President Barack Obama delivered his fifth State of the Union address on Jan 28. Here we look at the sections on pre-kindergarten and broadband connectivity for 99 percent of schools. The full text of the president’s address is available on the White House’s website, here.
Pre-K
Research shows that one of the best investments we can make in a child’s life is high-quality early education. Last year, I asked this Congress to help states make high-quality pre-K available to every 4-year-old. As a parent as well as a president, I repeat that request tonight. But in the meantime, 30 states have raised pre-k funding on their own. They know we can’t wait. So just as we worked with states to reform our schools, this year, we’ll invest in new partnerships with states and communities across the country in a race to the top for our youngest children. And as Congress decides what it’s going to do, I’m going to pull together a coalition of elected officials, business leaders, and philanthropists willing to help more kids access the high-quality pre-K they need.
Translation: I just read about some studies the other night that say early education serves kids well. It was dated from the 1970s, but one of my assistants just brought it to my attention, thinking I might want to use it in this speech.
Yeah, so as you may remember, I asked Congress to enact a universal pre-kindergarten for 4-year-olds last year, but they haven’t done anything about it yet. Although, a few governors must have also read this same research, so they’re starting up pre-K programs in their own states. This is good news, and I think these governors don’t want to wait for Congress to act, either.
What I’m going to do is get a few business leaders, elected officials, and philanthropists together, and we’re all going to figure out how to get more kids access to high-quality pre-K programs in their public schools. I know quite a few business leaders who will be able to put the education of 4-year-olds ahead of profits, quite a few elected officials who will be able to put it ahead of their political ambitions, and quite a few rich people who give away money who will be able to put it ahead of the strings they always seem to attach to that money. Trust me: I know lots of good-hearted people.
This kid at a school I visited last week asked me why there weren’t any teachers or even parents on the coalition I’m putting together. I said to him, “Kid, teachers are really wonderful people, and I appreciate all the hard work that they do. But standardized test results have convinced me that they don’t know how to teach children about the Common Core. And because of that, we’re not even asking them how they would run a pre-K.”
Broadband
Last year, I also pledged to connect 99 percent of our students to high-speed broadband over the next four years. Tonight, I can announce that with the support of the FCC and companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sprint, and Verizon, we’ve got a down payment to start connecting more than 15,000 schools and twenty million students over the next two years, without adding a dime to the deficit.
Translation: Soon thousands of schools in the US will have fast Internet connections that they didn’t have before. They need this in order to take standardized tests, of course, which are total game-changers, as Secretary Duncan [camera pans to Mr Duncan] assured me in a cabinet meeting the other day.
He said, “Mr President, they’re mostly multiple choice, just like the old tests, especially in English language arts, and many of the math questions (see here and here) are incomprehensible. But kids don’t read the questions anyway, and just between you and me, all their teachers really are lousy, so we want to make the questions unfair, at least a little.”
I congratulate Secretary Duncan on his capable steering of this standardized test project through two multi-state consortia, and I look forward to the day when we can say we have cleaned out all the bad teachers from our nation’s classrooms [cue triumphant music].
Note: Our “translations” are intended as humor, but the president’s rhetoric was a little distant from the reality on the ground and in our schools. For pre-K, we need early education specialists if the programs are to have any success, not businessmen or philanthropists. Success in profit-making or giving money away doesn’t predict success in developing educational programs for 4-year-olds. For broadband, yes, our schools need to be connected—every school. But we need to stop wasting money on gadgets if they only serve invalid, unreliable, and unfair standardized tests; we should use it for educational programs instead.