I'm Skeptical Of Obama's Race To The Top Program

First of all let me say that I don't trust much of anything the government does. After all, look at where we are as a nation with the economy in ruins, unemployment still around 10%, and more debt everywhere than ever before in our history.

So, it should come as no surprise that I have lots of doubts about President Obama and his Race To The Top program for schools. It seems every president has his pet school program. For Bush it was No Child Left Behind and look where that got us: nowhere.

Now we have Obama pledging to give around 4 billion of our tax dollars to states that jump through some hoops and make the right changes as judged by the President and his people. Texas, not wanting anything to do with the Federal government, never even was in the running for these so called Obama school grants. There were only 36 initial applicants so that means that a lot of other states never bothered either.

Right now, as of 7/27/2010 there are 18 finalists and you can read about the whole process here at the government education website. It seems the states can win money at each phase of the process and Tennessee and Delaware have already won money in phase 1. The ed.gov website itself calls it winning grants and that seems like the wrong choice of words to me. Is that what our public education system is depending on: the need to "win" money and grants to survive?

How many times have we talked about better teacher accountability and all the other things that go along with making our schools better? This has been going on for 30 years now where we have been aware that schooling in other countries is superior to ours. And here we are, still throwing money at it hoping it will get better.

Every president has got to seem concerned about our public school system: it is part of the job requirement. But every president has failed and I don't think Obama will be any different. All he knows how to do is to spend money anyway and that is not making things better as we are all seeing first hand.