Obama and Education Reform: Yes We Can?

Republicans and Democrats are talking about education, about improving human capital, the competitiveness of the country, innovation, and science and technology at every opportunity that presents itself. But bringing about an improvement in education seems to be much more complicated.

The United States is placed at 17th in the latest PISA ranking, out of the 65 countries that participated in the study. While the country spends around 5.3 percent of its GDP on education and is surpassed only by Luxembourg in its average expenditure per student, its test results have not improved in recent years.

The Bush administration tried to confront this problem in 2001 by passing, with the support of Republicans and Democrats, the No Child Left Behind legislation, which focused on introducing learning standards and allowing for intervention in schools that repeatedly fail to meet progress goals. The objective was for 100 percent of students to reach appropriate math and reading levels by 2014. Nevertheless, it seems that 82 percent of schools will not be meeting those goals.

But they did have some important achievements. For example, according to the Nation’s Report Card (NAEP) data, in the first four years of the program’s implementation, the gap between African-American and Hispanic students and white ones had shrunk to its smallest in history. Nevertheless, the standard has long been met with resistance.

On the one hand there are those who maintain that it isn’t enough to improve the system, including those in the Obama administration, who launched the successful Race to the Top initiative to give incentives and encouragement to states that create conditions for innovation and improvements in education reform and school performance, generating the first visible results in 2009 when Delaware and Tennessee were rewarded.

Other groups are opposed, saying that No Child Left Behind limits the focus of school education to annual tests, reducing what is taught in order to score well on evaluations and in turn preventing the consideration of social warning signs that affect educational performance.

President Obama is strongly supporting the reform and re-authorization of No Child Left Behind under the name Elementary and Secondary Education Act, focusing on changes that will improve the effectiveness of teachers and administrators and implement standards that will prepare students for college and the work force, but also allow better flexibility and innovation in schools.

But Obama faces an adverse situation in Congress, where the Republicans are proposing spending cuts to some programs, providing better flexibility in the implementation of the federal budget at the local level and stimulating private initiative through, for example, “charter schools” (public schools managed by communities of parents).

Tensions are higher in the context of budget cuts and the deficit, in which several states have started reducing spending on education. In particular, the House Budget Committee, lead by Republican Paul Ryan, is proposing a 12 percent reduction in funding to education, labor and health care programs in a context in which the economy is not picking up and unemployment has now reached 9 percent.

In an increasingly competitive world in which the United States is losing markets, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says, “More and more people recognize education is the game-changer in the global economy. A world-class education system is the engine of economic growth, innovation, competitiveness and job creation. Our children, our teachers and our parents deserve a world-class education — not some day, but today.” We’ll see if Congress agrees.