternative methods for everyone to be responsible for one another. At the end of this quote, Obama explains that 'other nations outpace us' in terms of education production. I suppose my assessment could be off-base, but it seems that the same stimuli that have led to the crisis we are now experiencing are the driving factors successful educational production internationally. Seemingly, students are continuing to be trainined in vocational and technological skill-sets so that they can take over production responsibilities for consuming nations. It appears that transnational outsourcing of resource production has, in part, led to the need and desire for 'successful' academic performance. The incentives that once existed in this country to satisfy literacy and math requirements in order to pursue industrial labor is now, seemingly, paralleling incentives elsewhere to academically succeed. If our standards are to be examined comparatively with the endeavors of others nations, the ultimate result will seemingly be an extension of the problems that catalyzed the current predicament."

I realized that I neglected to assess the other half of this puzzle. Obama's assessment of other nations' academic output is not comparatively one-dimensional, but an expression of how this achievement will save our economy. Once again, Obama explains that "the future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens." The simple fact behind this statement is that the President is equating economic recovery with educational performance; or, quantifying our youth in terms of economic utility as opposed to socially conscious citizens. These proposals are in no way a reform, but rather a perpetuation of the current state of systemic commodification and how to most effectively maximize its utility. In order to address the paradigmatic shift this country needs to make - educationally, politically, economically, environmentally, etc...... - we cannot continue to remedy a system that has been failing for years upon years. We need to address to core concerns by shifting away from an automatous redress of those problems to a more humane one.