Senator Barack Obama On Education

“It’s time to redesign our schools...to help prepare our children for a more competitive world... Our task, then, is to identify those reforms that have the highest impact on student achievement, fund them adequately, and eliminate those programs that don’t produce results...but unless [we] turn off the television and get over a certain anti–intellectualism...our children are not going to achieve.”

— Audacity Of Hope & Various Speeches

Senator Obama has long believed in and fought for better educational opportunities for all Americans. Senator Obama’s education initiatives have encompassed every age group, starting with Head Start programs, and continuing through adulthood to effective retraining programs for displaced workers. Senator Obama has supported and proposed:

• Guaranteed, affordable, top–notch and life–long education;
• Legislation that recruits and rewards teachers;
• Addressing the growing achievement gaps between low–income and middle–income students;
• Free public college for any student maintaining a B–grade average;
• and, has voted to shift $11–billion from corporate tax loopholes into education funding.

The very first bill that Senator Obama introduced into the U.S. Senate would increase Pell Grants from the present $4,050 to $5,100. In presenting his Higher Education Act, Obama noted that Pell Grants now only fund 23% of the cost of education, which represents a significant decline over the past two decades.

“What if we prepared every child in America with the education and skills they need to compete in the new economy? If we made sure that college was affordable for everyone who wanted to go? If we walked up to those Maytag workers and we said ‘Your old job is not coming back, but a new job will be there because we’re going to seriously retrain you and there’s life–long education that’s waiting for you.’”

 — Knox College, June 4, 2005