I Wish Obama Would Follow His Own Advice

The following is an excerpt from a speech by President Obama. I first read about it on Ed Week.

"Malia and Sasha, my two daughters, they just recently took a standardized test. But it wasn't a high-stakes test. It wasn't a test where they had to panic. I mean, they didn't even really know that they were going to take it ahead of time. They didn't study for it, they just went ahead and took it. And it was a tool to diagnose where they were strong, where they were weak, and what the teachers needed to emphasize. 

"Too often what we've been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools. And so what we've said is let's find a test that everybody agrees makes sense; let's apply it in a less pressured-packed atmosphere; let's figure out whether we have to do it every year or whether we can do it maybe every several years; and let's make sure that that's not the only way we're judging whether a school is doing well. 

"Because there are other criteria: What's the attendance rate? How are young people performing in terms of basic competency on projects? There are other ways of us measuring whether students are doing well or not." 

"So what I want to do is—one thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching to the test. Because then you're not learning about the world; you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math. 

All you're learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and the little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test. And that's not going to make education interesting to you. And young people do well in stuff that they're interested in. They're not going to do as well if it's boring."

Amazing. Isn't he the president who pushed for Race to the Top? Isn't he the man whose administration praised the firing of all teachers when test scores were low? Isn't his administration the one that said we're making excuses for kids when we bring up issues of attendance or poverty? Isn't he the one who wants merit pay and teacher evaluations to be based upon student achievement levels rather than student learning? I love what he has to say. I just wish he had the courage to back it up with real policy.