Obama wants bar set higher

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama on Saturday said he will send to Congress this week a blueprint for overhauling the nation’s education program and the No Child Left Behind project.

Worried that the U.S. is falling behind in education, Obama warned in his weekly address that “the nation that out-educates us today will out-compete us tomorrow.”

A plan to overhaul the 2002 education law championed by President George W. Bush was unveiled by the Obama administration Saturday in hopes of replacing a system that in the last decade has tagged more than a third of schools as failing and created a hodgepodge of sometimes weak academic standards among states.

“Unless we take action – unless we step up – there are countless children who will never realize their full talent and potential,” Obama said during a video address on Saturday. “I don’t accept that future for them. And I don’t accept that future for the United States of America.”

In the proposed dismantling of the No Child Left Behind law, education officials would move away from punishing schools that don’t meet benchmarks and focus on rewarding schools for progress, particularly with poor and minority students. Obama intends to send a rewrite to Congress on Monday of the law.

The proposed changes call for states to adopt standards that ensure students are ready for college or a career rather than grade-level proficiency – the focus of the current law.

The blueprint also would allow states to use subjects other than reading and mathematics as part of their measurements for meeting federal goals, pleasing many education groups that have said No Child Left Behind encouraged teachers not to focus on history, art, science, social studies and other important subjects.

And, for the first time in 45 years, the White House is proposing a $4 billion increase in federal education spending, most of which would go to increase the competition among states for grant money and move away from formula-based funding.

The blueprint goes before the House Education and Labor Committee on Wednesday as Obama pushes Congress to reauthorize the education law this year, a time-consuming task that some observers say will be difficult. Committee Chairman George Miller, a Democrat from California, praised Obama’s plan.

“This blueprint lays the right markers to help us reset the bar for our students and the nation,” Miller said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the American Federation of Teachers, which represents more than 1.4 million educators nationwide, issued a statement Saturday criticizing the plan, saying “it just doesn’t make sense to have teachers – and teachers alone – bear the responsibility for school and student success.”

“It appears from our first review that despite some promising rhetoric, this blueprint places 100 percent of the responsibility on teachers and gives them zero percent authority,” the statement said.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan briefed a handful of governors, lawmakers and education groups on the plan Friday, including Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, a Republican.

“The governor is very supportive of the direction the secretary is going,” said Perdue’s spokesman Chris Schrimpf.

The blueprint would also give more rewards to high-poverty schools that are seeing big gains in student achievement and use them as a model for other schools in low-income neighborhoods that struggle with performance.

It would also punish the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools by having the state take over federal funding for poor students, replacing staff or closing the school altogether.