(AP) — Barely into the new school year, President Barack Obama issued a tough-love message to students and teachers on Monday: Their year in the classroom should be longer, and poorly performing teachers should get out.
American students are falling behind their foreign counterparts, especially in math and science, and that’s got to change, Obama said.
“Whether jobs are created here, high-end jobs that support families and support the future of the American people, is going to depend on whether or not we can do something about these schools,” the president said in an interview.
U.S. schools through high school offer an average of 180 instruction days per year, according to the Education Commission of the States, compared to an average of 197 days for lower grades and 196 days for upper grades in countries with the best student achievement levels, including Japan, South Korea, Germany and New Zealand.
“That month makes a difference,” the president said. “It means that kids are losing a lot of what they learn during the school year during the summer. It’s especially severe for poorer kids who may not see as many books in the house during the summers, aren’t getting as many educational opportunities.”
Obama said teachers and their profession should be more highly honored — as in China and some other countries, he said — and he said he wanted to work with the teachers’ unions. But he also said that unions should not defend a status quo in which one-third of children are dropping out. He challenged them not to be resistant to change.
And the president endorsed the firing of teachers who, once given the chance and the help to improve, are still falling short.
“We have got to identify teachers who are doing well. Teachers who are not doing well, we have got to give them the support and the training to do well. And if some teachers aren’t doing a good job, they’ve got to go,” Obama said.
They’re goals the president has articulated in the past, but his ability to see them realized is limited. States set the minimum length of school years, and although there’s experimentation in some places, there’s not been wholesale change since Obama issued the same challenge for more classroom time at the start of the past school year.
Teachers’ unions say they’re open to the discussion of longer classroom time, but they also say that pay needs to be part of the conversation. As for Obama’s call for ousting underperforming teachers, National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel said unions weren’t the main stumbling block there, as many education reformers assert.
“No one wants an incompetent teacher in the classroom,” Van Roekel said. “It’s in the hiring, and in those first three to five years no teacher has the right to due process
