U.S. Schools 101: President Obama's inaccurate blasts at our schools

November 11, 12:03 PMSF Education ExaminerCaroline Grannan

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I cried with joy when Barack Obama was elected president, and I'm still with him most of the way, but I'm flat-out dismayed at how he is handling education.

Obama's Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, is a non-educator businessman who basically faked his resume when he claimed to have achieved successes in running Chicago's schools -- look, you don't hire someone to do a job because he's your basketball buddy; you hire someone who's qualified and experienced (and who hasn't made false claims on his resume).

Like much of the business community, Duncan is pushing privatization, more testing and other E-Z magical-thinking miracle fixes, disdainfully squelching the views of experienced educators, people who actually have seen the inside of a classroom.

I posted about this at the time, but again aiming at new parents coming into the schools: Obama made a speech in March that assailed U.S. public schools and characterized them as lagging behind other nations -- using inaccurate inforamtion that painted an unjustifiably gloomy picture. Here's an excerpt from factcheck.org correcting some of those misstatements (emphasis mine):

 ... President Obama is making a case for spending more on teachers’ salaries, early education and more as part of his new agenda. We certainly wouldn’t argue that education can’t be improved, but some of the figures Obama used painted a bleaker picture than actually exists:

    * The high school dropout rate hasn’t "tripled in the past 30 years," as Obama claimed. According to the Department of Education, it has actually declined by a third.

    * Eighth-grade math scores haven’t "fallen" to ninth place compared with other countries. U.S. scores have climbed to that ranking from as low as 28th place in 1995.

    * Obama also set a goal "of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world" by 2020. But in terms of bachelor’s degrees, we’re nearly there. The U.S. is already second only to Norway in the percentage of adults age 25 to 64 with a four-year degree, and trails by just 1 percentage point.
 

Echoing factcheck.org and others who think it's important to get the facts straight and not use falsehoods to disparage our schools, I agree that there's much about our educational system that needs improvement. But it's just wrong -- and damaging --  to use inaccuracies to blast our schools undeservedly. 

Read the full factcheck.org commentary.