Barack Obama offered more details of his educational platform during a speech this morning at a high school in Ohio. A key theme was embracing innovation, including more charter schools ? a position not destined to win him plaudits from the education establishment, to say the least:
“There’s partisanship and there’s bickering, but there’s no
understanding that both sides have good ideas that we’ll need to
implement if we hope to make the changes our children need,” Obama said
in excerpts provided by his campaign before the speech. “And we’ve
fallen further and further behind as a result. If we’re going to make a
real and lasting difference for our future, we have to be willing to
move beyond the old arguments of left and right and take meaningful,
practical steps to build an education system worthy of our children and
our future.”
OK, I’ll go along with that. I don’t much like his proposal to double federal funding for charters, though. Washington should be playing a smaller, not a larger, role in educational finance. It would be better to limit the federal role to assessment, the bully pulpit, and perhaps challenging any state restrictions on local educational innovations and management contracts that could be deemed an unconstitutional restraint of interstate commerce.
