The timing of President Obama's condemnation of "just teaching to the test," as he prepared for a televised address on Libya, was illustrative. Given the President's "to do" list, it would be unreasonable to expect him to know the details of why his educational policy is having the unintended effect of forcing poor students of color to "fill out a little bubble on an exam and [study] little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test."
Given the dramatic issues that preoccupy President Obama, he does not have time to worry about education policy. He has no time to learn how his policies are making school "boring" for the kids who he wants to help.
On foreign policy, the budget, and domestic policy, President Obama consciously follows a cautious policy of triangulation. I have no problem with his desire to split the difference on policy disputes. He seeks bipartisanship, as well as a moderate framing of the issues. Being a liberal, I sometimes recoil at the way the President sticks it to liberals but, regardless, I am sticking with Obama.
I also understand that the purpose of the Administration's tours of schools during the last month has been political. It would have been nice if his visits could have provided an opportunity for accurate briefings on his own educational policies' strengths and weaknesses, but he has too much on his plate. Educational politics will always be more important to the President of the United States than educational policies. After all, we did not elect him as school board chair.
But now, President Obama has explicitly stated:
"One thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching the test because then you're not learning about the world, you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math."
Had the President had the time to study his triangulated policy, he would have understood that it would have been more accurate to drop the royal "we" and admit, "Too often what I have been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools." (It would be even less presidential to also come out and say, "but that's politics.")
President Obama correctly expressed concern that too many schools will be unable to meet annual proficiency standards under the No Child Left Behind law this year. The standards are aimed at getting 100 percent of students proficient in math, reading and science by 2014. To his credit, the Obama "blueprint" would provide relief for 90 percent of schools from the pressure-packed atmosphere created by NCLB. If adopted, suburban schools would largely be freed to invest in diagnostic testing, not dissimilar to the assessments that his daughters, Sasha and Malia, take at Sidwell Friends private school. And someday, his Administration's investments in better tests will benefit all children.
The problem is that the Obama Administration has pressured districts to double or even triple bubble-in testing, thus encouraging more of the educational malpractice that he has criticized. Worst, by pressuring districts to use not-ready-for-prime-time statistical models to fire teachers, his policies are virtually guaranteed to drive teaching talent from urban schools where it is harder to raise test scores. Worst still, the Obama plan for reauthorizing NCLB combines all of the worst aspects of the law into dubious social experiment with the bottom 10 percent of schools. It incorporates every whim of the "billionaires boys club" in a questionable re-engineering of the poorest schools.
I suspect that President Obama has found time to listen to the political arguments in favor of his educational policy, but I doubt he has been fully briefed on its political risks. He gets to split the differences between liberal accountability hawks, who just want to beat up on unions, and the far Right, which seeks to destroy collective bargaining. The President gets to triangulate between the data-driven crowd, who just seek profits through replacing teachers with digital systems, the blood-in-their eyes "reformers" who blame teachers, and the sincere technocrats who really believe that computer systems can do a better job than flesh-and-blood educators.
The real political benefit of the Obama policy is that it allows him to say the tough-sounding word "accountability" over and over again. It is a "Sister Soldja" tactic which allows him to publicly beat up on loyal Democrats. After all, will unions, teachers, and the poor black and brown families, who send their kids to urban schools, abandon the party? And by rescuing 90 percent of schools from NCLB, he will appeal to "soccer moms" and middle class families fed up with the curriculum narrowing and nonstop test prep that the law encouraged.
On the other hand, it would be smarter politically if President Obama could take the time to look at educational reality. There is no educational reason why he should encourage more primitive testing and rote instruction in order to eventually replace them with authentic assessments. He need not sacrifice this generation of poor students in order to gain the political leverage to possibly help subsequent generations. The President assumes that he can flirt with teacher-bashing and union-bashing and not place swing states like Wisconsin, Ohio, and Florida at risk. The worst case scenario, however, would be an educational policy that drove engaging instruction from urban schools, and that also jeopardized President Obama's opportunity to implement moderate, triangulated policies during a second term.