Obama: Money alone can't solve school predicament

The Associated Press is reporting on a huge MSNBC interview with President Obama this morning on the crisis in education in the United States.

The article links to a section of the MSNBC web site with a video of the events so far.

Interesting comment from the MSNBC interview:

According to a recent Time survey, 67 percent of the US population now believes the public school system is in crisis.

And, in his videoed comments, the president says that:

Teachers union can’t defend a status quo where one-third of the students are dropping out and 2,000 schools are dropout factories.

Also, the president endorses firing teachers who don’t perform.

Finally, even our president now admits that just throwing more money at education isn’t going to work.

Check it out for yourself.

Then, keep up to date in this blog. There is more than ample evidence in the new test results I am writing about (lot’s more to come) to support that nationwide concern at an even higher level in Kentucky.

• I’ve already touched on some of the most disturbing data, such as the decline in our high schools in nearly every subject tested last year.

• Later today, I will next show how the elementary schools in our largest school district escaped any accountability what-so-ever under NCLB in 2010.

• Finally, we are going to look at the grim performance in many of our lower grades on the new Iowa Test of Basic Skills, which was given for the first time during the 2009-10 school term. Wait until you see how poorly some of our schools are doing in even teaching the basic stuff that children must master before they really are prepared to take on higher order thinking assessments.