Schools

President Barack Obama announced today that he's "asked the Vice President to lead an effort that includes members of my Cabinet and outside organizations to come up with a set of concrete proposals no later than January -- proposals that I then intend to push without delay."

The courts are moving with customary alacrity in ruling on Mayor Rahm Emanuel's request for an injunction that would have compelled teachers to return to the classroom this morning.

The Republican presidential candidates have spent the past year saying little about education. When they have addressed the issue, it has often been in terse calls to “turn off the lights” at the U.S. Department of Education.

President Obama on Friday will "speak with juniors and graduating seniors and their parents about the need to prevent interest rates on federal subsidized student loans from doubling on July 1" at Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., the White House announced earlier today.

On Purpose

Philip Brand has made an extraordinary journey.

Beginning in New Hampshire in September, 2008, Brand and his brother Evan spent seven months traveling the country, visiting two schools in each state (except Alaska). They visited inner-city schools, home schools, suburban schools, rich schools, poor schools--all in a painstaking attempt, as Brand puts it, to “understand American schooling.” The result of this sojourn is an invaluable, sometimes heart-breaking, treatise on the state of contemporary American schools.

President Obama was asked recently about "Waiting for 'Superman,'" the Davis Guggenheim documentary about public education which depicts a handful of qualified inner-city students competing for a limited number of spaces in charter schools.

The new documentary Waiting for "Superman", which premiered last night at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., follows several American students in suffering school districts and the reformers trying to fight and change the education system. But it was Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools and one of the film's subjects, who vocalized perhaps what many in the audience had been thinking during the screening.

New Jersey governor Chris Christie is getting results: 

New Jersey voters took a stand on school spending and property taxes Tuesday, rejecting 260 of 479 school budgets across 19 counties, according to unofficial results in statewide school elections.

President Obama missed a host of opportunities to remedy Washington’s fever of polarization during the health care debate. Instead of forging a bipartisan coalition and ratcheting back the campaign-style rhetoric, he agreed to a one-party strategy and consistently demonized his opponents with over the top rhetoric.

Mr. Obama also falsely raised citizens’ expectations that one bill or a new government program could remedy all that ails us. Government is no wonder drug.  It cannot deliver all the life altering promises on the president’s wish list.