Posted on 09/27/2010 7:47:52 AM PDT by MaestroLC
President Barack Obama said Monday morning during a live interview on NBC that his daughters couldn't get the same quality education at a District public school that they currently get at their private school.
Obama says the schools in the District of Columbia are "struggling," though he said there have been some important steps made in the direction of reform.
The president's daughters, Malia and Sasha, attend the Sidwell Friends School, an elite private school. Public schools in Washington have faced criticism for their low test scores and high graduation rates.
The president took a question from Florida resident Kelly Burnett:
"I wanted to know if Malia and Sasha would get the same high-quality, rigorous education in a D.C. public school as compared to the very elite private academy they're attending now?"
"I'll be blunt with you. The answer is 'no' right now," Obama said. "The D.C. Public School systems are struggling. They have made some important strides over the past several years to move in the direction of reform. There are some terrific individual schools in the D.C. system. ...
"I'll be very honest with you. Given my position, if I wanted to find a great public school for them to be in, we could probably maneuver to do it. The broader problem is that for a mom or dad who are working hard and who don't have a bunch of connections, don't have a lot of choice in where they live, they should be getting the same quality education for their kids as anybody else."
Amen. The teacher's union is trying to get her out because she is for vouchers and good schools there. Saw some of this on Fox's The WSJournal program. Sounds like Obama may be on the right side on this one. At least what he says, what he does may be something else.
What Obama really is saying, ‘we’re going to keep you people on the welfare plantation so you are obligated to vote for your meager increases in handouts. We cannot afford to give your children a quality education because they would possibly realize what we are doing in Washington’.
Yes, our President and his Secretary of Education both have said “we’ll pursue whatever works.” And yet, despite the proven progress that the DC Opportunity Scholarships were delivering (and the healthy competition it was bringing to the public school system) their debt to the Teachers’ Unions was much more important.
I would love to see an advertisement showing the Obama girls going off in their limo to Sidwell Friends while those denied their Opportunity Scholarships are sent off to the work-houses of the DC Public Schools.
PS: Where did Arne Duncan chose to live when he came to Washington? Not in DC, I can assure you.
And they'll ALWAYS vote for the black guy/gal, no matter how hateful.
You are onto something, keeping people dependent is their goal, insulating power. School unions and their Marxist politician allies need dummies to rule over, like Jesse Jackson requires poor blacks to ensure his blackmailing business thrives. If they learned to be self sufficient, the game is over for the Left via ‘compassion’.
i’m not sure “arne” and his “partner” have children...does he?
Didn’t Jimmy Carter have his daughter in the public schools at first and it was a disaster. Although, maybe that’s where she learned so much about nuclear proliferation.
He’s proposing thousands of new teachers with bigger, fatter salaries. It’s called votes and the majority are women.
Yes, and I bet virtually all of those tearful black mothers voted for Obama.
Replace the word “struggling” with “run by commielib social engineers who desire the destruction of Western Civilization” and you will have properly defined the problem.
They wouldn’t vote for the black guy if it was Clarence Thomas or Ken Blackwell. Of course, they aren’t really black.
Is he the mayor of DC now? I don’t pay property taxes there so I don’t want to support DC schools! Raise the rich politicians property taxes to support their school district, don’t pass it on to the rest of the country!
Ouch..that's gotta hurt there DC teachers union folk. Got more money for him and that hopey changy stuff?
However, he doesn’t want less fortunate black children to receive that same quality of education. Typical Marxist.
What does Obama really know about the public DC schools? His daughters sure have never been in one. Not that I blame him - I wouldn’t let my kids go to any of them either.
Few things have captured in microcosm what has gone so painfully wrong, where racial issues are concerned, like the recent election for mayor of Washington, D.C.
Mayor Adrian Fenty, under whom the murder rate has gone down and the school children's test scores have gone up, was resoundingly defeated for re-election.
Nor was Mayor Fenty simply a passive beneficiary of the rising test scores and falling murder rates. He appointed Michelle Rhee as head of the school system and backed her as she fought the teachers' union and fired large numbers of ineffective teachers-- something considered impossible in most cities across the country.
Mayor Fenty also appointed the city's chief of police, Cathy Lanier, who has cracked down on hoodlumism, as well as crime.
Either one of these achievements would made mayors local heroes in most other cities. Why then was he clobbered in the election? ~snip~
In short, the mayor appointed the best people he could find, instead of running a racial patronage system, as a black mayor of a city with a black majority is apparently expected to. He also didn't spend as much time schmoozing with the folks as was expected. ~snip~
How did we reach the point where a city is so polarized that an overwhelming majority of the white vote goes to one candidate and the overwhelming majority of the black vote goes to the opposing candidate?
How did we reach the point where black voters put racial patronage and racial symbolism above the education of their children and the safety of everyone?
There are many reasons but the trend is ominous. One key factor was the creation, back in the 1960s, of a whole government-supported industry of race hustling.
President Lyndon Johnson's "war on poverty"-- a war that we have lost, by the way-- bankrolled all kinds of local "leaders" and organizations with the taxpayers' money, in the name of community "participation" in shaping the policies of government.
These "leaders" and community activists have had every reason to hype racial resentments and to make issues "us" against "them."
Cognitive dissonance is a fascinating thing...
DC had a mayor who supported all the right policies for the children. They have a school chancellor who is very effective in cleaning the mess of the DC school system and who the mayor supports.
So, what did the DC voters do? They kicked the mayor out and voted in a teacher’s union hack. This could also mean that chancellor Michele Rhee will be replaced when the hack takes office.
Same here in New York’s 30th Congressional District. Parents have been clamoring FOR Charter Schools after a study showed kids in charter schools perform better by a statistically significant margin than union controlled schools. Who was against more charter schools ? Bill Perkins ( Dem candidate for State Senate ). His opponent, Basil Smirkle was FOR charter schools.
Guess who won in the primaries ? Bill Perkins !!
The voters clamor for charter schools, yet when push comes to shove, they vote in the man who fought against it and allied himself with the teacher’s union.
GO FIGURE !!
It’s more than $13,000 I’m sure. Newark, NJ, is from $22,000 to $24,000 per kid (depending on who you hear it from), half of the 40,000 students graduate, 20% of them go on to college where they have to take remedial courses and some guy just gave Newark $100 million which will probably wind up in some sort of slush fund since so far no one knows what to do with it.
Zuckerberg should have set up a scholarship fund for parents who wanted to pull their kids out of the public schools, but that’s not politically correct and might damage his empire.
If children won’t get motivated to be educated, no amount of money spent on schools will succeed.
And for a teacher to be judged on how well an unmotivated student does on a test will also not succeed.
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