Pueblo Chieftain opinion page
By JOSH PENRY
Last year’s bruising presidential race underscored many of the fundamental distinctions between our two political parties.
Yet, the victor who emerged from that partisan slugfest and won the Oval Office is now staking out some common ground in an area that should encourage Republicans and Democrats alike: He is calling for much-needed and long-overdue reforms in public education.
President Barack Obama deserves a lot of credit for bucking some of his own party establishment and rejecting its hidebound defense of the unsustainable status quo in our nation’s schools.
Our new president has taken a bold stance in favor of policies such as more rigorous academic standards, merit pay, a longer school year, more meaningful testing and swifter dismissal of ineffective teachers. These reforms, though long-standing tenets within my party, represent a clear departure from conventional thinking among many of the president’s own political allies. And they are the bane of the powerful teachers unions that carry so much clout in his party.
Why challenge such entrenched, powerful interests?
Probably because the president realizes what the nation’s employers, colleges and, of course, parents of every political stripe have known for years - that too many of our public schools are falling short of the mark for far too many of our children. Especially our society’s most at-risk children - low-income students trapped in failing inner-city schools - have had nowhere else to turn for too long.
In Colorado, as in the rest of the country, these children have lagged far behind the population as a whole in basic academic indicators like graduating high school and entering college.
Clearly, this is unacceptable, and as an elected policy maker, I appreciate how important it is to have a president who won’t accept the failure of our schools, either.
By demanding higher academic standards to graduate, as well as a longer school year, President Obama seems to get that we must raise the bar for all of our children in order to compete in an increasingly global economy. In calling for merit-based compensation to cultivate and retain the best and brightest teachers, our president grasps how much power - and responsibility - teachers have to inspire and expand young minds. Weeding out ineffective teachers achieves that end as well. We have to improve our accountability measures, including more thorough and meaningful testing, to be sure we are on the right track.
Make no mistake; President Obama’s embrace of pivotal reforms does not justify his attempts to link them to the unprecedented billions of dollars he is forcing the public to pay for his American Recovery and Reinvestment Act - a ticking time bomb for our nation’s fiscal future as well as a crushing burden for taxpayers.
If anything, the education dollars earmarked in the president’s stimulus package risk backfiring on his call for education reform. As the Wall Street Journal astutely observed in an editorial earlier this month, “The stimulus bill throws an unprecedented $100 billion at the nation's 14,000 school districts, but it subsidizes the status quo and demands little from recipients in return.”
In reality, the reforms that the president champions do not require an epic infusion of federal funding. What they need most to find their target is nothing more - or less - than the sheer will and determination of people like the president himself to see them through.
Meanwhile, Coloradans can take particular pride in the president’s education agenda; in a lot of ways, our state has helped pioneer the changes he is now championing nationwide. And here, too, the reform movement has been a truly bipartisan - in fact, largely nonpartisan-effort.
Lawmakers like Senate President Peter Groff and Sen. Chris Romer, as well as House Speaker Terrance Carroll, all Denver Democrats, have worked closely with the many of us across the aisle who advocate thoroughgoing change in public education.
Colorado was among the nation’s leaders in the charter-school movement, authorizing them in 1992 - under a Democratic governor, Roy Romer, and a Republican Legislature. By the late 1990s, it was a Republican governor, Bill Owens, ushering in accountability measures like grading our schools - working closely with key Democrats.
Making our schools work smarter for our kids isn’t about being a Republican or a Democrat. People of good will in both parties have been making that clear for years in Colorado as well as in Washington.
To have a president squarely on board meaningful education reform as well is heartening and reassuring. Now, let’s all resolve to help him make it work.