A compelling sentiment, that is. Our educational system couldn’t be much more broken, and a righteous keelhauling overhauling is certainly in order. But the rhetoric doesn’t tell us a lot. For instance:

“We have let our grades slip, our schools crumble, our teacher quality fall short and other nations outpace us,” Obama said in an address to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “The time for finger-pointing is over. The time for holding ourselves accountable is here.”

“The relative decline of American education is untenable for our economy, unsustainable for our democracy and unacceptable for our children, and we cannot afford to let it continue,” he said.

Great speechwriting, but two people who disagree violently on every point from root causes to optimal solutions might find themselves standing and cheering wildly and slapping each other on the back at these words.

So, as best we can tell, what does Mr. President actually plan to do? Let’s go line by line.

The president outlined a five-tier reform plan, starting with increased investments in early childhood initiatives.

Obama noted that the recently passed $787 billion stimulus plan includes an additional $5 billion for Head Start, a program to help low-income families.

He highlighted a proposal to offer 55,000 first-time parents “regular visits from trained nurses to help make sure their children are healthy and prepare them for school and life.”

He also pledged to boost federal support in the form of “Early Learning Challenge” grants to states that develop plans to strengthen early education programs.

Excellent. As I noted earlier this week, we need to “invest heavily in early childhood reading programs, because nothing better energizes subsequent, lifelong learning.”I was taught to read when I was four and by the first day of first grade I was reading at the 4th grade level, or better. I never looked back. The only real problem is that since all the other kids hadn’t had this advantage, I spent most of my school years bored out of my skull. But the basic fact is that thanks to my early reading education, everything – everything – came easier to me. The same is true across the board. Invest in early reading and you’re strengthening every link in the educational chain for each and every affected student.

It’s a shame that early childhood health has to be addressed by a special program, and an even bigger shame that Republicans will oppose it as “socialism,” but yes, this seems like a good idea, too.

Second, Obama called for an end to “what has become a race to the bottom in our schools” through lower testing standards. Echoing former President Bush’s call to end “the soft bigotry of low expectations,” Obama said states needed to stop “low-balling expectations” for students.

Few good things ever begin with “Echoing former President Bush.” But it’s not clear whether Obama was echoing Dubya or whether the CNN reporter hung that albatross around his neck. So let’s proceed … carefully.

“The solution to low test scores is not lower standards; it’s tougher, clearer standards,” he argued.

Those two guys who hate each other are applauding and high-fiving again.

At the same time, however, he urged states to develop standards “that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking, entrepreneurship and creativity.”

Okay, now I’m on my feet cheering and high-fiving. Problem-solving? Critical thinking? Are there really more essential skills out there? Are there more neglected skills?

To help promote this goal, Obama said he would push for funding in the No Child Left Behind law to be more effectively tied to results. The Education Department, he said, would “back up this commitment to higher standards with a fund to invest in innovation in our school districts.”

Errr, wait a goddamned minute. No Child Left Behind, the worst atrocity that’s been visited on American education in my lifetime? No Child Left Untested, the hellspawn of the “Texas Miracle”? The single biggest reason why we abandoned critical thinking and problem solving in the first place? Because the cure for the plague is more plague?

And what the hell does NCLB have to do with innovation, anyway? No, folks,this is not promising.

What next?

Obama’s third tier focused on teacher training and recruitment. He noted that federal dollars had been set aside in the stimulus plan to help prevent teacher layoffs. He also reiterated a promise to support merit pay, as well as extra pay for math and science teachers with the goal of ending a shortage in both of those subjects.

At the same time, however, the president warned that ineffective teachers should not be allowed to remain on the job.

“If a teacher is given a chance but still does not improve, there is no excuse for that person to continue teaching,” he said. “I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.”

Here Obama is paying cheap lip-service to the opponents of public education (and in the process insulting the rest of us). No, none of us are in favor of bad teachers. No, none of us are getting excited about the prospect of a system that aggressively seeks to provide tenure for half-trained monkeys.

In short, this is, as worded, a non-issue. The why is simple. As I explained in December of 2007, education is like most other professions: you get what you pay for. The rhetorical double-dealing and intellectual dishonesty from the Right on this issue is knee-buckling. On the one hand, we need vouchers and and privatization so that the king-hell majesty of the marketplace can solve the problem of government-induced mediocrity. On the other, we don’t believe that the basic laws of economics apply to the task of attracting good teachers.

So in the interest of helping Mr. President and the assembled crowd at Corruptapalooza to which he’s pandering, let’s revisit Econ 101 for a second: when you raise compensation, you attract better talent. Pay teachers what they deserve – something that approaches fair compensation for the service they provide – and you’ll find that the scourge of welfare queens from Detroit unqualified teachers begins to magically cure itself as highly qualified people who opted for jobs they could make a living at opt back into the thing they really want to do, forcing the less qualified types to seek employment elsewhere.

This isn’t to suggest that we don’t have fantastic teachers today – we do, by the boatload. But these are people who are willing to make some sacrifices that other talented people aren’t, and we’ll never get our system where it needs to be – no matter what kind of system we implement – until we can get the words “teacher” and “sacrifice” a little better separated.

Fourth, Obama called for the promotion of educational “innovation and excellence” by renewing his campaign pledge to support charter schools. He called on states to lift caps on the number of allowable charter schools.

[sigh]

Okay, I know that data vary from place to place, and I’m the last guy to hang his hat on standardized testing results, at least as they’re currently configured. But nationally, charters lag behind by a significant margin. So let’s put it this way. At best, there’s hardly enough data to make charter schools a significant component of your plan.

So that’s discouraging.

He also urged a longer school calendar.

“I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas,” Obama said. “But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.”

This I like. The nine-month calendar made more sense in an agrarian society, perhaps, but these days there’s a lot to be said for making learning a year-round endeavor.

Obama’s final reform initiative focused on higher education. Among other things, the president promised to boost college access by raising the maximum Pell Grant award to $5,550 a year and indexing it above inflation. He also promised to push for a $2,500 a year tuition tax credit for students from working families.

Half-measures. It’s like the house is on fire so let’s toss a glass of water on it.

We need to get serious about assuring a comprehensive, appropriate education for all citizens. This doesn’t necessarily mean a four-year college, but it does mean making sure that our brightest and best aren’t saddled with six-figure debt that they’ll never get paid off. This, to me, looks like a plan for reducing six-figure debt to a high five-figure debt. Which is to say, you’re pointed in the right direction, now walk it like you mean it.

In promoting his program, the president called for an end to the “partisanship and petty bickering” that many observers believe has typically defined education policy debates in the past.

I suppose one way of minimizing partisan backlash is to give the other side what it wants right up front.

Okay, maybe I’m being unduly bitchy in spots here. While there are things not to like in what Obama appears to be proposing, it also must be said that it’s far better than what we’ve seen from any other president this century.

So fingers crossed. Rest assured, Mr. President, we’ll be watching, and we’ll be doing so with some of those critical thinking skills you touted so highly in making your announcement.

On the learning front, America is an object at rest, and objects at rest tend to remain that way until acted on by some force. The good news is that if we’re able to set our society in motion, that momentum then becomes something we can leverage in our long drive toward a sustainable culture of education.

While EdF1rst will generate meaningful results within the scope of my first term, the full impact of our efforts won’t be seen for perhaps a generation. Does this doom our project? Are Americans incapable of voting for the long-term future of their children? Maybe, but the stakes are too high for us not to try. We must be willing to play to the historians, not the pundits.

Over time, we must transform America into a genuine culture of learning. Families must believe, as mine did, that education is their best hope for a sustainable future, and they must be willing to act forcefully and meaningfully on this conviction. Children must grow up in homes where commitment to education is an assumption that’s embedded in the very DNA of family and community life. In neighborhoods where teachers are revered. In classrooms that are safe and nurturing. In a nation that values you for what you know, what you can do, how you can contribute.

In order for this to happen, we need a multi-pronged strategy that address both reality and perception.

• Our schools must show results in ways that families and communities can recognize, and quickly laying in the infrastructural reforms described elsewhere in my platform will be a critical first step.
• We will develop an innovative multi-channel public information campaign that stresses the benefits of the EdF1rst initiative and highlights its successes. This initiative will leverage every creative tool at our disposal, including both traditional broadcast and innovative social media channels.
• We will utilize Internet and mobile technologies to establish advocacy communities to encourage hands-on investment in the educational process.
• We will recruit spokespeople and success stories from across the entire spectrum of American life to promote the long-term benefits of a genuine commitment to learning.
• We will ensure that our communications efforts are two-way, dynamic and thoroughly interactive.

We must never lose sight of the fact that as society evolves, so also must our educational programs. We will never stop revising, growing and improving, and we will never stop asking our citizens to help us understand how this might best be accomplished.

The discipline question is one of the most difficult ones facing this campaign, and even as we construct the strategic platform plank we’re sobered by the tactical realities that must be faced.

Some schools are dangerous places. A lot more are significantly less effective than they should be because of disruptive students and the fact that we seem not to have the mechanisms to deal with them. A couple problem students can have a dramatic impact on the function of the classroom and the resulting learning by other students. The DS08 campaign does not believe anyone has a right to infringe upon the learning atmosphere, because in doing so they undermine the ultimate goal of universal opportunity.

Obviously, the details on this issue are, and will remain, sticky. We probably don’t want to return to the sorts of classes my generation endured, where teachers not only had unquestioned authority to administer corporal punishment (sometimes for “fun”), but it’s just about impossible to ignore the correlation between the elimination of corporal punishment and the rise of discipline problems. Even if we were to adopt corporal punishment measures, it’s hard to envision how they could even be implemented in environments where gangs are overtly present.

We must and we will develop “big carrot/big stick” measures to assure the sanctity of the teaching environment. Students who cannot be persuaded to learn will be removed from the environment and alternative programs for their habilitation will be developed. Teachers will be armed with the tools they need to make sure their classrooms and hallways are safe, pro-learning spaces. In the short term this may imply security measures that seem heavy-handed, but it’s our expectation that a systematic rewards model that shows meaningful results will eliminate the need for “stick-first” approaches in due time.

Schools are not warehouses and they’re not detention centers for juvenile delinquents. Teachers aren’t prison guards and when we ask them to be every student in the school suffers – with consequences that endure for the rest of their lives.

The unfortunate truth is that not all can be saved, and the only rational policy response to this fact is to assure that those who cannot and will not respect the sanctity of the educational environment will be excluded.

Our curriculum will foster generations of students who, if dropped into novel, unfamiliar, even hostile situations, with few tools at their disposal, can nonetheless think their way to success. The story of past American triumph has always been about resourcefulness, and a renewed commitment to inculcating ingenuity will assure countless future chapters in that story.

Critical thinking is also our best hedge against tyranny and corruption. Our current administration has done all in its power to promote vocational learning while stifling the Liberal Arts, and this is a strategy that brazenly serves one master – the economic power elite. It has encouraged all manner of abuses in its quest for a “do, don’t think” society that profits the haves and assures that the have-nots stay in their place. A strong commitment to teaching social studies, civics and history will go a long way toward inoculating young Americans against home-grown despotism, and curricular elements that shine the light on propagandist communication techniques – both verbal and visual – will diminish the manipulative impact of our nation’s merchants of spin and disinformation.

Our curriculum will provide significant support for the development of creative and artistic faculties. While legions of brilliant, Nobel-worthy scientists are critical to our future greatness, a truly bright society cherishes and cultivates excellence across all human endeavors. The Arts and Humanities provide tremendous insights into the truth of our condition, and we should strive to be a nation whose collective right brain is as spectacularly brilliant as its left.

Finally, the simple reality of human society is that not everybody is destined for leadership, scientific accomplishment or artistic immortality. America has always thrived on the back of a dedicated working class, and despite the observation above about the power elite’s lust for a do, don’t think society, we in fact need people who do. Our educational system should account for those who have neither the interest nor aptitude for advanced study, but who are better suited for a career in industry or our surging service economy. These citizens should have access to exceptional vocational and technical training, which will be required if we are to compete with offshore competitors like India and China.

However, these sorts of decisions should be made in a good faith attempt to allow all citizens to seek satisfaction at their best, most productive level. The default goal of the system should be to help up, not hold down.

My administration will have no illusions about being lauded in the short term. However, decades of profoundly counter-productive policies have ushered us to the point where we desperately need leaders willing to be judged by those 50 years down the road instead of eight.

However, we continue to insist on more and more testing so as to assure “accountability,” a cynical, silly misappellation that aggressively refuses to acknowledge the real problems facing our schools. In short, when your teachers are a) drawn from a pool of what’s available at bargain basement wage scale, b) under-resourced, c) saddled with obscene amounts of mind-numbing clerical work, d) placed into overcrowded classrooms that are little more than warehouses, e) forced to teach 21st Century students with a 19th Century educational model, and f) afforded no effective means of addressing disruptive (and often dangerous) students, it is patently stupid to suggest that “accountability” is even possible, and even more ludicrous to suggest that standardized testing (leading to the threat of school closings) will somehow improve education.

The fact that there are people who think this way in positions of authority is perhaps all the evidence we’d ever need to prove that massive, systematic reform is needed.

When talented teachers are provided the ample resources and effective support, accountability isn’t going to be a problem. When learning organizations are tailored to 21st Century skills, tools, requirements and dynamics, we can reasonably expect the failings that “necessitated” over-testing to disappear.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t have standards, appropriate measures for evaluation (for students, teachers, administrators and facilities) and processes for assuring the highest functioning of the system (and yes, that includes removing sub-par educators). However, our focus must be on curing the disease, not profiteering off the symptoms.

Contrary to what some “reformers” seem to believe, the laws of economics apply to teaching. An extremely talented teaching candidate who’s bright enough to earn $80,000 in another field isn’t likely to settle for $25,000 to teach, especially when current policies have turned the job into a thankless slog. There are plenty of incredibly talented people out there who fit this description, but when push comes to shove they’re simply not willing to sacrifice their ability to earn a decent living. So they take the better job for twice the pay, and the teaching job goes to the person who doesn’t have the skills and ability to land that higher paying job.

It happens every day. And it’s time it stopped happening. It’s time we stopped paying lip service, and little else, to the idea that teaching is important and noble. It’s time we started applying the basic principles of economics to the incomparably critical task of preparing for the future.

So when we look at our schools and conclude that we’re not getting the kind of performance we’d like, maybe we should ask what would happen if legions of smart, committed people who want to teach, who think that teaching is the noblest of all professions, who have the capability to change young lives on a daily basis, what if these people don’t have to choose between their passion for cultivating the minds of the next generation and their basic need to earn a living wage. What if they don’t have to spend their own money on supplies for their classrooms? What if the workload makes it possible to have something like a normal family life at the end of the day?

This isn’t intended as a blanket indictment of the abilities of all teachers. Make no mistake – we are currently blessed with many who have the talent to do anything they want, and who nonetheless choose to make the sacrifices required to follow their passion for education. I’m fortunate to know a few of these people, in fact. But the sad truth is that there aren’t enough of them. The pool of talent from which our nation’s schools draw their teachers could and should be stronger – far stronger – and no outstanding teacher I have ever met has told me otherwise. One of the quickest and surest ways to accomplish this critical goal is to improve pay levels across the board.

If elected, I will make teacher compensation one of the first tasks I tackle after taking the oath of office. It won’t be a simple process, and we won’t begin to see the full results for a few years – perhaps not even until after I have left office. We have paid lip service for decades to the nobility of teaching, to how teachers are the real heroes in our society, to the value they represent in our communities and in the lives of tomorrow’s leaders. If I’m elected, our children will spend their days working with the brightest and best teachers our nation has ever seen, and we’ll begin to enjoy the rewards of putting our money where our mouth is.

Some will ask how we’ll pay for this. The EdF1rst initiative will require a significant increase in our total spending on education in the short term. We will not, however, lock ourselves into a “find more money” funding model. Instead, we will adopt a true education first approach. Our teaching and learning initiatives will be funded first – before defense, before social programs, before everything. We will then prioritize the remainder of our spending. This doesn’t imply that other programs aren’t worthy or important, only that we should put first things first. And nothing is more important to Americans than their future.

In the medium and longer term our total spending on salaries might actually decrease. We often make the assumption that we need more teachers, and this is true if we stick with our current teaching models. However, there is exciting evidence suggesting that emerging technology-based teaching models can enable more effective learning with fewer teachers. If these approaches prove broadly feasable, we anticipate that we can recruit the very best teachers, pay them what they’re actually worth, and manage expenditures all at the same time.

Finally, the tendency to think of teaching in cost terms ends the day I’m sworn in. Done properly, education isn’t a cost, it’s an investment that pays itself off dozens, hundreds, even thousands of times over when viewed in the long term. A dollar spent today that generates a million dollars in 20 years simply isn’t a cost, and we’re through viewing our children as a drain on our national resources. They are national resources, and will henceforth be treated that way.

A critical element of the EdF1rst restructuration will involve shifting of administrative functions (and their resource expenditures) from central offices to the schools and an attendant transfer of autonomy from bureaucratic centers to teachers. Central administrations will be much smaller under the EdF1rst plan, and one manifestation will be fewer administrative managers at the central office and more para-teaching personnel serving the daily needs of teachers in the schools.

This reorganization is essential if we’re to truly address the diseases afflicting public education in America. At present, critics on “both” sides of the debate point to various symptoms (which are certainly real) and offer solutions that amount to sticking a band-aid on a sucking chest wound. A variety of factors – ideological investment and self-serving financial interests being the two worst – prevent them from seeing through to the underlying root causes giving rise to the symptoms they’re troubled by (or are pretending to be troubled by).

For instance, some critics of my plan, when they hear the words “teacher salaries,” reflexively leap to the argument that we already spend a huge sum of money per student. This is correct (sort of) so far as it goes. But they then leap to precisely the wrong conclusion – “you can’t fix education by throwing money at it.” The irony in these discussions is that these critics will often, in the next breath, explain that bureaucratic bloat is undermining public education. Which seems to suggest that they can’t distinguish between spending too much and spending unwisely. While the two often go hand-in-hand, they’re hardly the same thing.

So let’s be clear – success is a function of a) investing sufficient resources and b) investing those resources in the right places. At present, public education wastes ridiculous amounts of money on administrativa. Yes, education systems need good administrators, but centralized organizational structures tend to suck money out of the classroom and into the bureaucracy.

As noted above, the EducationF1rst initiative will transfer significant administrative authority to education faculty. Especially with respect to curricular issues, autonomy will be shifted from central offices to the teachers responsible for the day-to-day life of their schools. Additionally, teachers currently waste tremendous amounts of time on clerical work when their skills should be more directly focused on the students. The addition of para-educators, who manage clerical functions and perform research and preparation work for teachers, will provide a far more effective and cost-efficient model for the conduct of daily operations in our schools.

EdF1rst will realign educational appropriation, shifting significant funding from administration into direct teaching programs. Obviously how much gets shifted and in what way will vary. At present we can find significant variations from state to state and district to district, and EdF1rst explicitly rejects the idea that one size fits all. However, as standards and best practices evolve and as our classrooms are populated with increasingly qualified teaching professionals, we will insist on locally sensitive policies that fund the classroom first.

For example: a dollar spent on education is also a dollar spent on the looming energy crisis. Teaching cultivates the minds that will one day develop the sustainable, environmentally friendly fuel resources we need to assure the growth of our economy and our independence from unstable foreign suppliers.

A dollar spent on education is a dollar spent on preventing and curing disease, as we develop ever greater knowledge about the causes and treatment of illness and on the steps we can take to live longer, healthier, more productive lives.

It’s a dollar spent developing the diplomatic skills we need to peacefully navigate our increasingly dangerous world. A dollar developing the military strategy and technical capability required to the integrity of our national interests. A dollar spent safeguarding the environment for future generations. Exploring the mysteries of the solar system and the universe beyond.

A dollar spent on education is a dollar spent shaping the political and economic genius required to innovate solutions to complex problems like immigration. Cultivating the entrepreneurial foundation for new industries and revitalization in existing ones, assuring that we have ample vocational opportunities here at home. It’s a dollar spent creating jobs in America so global corporations aren’t tempted to offshore employment to places like India and China.

It’s a dollar spent sparking the next golden age of American art and culture. Literature, dance, music, visual arts – and on the creation of new art forms that feed the spirit and utilize the new technologies of the brightest society on Earth.

Best of all, a dollar spent on teaching is a dollar spent on learning innovation. The more we learn, the more we understand how to learn, and as we discover new and better ways to educate, we ensure that our collective learning curve will be ever steeper, providing ever greater rewards.

In other words, when you devote resources to education, you’re not spending, you’re investing. The resources you allocate today will generate significant, even massive returns in the future. In a generation we will be smarter, safer, and healthier, and our world will hopefully be a more peaceful one, ripe with opportunity and possibility. Our children and grandchildren will look back in gratitude for the commitment we made to their big picture and the patience with which we stayed the course in the only battle that really matters.

There is nothing we cannot learn, and no problem that learning cannot solve, if only we’re smart enough and brave enough to bet our futures on the American mind. After all, it was our intelligence that propelled us to our greatest moments in the past.

Why should tomorrow promise less than yesterday?