President Pledges To Boost Education System

The success of the United States is contingent upon the success of the nation’s education system. This was the message President Barack Obama sent to the nation Thursday in his speech at the 100th Anniversary of the National Urban League in Washington.

“Some argue that as we emerge from a recession, my administration should focus solely on economic issues,” Obama said. “Education is an economic issue, if not the economic issue of our time.”

Obama said that education is a “prerequisite for prosperity” and credited “Race to the Top” for motivating schools across the country to believe in the same message.

“The single most important thing we’ve done is to launch Race to the Top,” he said.

The program is designed to encourage reform and change in state and local K-12 education. Schools that meet specific criteria are awarded grants, increasing funding to help implement some of the changes they have made and increasing opportunities for their students.

In collaboration with reform at the school level, Obama made certain that teachers gain the recognition they deserve but asserted that they must also be true to their responsibility to the nation’s students.

“Our goal is accountability,” he said. “It’s to provide teachers with the support they need to be as effective as they can be and to create a better environment for teachers and students alike.”

Standards in America’s education system are rising and it is being flooded with funding in an effort to yield positive results from teachers and students, but Obama said that there are schools that will need a little more for them to make that turnaround.

“If we want success for our country, we can’t accept failure in our schools decade after decade,” he said. “That’s why we’re challenging states to turn around our 5,00 lowest performing school and I don’t think it’s any secret that most of those are serving African-American or Hispanic kids.”

The president said that $4 billion is being invested into assisting these turnarounds.

The Economic Crisis: Failed Government Regulation and Racial Scapegoating

“The evidence is overwhelming. This crisis is a direct consequence of years of regulatory failures by government officials” said Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) Dodd continued, “the dominant players were not Fannie and Freddie, but the Wall Street firms and their other private sector partners; the mortgage brokers and the unregulated lenders”. At the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs hearing on “The Genesis of the Current Economic Crisis”, the overall consensus of Senators and panel members was that government regulation failures and Wall Street investors were to blame.

Dodd said, “no one can say that the nation’s financial regulators were not aware of the threats posed by reckless sub-prime lending to homeowners, communities, and indeed the entire country. That threat had already been recognized by Congress”. Senator Robert Casey (D-Pa.) said he was troubled by the fact the Treasury Department wants to commit $250 billion to aid banks without “planning to modify a single loan”. Casey suspects that banks are now holding back on modifying loans because they’re waiting to see if they can sell them to the Treasury Department first, which he believes is the worst things that can happen right now.

The Honorable Marc H. Morial, President and CEO of the National Urban League, said that he wanted to, “set the record straight about what I call the Financial Weapon of Mass Deception: the ugly and insidious and concerted effort to blame minority borrowers for the nation’s current economic straits”. Morial blamed a few conservative reporters such as Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer for, “telling the world that this crisis in not the result of a failure of regulation, but the fault of minority borrowers who bit off more than they could chew”. Morial said, “while minorities and low-income borrowers received a disproportionate share of sub-prime loans, the vast majority of sub-prime loans went to white and middle and upper income borrowers.”