I am Kyle's self-indulgence

Never let it be said that I blindly support any political party or candidate. Today I heard some of the details of Barack Obama's plan for education and I must say that I am sorely disappointed.

He has said that he supports increased funding for charter schools (good) and more money to recruit quality teachers (also good). Obama also said that he wants to give schools financial support with No Child Left Behind, which is better than the alternative, I guess, in the way that treating a compound fracture with a bandage is better than not treating it, but this also suggests that he plans to leave NCLB in place (very bad).

Obama also said he thinks teacher pay should be tied to student performance (also very bad) and that some teachers should be fired when their students fail to perform well (very, very bad).

Any kind of high stakes testing that ties school funding or teacher pay to student scores is not only unfair to educators, but damaging to the entire public school system. Already schools spend far too much time teaching students to take a single standardized test and providing teachers with no other professional support beyond addressing test performance.

Mandating that school funding and/or teacher pay be linked to student scores is like requiring that doctors only get paid when their patients live. Certainly there are some bad doctors who cause unnecessary patient deaths and there are some bad teachers who cause students to fail. But good doctors also have patients who sometimes die, and good teachers sometimes have failing students. We simply cannot control all of the variables.

Some of the most important factors in student success are parental support, student ability, and student initiative. If there anything I've learned as a teacher (and especially as a special education teacher), it's that you cannot make a student learn against his will. Good teachers do the best they can with each and every student they have, but the idea that a good teacher can make every student achieve the same level of success is as delusional as the idea that a good doctor can keep every patient alive.

So I'm very sad to see Barack Obama proposing educational reforms that still adhere to the flawed strategies that we've been stuck with for the last eight years. What we need is an entirely new outlook on education that emphasizes hiring and retaining highly qualified teachers and providing them the resources they need to teach students according to the best practices established by current research in education, not according to what the state test requires.