Hot Topic: Obama and Education

      I decided to write my hot topic blog about Obama, and the plans he has for education in our country. I chose this because I had to do a little research about it for my Children with Developmental Disabilities class over the summer, and thought it was really interesting. So, I chose to further research it. A big part of his campaign in '08 was about his plans for the educational system, and he's already done a lot with it.
      One of Obama's plans was his "Together for Tomorrow" campaign. He created this plan in an attempt to promote community culture where everyone is involved in educational improvement. This includes teachers, parents, school staff, community organizations, volunteers, and the child's family. This programs is focused on family and community partnerships, and their ability to boost students outcomes in areas such as behavior, attendance, course performance, and college access. This campaign also spotlights programs that are under way, which have a great possibility to manage school-community partnerships and demonstrates progress in those areas.
      In the next ten years, over 1.6 million teachers will retire.Obama plans to transform public education by recruiting, preparing, and training new teachers to take over those spots. Obama feels that not enough teacher prep programs offer rigorous, clinical experience that prepares students for the reality of teaching in a classroom today. He wants to better these programs for many reasons. One of those is that better teacher prep programs will help further his reform of the No Child Left Behind Act. The best programs will get better, and the worst will substantially improve. He wants to implement scholarship funds to recruit this new generation of teachers to attend the best programs across the country. He plans to prepare 200,000 future teachers each year. He was to implement institutional reporting and state reliability. He plans to do this by developing regulations to focus data collection conducted under the Higher Education Act on the most important indicators of quality. He wants to reform financing of students preparing to become teachers. He plans to do this by advancing presidential teacher fellows initiative in support of rigorous state-level policy reforms. He plans to direct scholarship aid to top performing teacher prep programs. He wants to target support to institutions that prepare high quality teachers from diverse back rounds. He plans to do this by seeking funding from the Hawkins Centers for Excellence Program at minority serving institutes.
      This is all the research I found about Obama and his plans to better education and the educational systems in the U.S. I personally think that some of these are great ideas. I love his idea of bringing community into the school and classroom as much as possible. I may be a little biased, but I personally love his idea of giving more financial aid to students in teacher prep programs as well.