Obama again sounds call for a longer school year

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama started the school week Monday with a call for a longer school year and said the worst-performing teachers have “got to go” if they don’t improve quickly.

American students are falling behind their foreign counterparts, especially in math and science, and that’s got to change, Obama said. Obama declared that the future of the country is at stake.

“Whether jobs are created here, high-end jobs that support families and support the future of the American people, is going to depend on whether or not we can do something about these schools,” the president said in an interview on NBC’s Today show.

U.S. schools through high school offer an average of 180 instruction days per year, according to the Education Commission of the States, compared with an average of 197 days for lower grades and 196 days for upper grades in countries with the best student achievement levels, including Japan, South Korea, Germany and New Zealand.

“That month makes a difference,” the president said. “It means that kids are losing a lot of what they learn during the school year during the summer. It’s especially severe for poorer kids who may not see as many books in the house during the summers, aren’t getting as many educational opportunities.”

Obama said teachers and their profession should be more highly honored - as in China and some other countries, he said - and he said he wanted to work with the teachers’ unions. But he also said that unions should not defend a status quo inwhich one-third of children are dropping out. He challenged them not to be resistant to change.

And the president endorsed the firing of teachers who, once given the chance and the help to improve, are still falling short.

“We have got to identify teachers who are doing well. Teachers who are not doing well, we have got to give them the support and the training to do well. And if some teachers aren’t doing a good job, they’ve got to go,” Obama said.

They’re goals the president has articulated in the past, but his ability to see them realized is limited. States set the minimum length of school years, and although there’s experimentation in some places, there’s not been wholesale change since Obama issued the same challenge for more classroom time at the start of the past school year.

One issue is money, and although the president said that lengthening school years would be “money well spent,” that doesn’t mean cash-strapped states and districts can afford it.

“It comes down to the old bugaboo, resources. It costs money to keep kids in school,” said Mayor Scott Smith of Mesa, Ariz. “Everyone believes we can achieve greater things if we have a longer school year. The question is how do you pay for it.”

Teachers’ unions say they’re open to the discussion of longer classroom time, but they also say that pay needs to be part of the conversation. As for Obama’s call for ousting underperforming teachers, National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel said unions weren’t the main stumbling block there, as many education reformers assert.

“No one wants an incompetent teacher in the classroom,” Van Roekel said. “It’s in the hiring, and in those first three to five years no teacher has the right to due process.”

Also on Monday, the U.S. Education Department announced it will mount a campaign to recruit 1.5 million teachers over the next decade to replace retiring instructors.

The drive features public service announcements from celebrities and a new website, www.teach.gov, to attract future teachers, according to a statement from the department. Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced the program at an event hosted by NBC News in New York on Monday.

The campaign will focus on attracting prospective teachers to subject areas with the highest demand, including science and math, and to rural and urban school districts with the greatest need, according to the statement.

It will also seek to increase minority-group participation in teaching. While more than 35 percent of public school students are black and Hispanic, less than 15 percent of teachers come from those groups. Fewer than 2 percent of U.S. teachers are black men, according to the statement.

Information for this article was contributed by Ben Feller, Julie Pace, Karen Matthews, Donna Gordon Blankinship and Alan C. Zagier of The Associated Press and by Oliver Staley of Bloomberg News.