Check out this video, released by Reason.Tv today, highlighting 3 reasons why President Obama deserves an F for his vision to reform education.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIb9v56K6l0&feature=player_embedded


The video points out that President Obama has pumped more money into a failing education system to protect education jobs during the recent economic recession, despite previous assertions that the President understands that spending alone is not going to fix the problem:



We can’t spend our way out of it. I think that when you look at the statistics, the fact is that our per-pupil spending has gone up during the last couple of decades even as results have gone down.


That’s right, and yet we will throw even more money at the system and hope that it will fix itself.


The video also highlights that while President Obama sends his children to a private school in D.C., he allowed the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program to die; taking away the opportunity for low-income D.C. children to attend a better-performing private school. I talked about this issue in a blog post earlier this week, when I asked if Obama was going to be our Superman.


Lastly, the video highlights the enormous financial contributions President Obama and the Democratic Party receive from the two largest teacher unions. No wonder we’re seeing no real effort to reform education.


When I look at some of the more substantial proposals the President has recently made to reform education, aside from throwing more money at it, I am still disappointed. One of his proposals is to extend the school year by one month. Other countries that rank above the U.S. in educational performance have longer school years which give these countries a competitive advantage, the President asserts.


IWF’s Vicky Murray tackled that claim last year in October, when she wrote that American schooling needs more quality time, not quantity time:



the fact that it’s a monopoly insulated from competition-not its calendar-is the real problem. It is true, as the president notes, that other countries have longer school years– Japan with 243 days, Korea, 220, Israel 216, and the Netherlands 200. Yet he neglects to mention that those countries are getting the job done in a fraction of the time and for pennies on the dollar because they have fewer teaching hours or shorter school days.


His latest focus has been on bashing the GOP for allegedly planning to cut education funding to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. Oh, Mr. President, I wish we could just put the politics aside for once and focus on what’s best for America’s school children. That would be the kind of change I could believe in.