Obama Education Plan

Obama has been very progressive with many major topics involving the reform for a better America but he hasn't really tackled education with the intensity he has used on the war or the health bill. On March 13, 2010, the Bush Administration handed him a bill to reform the education system and Obama is currently re-writing it and will be proposing it soon. Time Magazine listed some of the highlights

— By 2020, all students graduating from high school would need to be ready for college or a career. That's a shift away from the current law, which calls for all students to be performing at grade level in reading and math by 2014.

— Give more rewards — money and flexibility — to high-poverty schools that are seeing big gains in student achievement and use them as a model for other schools in low-income neighborhoods that struggle with performance.

— Punish the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools using aggressive measures, such as having the state take over federal funding for poor students, replacing the principal and half the teaching staff or closing the school altogether.

— Duncan has said the name No Child Left Behind will be dropped because it is associated with a harsh law that punishes schools for not reaching benchmarks even if they've made big gains. He said the administration will work with Congress to come up with a new name.

Amy Wilkins, a vice president with The Education Trust in Washington, D.C., called the blueprint a "culture shift."

"One of the things America has not been clear about is what k-12 is supposed to do," Wilkins said. "In this, we're saying K-12 is supposed to prepare kids for college and meaningful careers."

Although I feel that like most politicians Obama will promise us more than he can actually give us, I still really like the idea of rewarding schools with success. It's planned that more than four billion dollars will be given to the education system, which hasn't been done in forty five years.