By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
Citing the fact that American students attend school about a month less than children in other advanced nations, President Obama suggested today that one way of improving education in America will be to lengthen the school year.
During an interview with Matt Lauer of the TODAY Show this morning, the President addressed the problem of America’s failing school system, saying that money alone won’t 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,” the president said.
“Obviously, in some schools money plays a big factor,” he said, mentioning the fact that schools in poor neighborhoods often lack updated textbooks. “On the other hand, money without reform will not fix the problem.”
He went to explain his administration’s “reform agenda”, which includes increasing standards, finding and encouraging the best teachers, decreasing bureaucracy and deploying financial resources more effectively. He also said failing teachers should be given a chance to improve, but if that doesn’t work, they should “move on.”
The President then repeated his support for a longer school year, noting that on average U.S. attend classes about a month less than children in most other advanced countries.
“That month makes a difference,” he said. “It means students are losing a lot of what they learn during the school year during the summer … The idea of a longer school year, I think, makes sense. Now, that’s going to cost some money … but I think that would be money well spent.”
The interview comes on the heels of the release of a new documentary, Waiting for Superman by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) which documents the bloated bureaucracy of the U.S. public school system and the teachers unions that are standing in the way of meaningful reform.
The president, who has strong political ties to unions, expressed his interest in working with teachers’ unions, but said they shouldn’t defend a status quo in which one-third of children are dropping out. He urged them not to be resistant to change, particularly in the overcrowded urban high schools which some describe as “dropout factories.”
“The vast majority of teachers want to do a good job,” the president said. “We have to be able to identify teachers who are doing well. Teachers who are not doing well, we have to give them the support and the training to do well. And ultimately, if some teachers are not doing a good job, they’ve gotta go.”
He also announced an initiative to train 10,000 new math and science teachers in order to stop the steady decline in math and science scores in the U.S.
“My administration is announcing that we are going to specifically focus on training 10,000 new math and science teachers,” he said. “We have to boost performance in that area. We used to rank at the top; we are now 21st in science, 25th in math. That is a sign of long-term decline that has to be reversed.”
The president acknowledged that fact that his two daughters, Sasha, 9, and Malia, 12, are both enrolled in private schools that he said are much better than the public schools in Washington, D.C., but went on to say that parents need to do more to foster good study habits at at home.
“No matter how good the teacher, if the kid’s coming home from school, and the parent isn’t checking to see if they are doing their homework or watching TV, that’s going to be a problem,” he said. “And that, by the way, is true here in this White House. Malia and Sasha are great kids, and great students. But if you gave them a choice, they’d be happy to sit in front of the TV all night long, every night. At some point you have to say, ‘Your job, kid, right now, is to learn.’ ”
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