Obama's view of education is stuck in reverse

Barack Obama views education as a high priority in his administration. Unlike in the Bush administration, he appears far more aware that public and higher education are important sites of struggle with enormous implications for young people, the existing social order, and the future. While President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have focused on public education, they have done so by largely embracing the Bush administration's view of educational reform, which includes more testing, more empirically based accountability measures, more charter schools, more military academies, defining the purpose of education in largely economic terms, and punishing public schools that don't measure up to high-stakes testing measures. For instance, his recent reforms aimed at higher education consists of providing 12 billion dollars to improve community colleges by developing new assessment tools and developing a standardized national curriculum. What comes to mind from this piece of reform is an attempt to upgrade bad secondary schools by adding computers and turning them into trade schools while producing an army of students prepared to take their place in low-skill, low pay service sector jobs.