Discriminations

Mark up Obama’s new education policy as another change in the “Change!” promised during the campaign. Remember his call for universal access to college?

We will prepare the next generation for success in college and the workforce, ensuring that ... any young person who works hard and desires a college education can access it.

Actually, that was the quote that appears on the Google link to Candidate Obama’s education policy. If you follow that same link now what you find is:

We will prepare the next generation for success in college and the workforce, ensuring that American children lead the world once again in creativity and achievement....

After graduating high school, all Americans should be prepared to attend at least one year of job training or higher education to better equip our workforce for the 21st century economy....

Universal access seems to have been, well, somewhat attenuated. And now the new policy has been unveiled, as reported in the New York Times:

The Obama administration on Saturday called for a broad overhaul of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, proposing to reshape divisive provisions that encouraged instructors to teach to tests, narrowed the curriculum, and labeled one in three American schools as failing.

The article is fascinating, even aside from the NYT’s typical news story editorializing (“His plan strikes a careful balance...”). An interesting feature of this “overhaul” is that

President Obama would replace the law’s requirement that every American child reach proficiency in reading and math, which administration officials have called utopian, with a new national target that could prove equally elusive: that all students should graduate from high school prepared for college and a career.

Well, whoever said high school graduates must be able to read and write and add and subtract?

President Bush called the attitude embodied in President Obama’s new policy the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” I think he was wrong about the soft.