[Vision2020] Obama’s Best-Kept Secrets

[Art Deco]

Op-Ed Columnist Obama’s Best-Kept Secrets By THOMAS L.
FRIEDMAN<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html>
Published:
October 20, 2012

ONE thing that has struck me about the debates so far is how little President
Obama<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/o/barack_obama/index.html?inline=nyt-per>has
conveyed about what I think are his two most innovative domestic
programs. While I don’t know how Obamacare will turn out, I’m certain that
my two favorite Obama initiatives will be transformative.
  Enlarge This Image
   Oliver Munday

  Go to Columnist Page
»<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/thomaslfriedman/index.html>
    Josh Haner/The New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman

His Race to the Top program in education has already set off a nationwide
wave of school reform, and his Race to the Top in vehicles — raising the
mileage standards for American-made car and truck fleets from 27.5 miles
per gallon to 54.5 m.p.g. between now and 2025 — is already spurring a wave
of innovation in auto materials, engines and software. Obama mentioned both
briefly in the last debate, but I want to talk about them more, because I
think they are the future of progressive politics in this age of austerity:
government using its limited funds and steadily rising performance
standards to stimulate states and businesses to innovate better economic,
educational and environmental practices.

While it is too scary for Obama to tell people in so many words, his races
to the top in schools and cars are both based on one brutal fact: “The
high-wage, medium-skilled job is over,” as Stefanie Sanford, a senior
education expert at the Gates Foundation, puts it. The only high-wage jobs,
whether in manufacturing or services, will be high-skilled ones, requiring
more and better education, and Obama’s two races to the top aim to produce
both more high-skill jobs and more high-skilled workers.

In the Race to the Top in schools, Education Secretary Arne
Duncan<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/arne_duncan/index.html?inline=nyt-per>has
built on the good works of his predecessor, Margaret Spellings, and
President George W. Bush, who put in place No Child Left
Behind<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/n/no_child_left_behind_act/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>.
Though never perfect, No Child Left Behind was still a game-changer for
education reform because it gave us the data to see not only how individual
schools were doing but how the most at-risk students were doing within
those schools. Without that, educational reform based on accountability of
teachers and principals could never start.

The purpose of Race to the Top, Secretary Duncan explained to me, was
basically to say that if we now live in a world where every good high-wage
job requires more skill, we need to get as many of our schools as possible
educating their students “to college- and career-ready standards,” measured
against the best in the world, because that is whom our kids will be
competing against. “We have to educate our way to a better economy,” Duncan
argues. “The path to the middle class today runs straight through the
classroom.”

So, Race to the Top said to all 50 states, we have a $4.35 billion fund
that Washington will invest in the states that come up with the best
four-year education reform plans that have these components: 1) systems for
data-gathering on student performance, dropout rates, graduation rates and
post-graduation college and vocational school success, so schools are held
accountable for what happens to their students; 2) systems for teacher and
principal evaluation and support, as well as systems to reward great
teachers, learn from their best practices and move out those at the bottom
— essentially systems that help elevate teaching into an attractive
profession; 3) systems that propose turning around failing schools by
changing the management and culture; 4) systems that set college- and
career-ready, internationally benchmarked standards for reading and math.

IT is too early to draw any firm conclusions, but Duncan points to some
early positives. Some 4,500 state and local teachers’ union affiliates have
signed onto their state’s reform proposals, showing they want to be
partners. Roughly 25 percent of the turnaround schools, Duncan said, “have
already showed double-digit increases in reading or math in their first
year and about two-thirds showed gains.” There have also been “huge
reductions of discipline incidents.”

Although, over the two years of the program, 46 states submitted reform
blueprints — and only the 12 best won grants from $70 million to $700
million, depending on the size of their student populations — even states
that did not win have been implementing their proposals anyway. And because
45 states and the District of Columbia adopted similar higher academic
standards (known as the “common core”) for reading and math, “for the first
time in our history a kid in Massachusetts and a kid in Mississippi are now
being measured by the same yardstick,” said Duncan.

In many cases, we have seen as much reform from those “who did not get a
nickel as those who got $100 million,” Duncan added. As Jay Altman, the
chief executive of FirstLine Schools, which manages the turnarounds of
failing schools in New Orleans, put it, “Louisiana ended up not winning
Race to the Top, but we got close, and the process stimulated Louisiana and
other states to think more broadly about educational reform rather than
just approach it piecemeal.”

As for Obama’s doubling of vehicle mileage by 2025, led by his
Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Transportation, it’s
already driving more innovation in Detroit, as each car company figures out
how it will improve mileage by 5 percent every year. The auto industry’s
main newspaper, “Automotive News, used to be a sad collection of stories of
failing dealerships and excess inventory,” notes Hal Harvey, the chief
executive of Energy Innovation. “Now it is one technology story after
another, all aimed at increasing fuel
efficiency<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/f/fuel_efficiency/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>.
Engines, transmissions, electrical systems, advanced materials are all in
the midst of new revolutions. Finally the engineers are back at work!”

Carl Pope, the former executive director of the Sierra Club, notes that
Mitt Romney rejects Obama’s auto Race to the Top and is vowing to import
more oil from the Canadian tar sands through the Keystone XL pipeline. “So
Romney wants to throw away our cheapest, cleanest oil — the stuff we make
in Detroit through greater mileage efficiency — and replace it with the
world’s most expensive and dirty oil from the Canadian tar sands,” says
Pope. “That’s a swap only the Koch brothers could dream up.”

Yes, the costs for cars with higher miles per gallon will rise a touch, but
the savings will be manyfold that amount. The Environmental Protection
Agency projects families will save $1.8 trillion in fuel costs and reduce
oil consumption by 2.1 million barrels per day by 2025, which is equivalent
to one-half of the oil that we currently import from OPEC countries every
day. It will cut six billion metric tons of greenhouse gases over the
lifetimes of the vehicles sold through 2025 — more than the total amount of
carbon dioxide emitted by the U.S. in 2010.

But remember: It’s all a secret. Don’t tell anyone.


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
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