Michelle Obama Rallies the Education Troops

“”There’s a lot of work to do. And we’re gonna need you,” Mrs. Obama said. ”
Well, I mean not *me*. I am not sending my kids to public school.
I mean you’ve got to be kidding. I am spending $60K a year to avoid your work.
But other than that, we’re going to need you.

Nice to see Mrs Obama take an active role and I’m glad she had a great public education. However, the Obama children have never been in public school so to believe the Obama’s truely care or understand education issues is very hard. Mr. Duncan is not an educator and also lacks understanding of the issues. That is evidenced by his recent statements on CNN. He would do well to survey American teachers and ask those who are in the trenches day in and day out.

It does not require a person who has kids in Public schools to know the problems. My kids went mostly to private schools, and a daughter went to a public school for the last four years of high school. Yes, there are good teachers in the public school too, however, there are many really bad ones and you cannot get rid of them because of the union. Even the principal is unable to do anything and unless parents go through a long a arduous process, it is almost impossible to fire them. By which time, our kids would be out, bad teachers go on “medical leave” due to stress of this, and out for months, then comes back and remains a deadwood again. No, you don’t need kids in public school to know what is wrong – allowing unions to dictate to us all.

Karen … really bad ones and you cannot get rid of them because of the union
Did you know that over half of Obama’s stimulus package is going to these dead beat unions that drive legitimate bumpiness out of the country.

What is definition of “hypocrite”? Advocating for Public Schools when the President sends his daughters to a private school which tuition is more than a lot of salaries for Americans.

Technically, Michelle Obama graduated from high school the year before the Department of Education was established.
It would be interesting to compare the federal spending per student then- when Michelle and her brother graduated, to the now- when the Obamas opted out of Chicago Public Schools.
That might give us a clue about whether the problem is, indeed, a funding problem. I don’t think it is.

“Imagine what we can do with millions of dollars more investment in this area…”
Sadly, education is not an area that one can simply throw more money at to improve. There are too many variables. The support of the parents, the interest of the students and the quality of the teachers. None of those depends on more money.
Bad teachers need to be weeded out. The Teacher’s Unions protect the bad apples which poison the good ones. Children are last on their list of concerns.
Mrs. Obama, being the product of public schools and then choosing to put her own children into private education, shows her true lack of faith in teachers, parents and children who are less fortunate.
If redistribution of the wealth is one of the Obama’s mantras, why not with educational scholarships, also called vouchers. No additional funding is needed. Each family directs the current amount alloted for their child/children to the school they wish to attend.
Education is a gift that many simply throw away. The majority of the electorate proved their lack of education in post election interviews.

I would also like to point out to Mrs. Obama that her own husband was part of a failed attempt to throw $150 million at the Chicago public schools. By “failed”, I mean they spent the money but obtained few positive results.
It isn’t just about more funding, and I hope his time with the Chicago Annenberg Challenge has proven that to both Obamas.

Back when baby-boomers started public school in the 1950s, no European country enrolled 30% of its teens in full-time secondary school. In the U.S., 70% went to High School. This gave America an ENORMOUS economic advantage.
However, between 1975 and 1990, our education stalled. Today this decline threatens the US in a global economy. Whenever education falls behind the speed of technological change, the gap between rich and poor widens. Today a small group of skilled workers (like Wall Street bankers) command high salaries, and the growing number of unskilled workers (like High School drop-outs) have few choices.
My liberal friends say what’s happened to jobs has been the result of globalization, outsourcing and nasty capitalism. My conservative friends say it’s a result of evil labor unions, lazy workers, and bumbling government intervention. Regardless where your politics fall, I think we can all agree the US must find new, innovative ways to improve our country’s educational attainment. I applaud Michele Obama.
Stop being petty. So what if her kids go to private school. Everyone in America will benefit from stronger educational attainment at the bottom. Eliminating the skills gap means more tax payers, a stronger economy, and less need for government freebees. Isn’t that what we all want?

Hey: taxed by Obama but not his friends!
YOU refuse to file your taxes! The rest of us will not even hear about it because you don’t matter.
The First Lady means well and you know it, but all of your hate shines through anyway.

I recently came across a grammar school primer at a used bookstore. It was dated in the early 1920′s. It was AMAZING what they were reading back then. It had samples of poetry and prose (often written in archaic English), sentence structure, stories from the Bible, samples from Greek histories and books etc. Compare to the tripe the the school systems give our children to read! And this was for use in 1-6 (sections of the book for different ages since, I assume, 1 room schoolhouse usuage.) We have “dumbed down” the education system and this is just one small example.

Under Bush the DOE budget grew more than under any other president.
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If that’s actually the case, the money failed to make it to public schools, where each year since 2000 cuts were incrementally made in staff and programs.

All the haters must have amnesia.
We have just had the worst president in history and now all of a sudden they have concern for what’s going on in government.
Bush raped this country while padding the coffers of his cronies and most of you were had your mute button on.
Now you speak but now I have your mute button ON.
You are are extremely silly saying a bunch of nothing and still think you words have relevance.
HILARIOUS. How about juggling some balls and balancing on a unicycle why you do your circus act.

Omentum you have amnesia in your own post- you accuse other people of being haters while doing your own little Code pink “worst president ever” hate dance a sentence away.
The fact of the matter is that Obama and his children have gone to elite private schools so its a little thick for MO to try and tell the teachers what a great jobs they are doing.

JustHow are we ever going to fix the Public School system if anyone with the ability to afford PRIVATE schools jump ship? How can the President who proclaims to be a man of the common folk send his daughters to a extremely expensive school? What kind of mesage is our President sending? It certainly isn’t a mesage of hope!

huh, very convenient that corresponds to the Democrats marketing campaign from 2004. Not that these history departments are politicized or anything.
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Where was George Mason University supposed to get their historians- from viewers of the History Channel or from self professed historians on blogs? Of course, I would think they pooled the universities. I’m not aware that the marketing campaign from 2004 was advertising Bush as the worst president in history and citing Pew polls of disapproval. I must have been asleep and wasn’t dreaming that dream.

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Mrs. Obama stressed the need for more education spending saying, “Imagine what we can do with millions of dollars more investment in this area. We can expand opportunities in low-income districts for all students, particularly for students with disabilities.”
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Does this woman have any idea at all how many billions upon billions of dollars have been thrown at Education since the expansion of the Americans With disabilities Act?
Ever since Carter created this fiasco of a department, This Liberal Social Experiment called the Dept of Ed. has been a dismal failure!
For every “feel good” story they manage to dig up, you can find hundreds of schools that struggle to get the majority of kids through a just a rudimentary level. Go to your own twons and talk to the teachers and the teacher aides. Go examine your school budgets and see how much of that budget already goes to “special education”.
This system pushes “coding” of kids in 1st & 2nd grade, many times when its completely unnecessary! Teachers have to plan not only for the normal class material they are trying to teach, but for toned down, cut back versions for those kids who have IEPs. We then have this brilliant system that tells a kid who 35 or 40 years ago would have been a solid “C” student, that he is now an “A” student because he can do 1/2 of what the rest of the class does, but he can do it all correctly.
You NEVER EVER hear anyone in the education system explain how this foolish concept is going to help this kid when he/she graduates and hits the job market. Do you know many buisnesses who are willing to take on employees who have been conditioned by the education system to only do part of the load shouldered by everyone else?
Because of this stupid policy of teaching to the lowest common denominator, our top students get bored and in some case become disiplinary promlems themselves. Many people take thier kids out of the public schools and head to private schools to give thier kids a chance to excel in an environment free of these ridiculous methods.
It is way past the time to throw out all this foolish liberal concepts and return to the fundemtals of education that made this country great! It is not the end of the world to be honest with a kid in the early grades and actually help them to LEARN. Contrary to foolish notion of destroying a child’s ego because they were tld they did it wrong, It is the natural way we learn as children, we need to be told what was correct as well as what was not!
We certainly need to spend money on education, but lets actually spend it on educating the kids, not beefing up some useless bureaucracy!

Supremely hollow words from an ignorant woman!