The Audacity of Hope - Barack Obama [77]
But these aren’t insoluble problems. Working with teacher’s unions, states and school districts can develop better measures of performance, ones that combine test data with a system of peer review (most teachers can tell you with amazing consistency which teachers in their schools are really good, and which are really bad). And we can make sure that nonperforming teachers no longer handicap children who want to learn.
Indeed, if we’re to make the investments required to revamp our schools, then we will need to rediscover our faith that every child can learn. Recently, I had the chance to visit Dodge Elementary School, on the West Side of Chicago, a school that had once been near the bottom on every measure but that is in the midst of a turnaround. While I was talking to some of the teachers about the challenges they faced, one young teacher mentioned what she called the “These Kids Syndrome”—the willingness of society to find a million excuses for why “these kids” can’t learn; how “these kids come from tough backgrounds” or “these kids are too far behind.”
“When I hear that term, it drives me nuts,” the teacher told me. “They’re not ‘these kids.’ They’re our kids.”
How America’s economy performs in the years to come may depend largely on how well we take such wisdom to heart.
OUR INVESTMENT IN education can’t end with an improved elementary and secondary school system. In a knowledge-based economy where eight of the nine fastest-growing occupations this decade require scientific or technological skills, most workers are going to need some form of higher education to fill the jobs of the future. And just as our government instituted free and mandatory public high schools at the dawn of the twentieth century to provide workers the skills needed for the industrial age, our government has to help today’s workforce adjust to twenty-first-century realities.
In many ways, our task should be easier than it was for policy makers a hundred years ago. For one thing, our network of universities and community colleges already exists and is well equipped to take on more students. And Americans certainly don’t need to be convinced of the value of a higher education—the percentage of young adults getting bachelor’s degrees has risen steadily each decade, from around 16 percent in 1980 to almost 33 percent today.
Where Americans do need help, immediately, is in managing the rising cost of college—something with which Michelle and I are all too familiar (for the first ten years of our marriage, our combined monthly payments on our undergraduate and law school debt exceeded our mortgage by a healthy margin). Over the last five years, the average tuition and fees at four-year public colleges, adjusted for inflation, have risen 40 percent. To absorb these costs, students have been taking on ever-increasing debt levels, which discourages many undergraduates from pursuing careers in less lucrative fields like teaching. And an estimated two hundred thousand college-qualified students each year choose to forgo college altogether because they can’t figure out how to pay the bills.
There are a number of steps we can take to control costs and improve access to higher education. States can limit annual tuition increases at public universities. For many nontraditional students, technical schools and online courses may provide a cost-effective option for retooling in a constantly changing economy. And students can insist that their institutions focus their fund-raising efforts more on improving the quality of instruction than on building new football stadiums.
But no matter how well we do in controlling the spiraling cost of education, we will still need to provide many students and parents with more direct help in meeting college expenses,