Education reform is about to return to the headlines, if not the floor of Congress, if President Obama’s State of the Union is any indication. Obama built his feel-good speech Tuesday night around the uncontroversial theme of “winning the future” and nestled every major policy issue within this rhetorical frame. He put particular emphasis on education as the path to that victorious future. But the education agenda the president articulated contained no surprises. It’s the same one his administration’s been selling for the past two years–and it’s the same one many of his critics have been fretting about for just as long.

Education reform watchers offered Obama reserved praise for giving education such a prominent place in his speech. “One reaction I had was exactly that he spent a lot of time on education, which I think is a good thing,” said John Rogers, associate professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. But Rogers, like a handful of other educators I spoke with after the speech, added long caveats after this initial praise.

Obama touted his administration’s undeniable wins, including student aid reform, and championed the more questionable achievements of Race to the Top, which is a $4.35 billion competitive grants program for states that adopt the president’s reform agenda. Eleven states have won millions of dollars each as a reward for opening up their states to more charter schools and agreeing to make test scores a component of teacher evaluations and salaries. 

Under Race to the Top, states were rewarded for forcing public schools that were designated as failing to undergo a total restructuring or a takeover from a charter school company. The program remains controversial, especially among teachers who oppose new evaluation systems that they feel unfairly punish individual educators for a systemic problem.

Obama also called for 100,000 more science and math teachers by the end of the decade and called on Congress to take up a No Child Left Behind reauthorization in the model of Race to the Top. He didn’t suggest how those teachers would get funded, and congressional watchers consider it unlikely that the new Congress will have the stomach for a major overhaul of any program, including No Child Left Behind.

Obama called Race to the Top “the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation.” If success is measured by impact, Obama’s correct. The program circumvented Congress entirely and got 39 states to rewrite their education laws. But if success is measured in students’ improved performance and teachers’ increased retention rates, the jury’s still out.

“I think the speech clearly shows the president understands the link between education and our country’s future,” said John Jackson, president of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, which works toward racial equity in public education. (Colorlines’ publisher, the Applied Research Center, has done contract research for the Schott Foundation.) But, Jackson stresses, the Race to the Top initiatives Obama is pushing aren’t proven to work. ”We haven’t seen one state that has reformed its education system by removing its charter school cap, or reformed its education system by linking teacher salaries to student performance.” 

A September 2010 study by Vanderbilt University found that performance pay on its own had no measurable impact on teachers’ ability to raise their students’ test scores.

Global Competition

In his speech, Obama tapped into the pain that many Americans are feeling right now as they wade through seemingly endless economic crisis, and tried to redirect that frustration toward global competitiveness. He warned that while America’s middle class has been dismantled over the course of a generation, other countries have been ascending, creeping onto the medal stands that the U.S. occupied alone for decades.

“Nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world,” Obama said. “And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science. They’re investing in research and new technologies.”

But pitting the U.S. against other countries unsettled some educators. 

“The line here is: ‘Yeah, they go to the sweatshops now and make stuff for us, but if they beat us they won’t be in the sweatshops making stuff anymore. They might dare to have a standard of living that’s better than us,’ ” said Rick Ayers, adjunct professor of education at the University of San Francisco and co-author of “Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom.” ”It’s all put out in a very polite, liberal veneer, but I would point out that it’s the dark, Asiatic other that is being called up.” 

Ayers said that the true comparison between present-day America and Cold War America is “an extraordinary rise in income inequality that public policy could address separately, an extraordinary rise in incarceration rates that public policy could address. The presumption that education can act independently of economic inequality and incarceration is wrong.”

The United States is ninth globally in the percentage of undergraduate degree holders, Obama said. He wants the country to claw its way back to the top. As it is, more than a third of college students don’t graduate in six years, and that number is even higher for undergraduate students of color–something Obama pointed out in a speech he gave at UT Austin last year. The president seemingly knows that students of color are key to achieving his education goals.

Jackson said other countries’ educational success has been linked to the educational equity that the U.S. has not yet found. “All of the countries that are outcompeting us don’t deal with fringe structural issues,” he argued. “They provide all students access to early education. They hold teachers in high regard, and not in a punitive frame, and they have a much more equitable distribution of their resources.”

Jackson pointed out that there are over a million homeless children in the U.S., for instance.

“Yes, we want to ‘win the future,’ but for many the concern now is surviving the present,” Rogers echoed, adding that 22 percent of American children below the age of six are living below the poverty line. “How do young people who are growing up in families that are really facing difficult economic circumstances survive the present without a whole host of social supports that are being eroded or eliminated outright?”

There was a time not so long ago when Obama was willing to examine the structural factors that influence a kid’s education, Rogers said. “None of that was in the speech [Tuesday] night,” he complained. ”Instead, all we get is that parents need to shut off the TV.” 

Obama’s lone reference to the role that parents and communities play in the nation’s education effort was to declare, ”Only parents can make sure the TV is turned off and homework gets done.”

That’s the narrow, individualized perspective that makes teachers and parents feel so besieged. Obama tried to soothe teachers–”Here in America, it’s time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect”–but critics say his policies don’t match that rhetoric. ”The truth is I didn’t feel the sincerity in that,” said Jim Anderson, who serves on the statewide board of the Alliance for Quality Education. “I haven’t seen the policies that shows that respect.” 

Educators said that Obama’s rhetoric contradicted his policy in other parts of his education remarks as well. Obama praised America’s public school systems for providing students with more than memorization drills for standardized tests. “It’s why our students don’t just memorize equations,” Obama said, “but answer questions like ‘What do you think of that idea? What would you change about the world? What do you want to be when you grow up?’ “

Rogers considered it one of Obama’s strongest lines and said that it reflected the part of the president’s vision he most admires. “But that’s not the sort of question that emerges when you have the narrowed standardized tests we have now,” he warned. 

“Obama’s good at co-opting the criticism,” said Ayers. “He said, ‘We’re not talking about rote memorization; we’re about learning deeply and asking questions.’ But that’s our argument,” Ayers said, referring to progressives who take issue with the Obama administration’s policies, “that the test prep stuff undermines the possibility of deep learning and learning for democracy.”

Of course, amidst everything the president was said, there were notable silences as well. Rogers said he wished Obama was more willing to address the vast racial disparities in kids’ educational opportunities. “I was struck by the fact that there was so little attention paid explicitly to the issue of race in education, or even outside of education,” Rogers said. “He didn’t highlight those equity issues.”

The upcoming year holds many uncertainties. It’s still unclear whether Republicans or Democrats have any interest in tackling No Child Left Behind, or even what another Race to the Top round would look like. In the meantime, the debate rages on over what winning the future even means, let alone how to do it.

President Obama’s speech last night was resolutely positive and forward looking. It was, after all, primarily a campaign speech for which the take-home message was “win the future” through smart investment and innovation. If that sounds more roaring ’90s than wincing ’00s, that’s because it is. But there are a number of deeply consequential choices that must be made in the coming months, all of which the president noticeably avoided in his State of the Union. Jamilah King wrote about one of them earlier today: sorting out the FCC’s power to keep the Internet open enough to fuel the sort of innovation Obama cheered. And Julianne Hing will tomorrow dig into the dirty details of Obama’s Race to the Top education reform. Another one that’s crucial to racial justice is consumer protection.

Obama has until July to name and get confirmed a permanent head to the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which Congress created at the president’s urging during the financial reform fight last winter. Elizabeth Warren, the bureau’s lead proponent in Washington, is currently getting it set up as a functioning body inside the Fed. Banks want nothing more than to block her from becoming its chief. That’s because they know she’s the best chance for the bureau to work.

Lobbyists succeeded in both keeping the new consumer watchdog housed inside the Fed and, importantly, giving existing banking regulators veto power over new rules the bureau writes. That means the only way it will actually have enough muscle to reign in predatory and deceptive banking practices–like, say, the subprime mortgages that existing regulators ignored for years–will be through a strong, informed chief who has the president’s ear. That’s Warren.

Obama’s in a tough spot on this. It’s pretty clear the Senate will not confirm Warren at this point, thanks to the banking lobby. It’s also clear that, if Obama offers a “safe” (read: bank approved) stand-in for Warren, the new bureau will immediately lose credibility, and not just in the eyes of progressive critics. There’s every reason to believe Obama wants the bureau to succeed, and that he’s got faith in Warren to head it. He could cram her through by a recess appointment, or he could pick someone similar to her but who doesn’t have her high profile. Either way, it’ll take a fight, and a deeply consequential one. The new consumer watchdog is the only meaningful check on Wall Street’s power to continue the destructive practices that got us here. If Obama caves on its chief, he truly will have led us back to 1999.

The State of the Union address has been interpreted differently since President George Washington delivered the first speech in 1790. And though the speech is required by the  constitution: every president in each address has offered his own spin. Lincoln discussed the emancipation of slaves. In 1978, Jimmy Carter assured the country that “militarily, politically, economically, and in spirit” the state of our Union was sound.
In 2002 and 2003 George W. Bush used his speech to argue the moral case for war against Iraq. And yesterday, Obama focused on innovation.

If you ever wanted to see just what those varied themes looked like in real time, you’re in luck. Take a look at the “tag clouds” below to see how Tuesday’s State of the Union compares to previous speeches. The size of the text changes according to how many times the word was used in a speech. And the content speaks volumes.

President Obama, 2011:

President George W. Bush, 2002:

Jimmy Carter, 1978

John F. Kennedy, 1962

Abraham Lincoln, 1862

George Washington, 1790

President Obama delivered his second State of the Union and fourth address to a joint Congress last night. Pundits have generally responded to his rallying tone, which was Obama’s the latest effort to revive the guy millions loved in 2008. He focused on civility and unity, framed his ideas as grand scale initiatives that rise above the old debates of left and right, and hammered home a theme of American “innovation” as the way out of today’s troubles. In the end, he said almost nothing tangible, leaving us with little more knowledge of the White House’s priorities for the next two years than we had before the speech began.

There were two big pieces of news, however: He vowed a five-year freeze in domestic discretionary spending, but demanded we end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent as well. Everything the White House says and does over the next two years will be managed to reinforce this two-step strategy on the spending-vs.-deficit reduction debate that will dominate the 2012 campaign.

The president also championed his Race to the Top education reform, which many educators and schools advocates have argued is just top-down, testing-driven, charter-fetishizing reform by another name. Our reporter Julianne Hing will dig more deeply into the administration’s education reform efforts tomorrow. For now, you can recap the speech through my live blog from last night. Take a look.

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Update @ 10:21: And we arrive at the necessary jingoism part of the night: America, fuck yeah! Hey, don’t let me rain on anybody’s patriotism parade. And I’m as proud as anybody else of ambitious individuals and entrepreneurs like Brandon Fisher. But here’s the thing, the state of our union is plainly not strong. To the contrary, we are in deep, lasting crisis born of decades’ worth of refusal to acknowledge hard realities. From economics to climate, our insistence that anything is possible, that there are no limits to our growth, have driven us to a collapse. And our refusal to acknowledge the massive inequity that has fueled that unchecked growth–no subprime lending, no housing boom; no slave labor by undocumented immigrants, no successful “innovation” from a whole lot of sectors of the economy–will always damn our fates. All the cheerleading in the world won’t change those things.

Also, not for nothing, the president said next to nothing tangible tonight. Let’s unify. Let’s innovate. Let’s spend responsibly. Go forth and be Americans. I dunno, but I look around at the struggling families I know and have covered, and seems like we need a hell of a lot more than that right now.

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Update @ 10:06: We arrive at the main event: deficit reduction. Obama is good at this conversation, actually, and he’s reminding us of that tonight. It’s easy to forget that after two years of frustration with the “principled compromise” trope. But like the green economy stuff, Obama meaningfully drove the spending-vs.-cuts debate forward back in 2008. His frame of smart spending reduction is compelling to most people, and it’s also actually correct.

Tonight, he’s proposed a five year freeze in discretionary domestic spending. That’s meaningless; the real money is spent on non-discretionary stuff like Medicare, education, Social Security and so on. But it’s an easy way to dismiss the Republican straw man of wasteful, indulgent spending. (Similarly, Obama’s quips about silly environmental regulation is an easy way to steal the GOP thunder on how absurd Washington’s spending can be.) Both set him up to make the real point: Spending cuts alone won’t do it. We can’t afford Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent. Get used to this conversation, as both parties are eager to have it over the next two years. Barring some unforeseen new foreign policy crises, the defining (and related) issues of 2012 are deficit reduction and jobs. And make no mistake, this speech inaugurates the 2012 campaign.

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Update @ 9:49: Shorter immigration reform…What he said good: Pass the DREAM Act:

One last point about education. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of students excelling in our schools who are not American citizens. Some are the children of undocumented workers, who had nothing to do with the actions of their parents. They grew up as Americans and pledge allegiance to our flag, and yet live every day with the threat of deportation. Others come here from abroad to study in our colleges and universities. But as soon as they obtain advanced degrees, we send them back home to compete against us. It makes no sense.

What he said bad: I’ll keep deporting a record number of people and wasting billions on ineffective border militarization that’s getting more lethal every day.

Now, I strongly believe that we should take on, once and for all, the issue of illegal immigration. I am prepared to work with Republicans and Democrats to protect our borders, enforce our laws and address the millions of undocumented workers who are now living in the shadows.

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Update @ 9:44: I’ll leave a take on Obama’s Race to the Top education reform to our reporter Julianne Hing. She’ll chime in with a full update on the program by Thursday. According to Obama, “Race to the Top is the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation.” Suffice to say, it’s a bit more complicate than that.

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Update @ 9:37: Sputnick II. That’s been the buzz for days in advance, as the White House hopes to put Obama and Kennedy in the same breath again. It’s both smart politics and smart policy. Obama happily took a swipe at oil companies, and they’re an easy and appropriate villain. So he says the feds are going to redirect money from Big Oil’s tax breaks and into “innovation” investment.

There’s a lot of promise here, and Professor Obama can be an excellent messenger for it. The Bush White House became a standard bearer for anti-intellectual, anti-scientific ignorance (and for keeping Big Oil fat). Even if no policy changes, the president could do great service by leading a national conversation to restore science and intellectual rigor as a point of national pride. His vision for green jobs was certainly a compelling part of his original economic narrative, and it’s nice to see it return. And wouldn’t that green economy be nice? It’ll take real fight to get it, and don’t expect it before 2012. And the devil will be in the details: What jobs, for whom and where? Green for All has lots of good resources on this conversation.

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Update @ 9:25: Obama dove right into the real issue once dispensing with the unity trope: Where’s the jobs. He offers a poetic hark back to the good old days when “finding a good job meant showing up at a nearby factory or a business downtown. You didn’t always need a degree, and your competition was pretty much limited to your neighbors. If you worked hard, chances are you’d have a job for life, with a decent paycheck, good benefits, and the occasional promotion. Maybe you’d even have the pride of seeing your kids work at the same company. That world has changed.”

Due respect Mr. President, but that’s some bullshit. That’s not a history that’s particularly relevant to generations of people of color, who could not in fact get those jobs. This is more than a rhetorical concern. As I wrote Monday, too many communities–in particular black ones–never recovered from the 2001 recession. That’s because our policy solutions to it did nothing to address the structural inequalities the economy was built around. And today, no amount of happy talk about becoming competitive with China will end that decade-plus recession without a structural intervention. And not for nothing, it was that unaddressed black recession that created the customers who fueled the subprime crisis that broke the world.

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Update @ 9:17p : It comes as no surprise that the president opens his address with a poetic turn on unity. For one thing the text of the speech was leaked in advance. But also because Obama’s riding a wave of popularity he’s missed in recent months after his moving speech on the Tuscon shootings. One worries, however, that the White House is learning the wrong lesson. In times of national tragedy, Americans always rally around their leaders. New York City despised Rudy Guiliani, until 9/11. So Obama had a pretty low bar for that Tuscon speech. The real polling bump to mind is the one he got at the end of the lame duck Congress. What drove that? Winning. For the first time in two years, Obama wasn’t on the defense. Instead, he was shoving bills through Congress and declaring victory. That’s the lesson. Whatever he chooses to focus on following tonight, he’ll do well to spend less time on unity and more on winning.

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President Obama delivers his second State of the Union tonight, and fourth address to a joint Congress. The first question I’ve been asked by a number of colleagues on the left is, Who cares? It’s a good question.

It’s not just a statement of frustration with Obama–though, there’s plenty of that. It’s more a fatigue with the rote exercises of electoral politics. Year after year, journalists, activists and even individual voters turn earnestly toward Washington and engage it. We build coalitions and get out the vote come election. We propose legislation when the voting’s over. We watchdog the implementation of new policies as they roll out. And in what seems lately to be an inevitable end, we arrive at frustration and disappointment when the interests of a handful of rich and powerful outweigh those of everyone else. Then an election comes and we repeat the cycle. For many, the past three years are the defining example of this hamster wheel of democracy gone awry. And the State of the Union may be among the least compelling turns of the wheel. After all, the biggest story of this evening has been some Congress members’ decision to sit next to people in the opposite party. It’s hard to imagine a more empty gesture.

But here’s the thing, the State of the Union is also, if appropriately engaged, an accountability moment for our chief executive. There are few moments when the president stands up and speaks to the entire nation, outside of campaign season. It’s his (and one day, her) chance to stand up and outline where he intends to guide the nation over the next year. Those are too often empty promises; indeed, the budget proposal the White House releases in the weeks following each State of the Union is far more consequential. But this is the only government we’ve got, and it’s our responsibility as citizens to engage it. Too many elected officials and horse-race political pundits have reduced this and other elements of our democracy to meaningless ceremony. We can’t do the same as citizens. At minimum–and that’s not a stopping point–we have to pay attention to what our elected officials say, so we can hold them accountable to it.

This week, President Obama is scheduled to meet with two key congressional players in the movement for immigration reform—Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC)—who are working together behind the scenes to draft a bipartisan immigration bill. The President is expected to ask Sens. Graham and Schumer to produce a reform bill blueprint that “could be turned into legislative language.” While some will interpret this week’s meeting as another positive signal from the White House and others as a “last-ditch effort in an election year,” the White House affirms that the President is still committed to reforming our immigration system.

According to the L.A. Times, White House spokesperson Nick Shapiro said:

The president is looking forward to hearing more about their efforts toward producing a bipartisan bill…The president’s commitment to fixing our broken immigration system remains unwavering.

For many advocates, the upcoming White House meeting is a welcomed signal that immigration remains a priority for the President, particularly as grassroots groups across the country vent frustrations over the continuation of Bush-era “enforcement-only” policies. Immigration advocates have been disappointed by a perceived lack of leadership on this issue on the part of the President. Advocates have also cautioned that inaction on immigration reform could cause political fallout, particularly if the growing Latino electorate decides that there has not been enough movement on immigration reform and either stays home or votes for the opposition party.

Much like stalled health care legislation, it may be easy for President Obama to blame Congress for playing politics. But even in the absence of a much needed immigration overhaul, there are things the Obama Administration could do to improve immigration policy if he were serious about fixing the system. Last week, IPC released a review of DHS under the Obama Administration which outlines a series of changes the Administration could make absent legislation.

Conventional wisdom holds that the longer it takes President Obama to pass a major piece of legislation, the more political clout he loses come mid-term election. We understand that the President is currently facing some difficult legislative hurdles with health care and the economy, but regardless, immigrant advocates, as well as Asian, Latino and immigrant voters, are going to look to hold the President accountable for his actions—or inactions—on immigration reform. Talking to Senators Schumer and Graham is a welcomed step, but now the Administration has to show some real strength by making Administrative reforms and demonstrating that it is engaging the issue in a meaningful way. Real action will go a long way toward drumming up needed support in Congress and from a constituency whose vote could make all the difference come election time.

Photo by White House.