WASHINGTON — President Obama called for sweeping changes in American education on Tuesday, urging states to lift limits on charter schools and exhorting teachers, parents and students to embrace a renewed commitment to learning from grade school through adulthood.
The president said it was time to erase limits on the number of charter schools, which his administration refers to as “laboratories of innovation,” while closing those that are not working. Teachers’ unions oppose the schools, saying they take away funding for public schools.
“I call on states to reform their charter rules, and lift caps on the number of allowable charter schools, wherever such caps are in place,” the president said, in his first major speech on education since he took office seven weeks ago. Caps now exist in 26 states and the District of Columbia, he said.
Putting limits on charter schools, even in places where they are performing well, “isn’t good for our children, our economy or our country,” the president said. He said recently in his budget message that he hoped to double financing for charter schools eventually, and that the Department of Education would help create “new, high-quality charter schools” while supporting the closing of those guilty of “chronic underperformance.”
Mr. Obama’s promotion of charter schools was virtually certain to be greeted with skepticism, at best, from teacher unions, as was his call for a system of merit pay for good teachers, which the president said would mean “treating teachers like the professionals they are, while also holding them more accountable.”
“New teachers will be mentored by experienced ones,” the president said, in an address to the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce here. “Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement, and asked to accept more responsibilities for lifting up their schools.”
Teacher union leaders reacted cautiously. Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, said his union’s 3.2 million members “welcome the vision” laid out by the president and look forward to working with him and Education Secretary Arne Duncan “to transform public education to prepare students to compete in a global economy.”
Randi Weingarten, president of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers, said her union embraced “the goals and aspirations” outlined by President Obama. “As with any public policy, the devil is in the details, and it is important that teachers’ voices are heard as we implement the president’s vision,” Ms. Weingarten said.
In his address, the president said the United States’ prosperity, security and even the American dream itself are at risk unless the country reverses years of decline and restores its education system to pre-eminence. “Let there be no doubt,” Mr. Obama said. “The future belongs to the nation that best educates its citizens — and my fellow Americans, we have everything we need to be that nation.”
“It is time to give all Americans a complete and competitive education from the cradle up through a career,” Mr. Obama said. “We have accepted failure for too long — enough. America’s entire education system must once more be the envy of the world.”
In promoting a merit-based system of pay for teachers, which unions generally dislike because they say it could foster favoritism, the president was following through on positions he took during his campaign — and implicitly laying down a challenge to unions, traditionally reliable supporters of Democratic candidates.
The president said too many people in his party have resisted the idea of “rewarding excellence” with extra pay, while too many Republicans have opposed spending money on early education “despite compelling evidence of its importance.”
“The time for finger-pointing is over. The time for holding ourselves accountable is here,” Mr. Obama said. “What’s required is not simply new investments, but new reforms. It is time to expect more from our students.”
While the overwhelming number of teachers are “doing an outstanding job under difficult circumstances,” states and school districts should be able “to move bad teachers out of the classroom,” the president said.
While teacher unions have generally resisted merit-pay programs, there have been some successful experiments with them across the country, especially in districts where unions are involved from the beginning in developing them.
The address on Tuesday was the first step in laying out the president’s agenda to improve American schools, officials said, with more specifics to be outlined to Congress in the coming weeks. The president noted that the recently enacted stimulus package calls for spending some $5 billion on the Early Head Start and Head Start programs — an investment that he said would be rewarded by lower welfare rolls, fewer health care costs and less crime, as well as better classroom performance.
Mr. Obama set a goal of the United States having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020. Nothing less than that will suffice in the 21st Century, when Americans are competing in a world made ever smaller by the Internet, the president said.
The president said the Education Department “will use only one test when deciding what ideas to support with your precious tax dollars. It’s not whether an idea is liberal or conservative but whether it works.”
Charter school proponents were elated by the president’s speech. “With 365,000 students on charter waiting lists, there is no excuse for state laws that stifle the growth of these schools,” Nelson Smith, the president and chief executive of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said in a statement.
The president said new approaches to education should extend to the traditional school day and the school calendar, both of which should be longer. “We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land,” he said.
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