Via Beyond the Chron: School Beat: Imagining A New Funding Framework for Schools
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President Obama’s State of the Union speech Tuesday night promised a continuation of flawed education strategies while ignoring the need for truly transformative actions. Reaffirming his support for the exclusionary and unfair approach of competitive grants as embodied in the Race To The Top (RTTT) program, Obama once again sidestepped the most fundamental challenges our students and their schools are facing – increasing child poverty across the nation and chronic underfunding of education in almost all states.
If our children are to have a new and better educational future, one that lays the foundation for living a full engaged-life, thus benefitting all of us, then addressing poverty and school finance must be the first priorities of elected officials and educational leaders, beginning with the White House and Congress. When President Obama announced allocating more money to education, two years of experience with his policies tell us that addressing baseline school finance is not where that money will go, but instead will be spent on expansion of RTTT type efforts, “innovation” grants for tracking students and grading teachers and the increase of privatization of schools. Despite the President’s confidence, this is simply the wrong direction. [more]->
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