Nine minutes and forty-five seconds into his speech, Barack Obama gets it.

"... From the moment our children step into a classroom, the single most important factor in determining their achievement is not the color of their skin or where they come from. It's not who their parents are or how much money they have. It's who their teacher is."

In the longest single-issue, education-only speech any of the candidates have given for the public record thus far, Barack Obama did not disappoint earlier this week. Speaking in front of an audience of students, educators, and parents outside Denver, CO (a notable location, and location, of course, is everything), Senator Obama outlined a serious of key principles and policy ideas that would guide his legislative leadership on education were he to be elected president (full text of the speech here).

If you can get past the relatively slight amount of political pandering, where the Senator criticizes NCLB with the standard throw-away sentiment that NCLB left the funding behind, he actually makes some fair points. To begin with, he takes the bold and even slightly controversial position among liberal educators that NCLB itself is a good law with good goals. The problems, he correctly points out, have to do with the implementation. So far so good.

He then goes on to tell the truth about another straw-man argument that liberal educators wrongly bash the federal law for, the idea that NCLB has turned schools into factories where teachers no longer innovate in the classroom but only "teach to the test". And he did it in a way that garnered applause from an audience that I believe didn't quite catch his deft pivot. Stating, "we need to realize that we can meet high standards without forcing teachers and students to spend most of the year for a single, high stakes test," the Senator then changes gears to say that, "if we want our children to be great... our schools shouldn't stifle innovation, they should let it thrive." In doing so, I believe the Senator is pointing the blame for the "teaching to the test argument" at the correct party: not the federal government, but rather the schools and school districts who over-react to the concept of accountability by turning to rote memorization and test prep! As he goes on to say, the idea of school accountability for learning is important, and a standardized test is a necessary thing. But standardized tests and critical thinking skills, art, music and the like are not either / or propositions, they are both / and propositions.

Most importantly, the Senator sees the crucial issue threatening the quality of education in America: teacher quality. He recognizes that our children--particularly those in low-income urban and rural schools--will only go so far as their teachers can teach them, and that right now, our teachers are far from good enough. So he suggests a number of promising teacher recruitment programs and financial incentives that will help bring much needed talent into the field.

Unfortunately, the only place where I'm afraid he falls short is in a lack of candor over the other side of the teacher quality coin. Carrots are great to bring more people into the profession, but sticks are needed too--in fact the carrots won't do much without the sticks when all is said and done.

After all, we don't really have a shortage of nice people who come to school to teach every day. Plenty of low-quality candidates come to interview at my low-performing school each month, after all. The problem we have is that schools, by and large, are too slow to get rid of the worst teachers. More pointedly, schools are also too reluctant to pay good teachers what they deserve and bad teachers what they deserve as well. I hope the reason why Senator Obama did not come out and say this is because he understands that he can only make these kinds of changes if he doesn't go on a public anti-teacher union crusade, and not that he is unwilling to broach the issue. It won't be pretty if he tries, but if he can bring unions, students, and parents to the same table, crazier deals have been struck in the name of what's best for the future.

Lastly, I've heard Senator Obama use this refrain about needing parents who are willing to turn the T.V. off if we are going to really give our children the education they deserve--this idea of shared sacrifice and responsibility. It's a brilliant political line, and a popular part of his education passages in speeches. It accomplishes two things: (1) it gives him the appearance of "street cred" as a truth-talker, unafraid to confront delinquent parents, and (2) it seems to make sense. The real beauty of the line, though, is that it accomplishes both tasks without any political cost! Why? Because the parents he is talking about, by and large, do not recognize that they are the ones at fault! Parents as a whole are quick to point out when other parents are doing a bad job, but rare to admit that they are failing their children (and if you need to know more, just ask me to tell you about a student who's mom enrolled him in the wrong grade at the start of this school year because she forgot what grade he was supposed to be in!).