Is it just me, or with a full two months until President-elect Obama will take the oath of office as our nation's 44th President, is everyone and their political pundit mother questioning Barack Obama as though he is already our chief executive?

To be sure, a lot of the scrutiny Obama has received is rooted in key decisions that he is in the process of making regarding his plan to address our struggling economy--decisions such as the makeup of his team of economic advisors, the details of his stimulus plan, his level of support for an auto-maker industry bailout, and so on. And other sources of scrutiny are timely simply because they concern intriguing cabinet level selections, with Senator Hillary Clinton headlining the list.

But Mr. Obama is already drawing what can best be termed "challenges" from observers as to his leadership ability and reform views on a wide variety of less prominent issues as well--and education is a terrific example of this. Two pieces just this past week--one in Newsweek and another in the Wall Street Journal--call out Mr. Obama and whether he will be able to deliver on his promises of the change we need, changes that are particularly vital in school reform.

Newsweek questions whether Senator Obama's purported commitment to change in education will actually ring true through the lens of recent developments in D.C. Public Schools, where controversial Chancellor of Schools Michelle Rhee has threatened to unilaterally revoke teacher tenure in exchange for a merit pay system that would reward the district's best teachers salaries approaching $130,000--where "best" is judged by how much students improve in learning. In the Wall Street Journal, Stanford Professor Terry Moe questions more broadly whether Mr. Obama will have the political gumption needed to take on teachers unions to make changes that many in the school reform arena think are crucial: expanding school choice, strengthening school accountability, and reassessing teacher pay in exactly the kind of ways contemplated by Michelle Rhee.

Why the attention and, arguably, premature concern over Mr. Obama's ability to deliver reform in education when he becomes president? I suppose part of it owes to a desperately hungry media news cycle that has had a year's worth of Obama-watching and that is loath to give it up now that the election season is over (But wait! Media! What if we entered President Obama in this hotly-contested, closely-watched, and rife-with-implications electoral race!) And another part of it has to do with the de facto nature of a constitutional conundrum concerning where power actually rests during lame-duck periods like the one we are in now.

But another source of the unrest and concern over Mr. Obama's ability to lead has to do with the nature of the electoral coalition he put together and that propelled him to the White House. It's no surprise that any time a candidate receives more than 66 million popular votes that not all of those voters will agree with each other on big issues, but in education there is a divide, alluded to in the WSJ op-ed that has unique implications: a good percentage of the Democratic base plays by the old playbook of teacher-union driven reform models, while many others ask more exclusively, what is best for school children?

Here's where a recent development kicks in: President-elect Obama tabbed a pro-union, old-school reform thinker, Linda Darling-Hammond, to be the leader of his education policy transition team, drawing concerns from progressives in the newer camp of school reform. The same thing has happened, in some eyes, in the economic team put together by the Obama leadership, a team that has a lot of old-school ties to the Clinton years (not to mention Mrs. Clinton herself at State).

What does it all mean? We're still two months away from President Obama's first day in office, but already the second-guessing is starting. The second-guessing, however, does little good (other than to give me something to blog about). Better for us, as a nation and punditry, to ease off on the political commentary a bit and wait until the President-elect actually gets into office and develops a record on these very issues. Once that happens, any and every move and decision made by the administration will be fair game.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While large numbers of young Americans have gotten involved in the political process lately--both through exercise of the right to vote as well as through protests on issues such as California's recent Proposition 8 banning gay marraige--students in Europe have been busy making their own political statements in resounding fashion.

The video and pictures below are from protests in the streets of Italy (video) and Germany (photo), where students in the past weeks have taken bold action to show their anger with government proposals in each country cutting education spending and services:

It's impossible to analyze the events in Italy without reference to the flagging economic conditions affecting the entire globe. Italy is on the front-lines of the economic downturn, with the world's third largest debt (behind only the US and Japan), but only the 7th largest economy by GDP. In light of the economic situation, Italian Prime Minister Sylvio Berlusconi has sought to make dramatic spending cuts--as much as $7 billion Euros, or $9 billion US--in the education system. Proposed cuts would include eliminating as many as 70,000 teaching positions in elementary schools and reducing spending in Italian high schools and universities.

In Germany, student protests are just beginning (compared to the protests in Italy, which started towards the end of October). German students are upset with overcrowded classrooms, high-pressure school exit exams, and teacher quality in general.

While estimates vary, the number of youth protestors in Italy has been widely reported as in the hundreds of thousands--anywhere from 100,000 to 500,000. Given that Italy's population is five times smaller than the United States, one has to wonder what would happen if hundreds of thousands or even millions of American youth stood united to demand improvements in our schools.

To be sure, much remains to be determined as to whether Italian student protests will lead Prime Minister Berlusconi to recant on his promises to cut education spending, or whether there will be some electoral blowback (a Reuters report showed Mr. Berlusconi's approval rating falling a significant 4% in just the past month as the protests have gotten underway). But if the experience from student social movement building in Chile is any lesson, we almost certainly have yet to see the final impact of the protests.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

What is the most important issue facing the Obama family right now?

No, it's not the breed of dog they should bring to the White House (although the leading candidate is good news for animal shelters across the country who will get some free press: rescue dog!)

And it certainly has nothing to do with the drapes in the oval office or whether to team up with Senator McCain and Governor Palin to steal the hope diamond.

The most important issue facing the first-family-elect has to do with where Sasha and Malia...

should go to school.

It is a tricky question, substantively, to be sure. There are two widely renown, elite private schools that most pundits have at the top of the Obama's list: Georgetown Day School and Sidwell Friends School. The Obama girls both currently attend the University of Chicago's Laboratory School, a highly regarded private school in its own right, and it wouldn't be a culture shock for the two of them to transfer to either Georgetown Day or Sidwell Friends, where Chelsea Clinton was enrolled. I doubt either the Obama girls will have trouble getting admission, and their parents can probably foot the ~$30,000 tuition.

But a wild card is in the picture, which makes the choice for the first family difficult not just substantively, but symbolically: Thomson Elementary School, one of the higher achieving elementary schools in the DC Public School system. The school seems to be a beacon in a district that is largely maligned by low test scores and high drop-out rates, although recent reforms under new school Chancellor Michelle Rhee have drawn positive reviews from a number of education reformers.

The substantive issues are relatively straightforward, and they are for the Obamas to decide: where do they think Sasha and Malia will get the best education to prepare them for a successful future? It's the same choice that face so many families across the country, except for two major differences.

The first difference, of course, is that the vast majority of families don't even have the option of sending their kids to $30,000 a year primary schools. If history is any guide, it's likely that the Obama kids will do what many wealthy families do and send Sasha and Malia to either of the private schools, since the last first kid to attend a public school was Jimmy Carter's daughter, Amy, over 30 years ago.

But the second difference between the Obama family choice and the choice facing most American families is that millions of people are watching their decision. Put simply there are political implications when one chooses to send their kids to an elite private school that is out of reach for mainstream America, and yet tries to understand mainstream America's challenges.

Now I, and many others such as the USA Today editorial board, don't think the Obamas should make the choice for political reasons. But that doesn't mean politics don't exist on this decision. Thomson Elementary serves nearly 300 school children, 69% of whom are from low-income families, and 96% of whom are minorities (40% Hispanic, 34% black, and 22% Asian-American, the remainder white). There is undoubtedly a message sent if Mr. and Mrs. Obama enroll Sasha and Malia there; whether one calls it faith in the American public education system, belief in the American dream, or just good old fashioned seeing-what-your-tax-dollars pay for.

Where do you think they should send their kids (or do you think its no business of nosy bloggers like me?)

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A treasure trove of implications for school children can be mined from the election returns on Tuesday--not just as a result of the big race but also from a number of key ballot measures I discussed last week.

But before getting to the initiatives, a quick dissection of what President-Elect Obama may mean for children in the early months of his administration. There are two quick and easy wins that look to be likely bets on any 100 days type calendar: expanding funding for children's health insurance --a measure vetoed by President Bush--via SCHIP and passing a new college tuition tax credit to benefit at-need college students in exchange for community service.

The tougher question is what President Obama will do about reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (AKA NCLB). It's unlikely that he will tackle NCLB in the early part of his legislative calendar simply because: 1.) It will cost a lot of political capital to do so, and 2.) that capital, in the eyes of most Americans, is more urgently needed on economic action, energy policy, troop numbers in the Middle East, and even health care. So the best answer to the question, what will President Obama do on K-12 education in the very early going? He'll punt... at least until middle-late 2009.

To the ballot measures. Missouri, Colorado, Maryland, and Arkansas each had ballot proposals to increase access citizen access to gambling with a back-end result of increasing (or substituting) public education funding. All four initiatives passed. Just goes to show what happens when you bundle up a bunch of core American values--freedom, education, risk-taking, greed--in one neat package and place it on a ballot: people will vote for it.

Nebraska and Colorado each had initiatives to ban affirmative action, part of California millionaire Ward Connerly's steady march to rid states of the policy one by one (affirmative action bans have been passed in Connerly's home state of California, Washington, and Michigan in previous elections). The ban passed easily in Nebraska, but was just declared defeated in Colorado, by the narrowest of margins.

Colorado wasn't done with controversial measures affecting education, though. A trio of anti-union measures, Amendments 47, 49, and 54 were up for decision as well, and the first two were defeated easily, largely through the campaign organizing of the Colorado Education Association. 47 & 49 would have made it illegal for school districts to force teachers to pay their union dues by witholding pay from their paychecks, a fairly common practice in schools across the nation--but Union control lives on. Amendment 54, however, passed narrowly--a measure designed to limit the lobbying influence of organizations who receive no-bid / non-competitive contracts from the government. The measure was supported as a pro-democracy plan to limit lobbyist and special interest influence; teachers unions are likely to file suit over the initiative on first amendment grounds.

Lastly, the initiatives I was personally most curious about: Oregon measures 58 and 60. Both failed by wide margins--58 proposed to restrict non-English instruction in schools and 60 attempted to change Oregon's system for teacher pay from a seniority-based system to a merit-based system. No question that 58 runs counter to progressive notions of equity along racial and ethnic lines by essentially rendering Spanish and other second language classes not just inferior, but illegal in certain school settings.

But measure 60 is a bit tricker. It is the kind of measure that was no doubt destined to fail, but which just may prove prescient; the kind of idea that is rightfully placed directly before voters because entrenched political interests are unlikely to support it. The idea is this: if we, as a people, believe that data systems are appropriate and in place such that educators can be measured, rewarded, or recognized as in-need of improvement based on how much they are helping their students learn, then shouldn't that be a system of paying teachers that deserves consideration instead of paying our oldest teachers most (which may be, at best, only loosely tied to student learning)? In other words, it's totally appropriate to pay an experienced teacher "A" the most money out of an entire staff if teacher "A" is in fact helping their students advance the most in math, reading skills, science, etc. And if that's the case, can anyone make an argument for why we would pay teacher "B", whose students, year-in and year-out, show absolutely no improvement in reading or math skills more than teacher "A"? No way right?

Now what if I told you that teacher "A" has been a teacher for 6 years and teacher "B" for 30 years. Would you suddenly want to pay teacher "B" more (in some districts, as much as 100% more) just because he is older? I can't think of a single reason why we'd do that. At its heart, that is what measure 60 was about, though. Of course, there are lots of nuances about the data and why any merit system has to be cautious so as to avoid over-drawn conclusions, but Oregon Measure 60 is not some political hack job idea--it's a serious issue.

Finally, in perhaps the most important decision still to be made, word on the street is that there is a leading contender in the race to be the First Dog promised to Sasha and Malia Obama:

GOLDENDOODLE!!!!

Posted by Aaron Tang at 01:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)