President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan visit with a high school class in New York in 2013. (The White House)
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama focused on increasing Americans’ access to community college in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, expanding on the conventional view of public universal education as a K-12 process.
“We still live in a country where too many bright, striving Americans are priced out of the education they need,” Obama said in reference to the America’s College Promise plan that he unveiled earlier in January. “It’s not fair to them, and it’s not smart for our future. That’s why I am sending this Congress a bold new plan to lower the cost of community college — to zero.”
While the plan may seem radical, Obama is no stranger to proposing broad education reform in the State of the Union speech.
Following his reelection, for example, Obama proposed major early childhood education reform, called Preschool for All, in his 2013 address. His plan: “to make high-quality preschool education available to every single child in America.”
In a similar light, Obama’s latest education proposal shifts the focus to higher education “so that two years of college becomes as free and universal in America as high school is today.”
The idealistic tone of Obama’s proposals, though, runs against real finance and implementation issues. States would have to come up with the revenue to attract the proposed federal funding.
With the introduction of America’s College Promise, in conjunction with his prior proposals on early childhood education, Obama and his supporters have shown they intend to push the boundaries of the K-12 universal public education schema.
“We can no longer be satisfied by saying it is the responsibility of our society to provide education from kindergarten through the 12th grade,” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said in a CSPAN video on the Senate floor Tuesday ahead of the president’s address. “We have to look at a new model in America…that is a K-14 model. That is reality.”
The underlying similarities between the two plans and their goals are clear: help states increase investment in approaches to economic mobility for the middle and lower-income classes, a central theme to Obama’s address.
“Whoever you are,” Obama said Tuesday night, “this plan is your chance to graduate ready for the new economy, without a load of debt.”
But because of the similar set ups in the two plans, America’s College Promise could fall victim to the same issue that has plagued Preschool for All: the need for state support of the programs. The federal government cannot force states to participate in these types of federal education funding plans.
For example, Obama’s goal of a federal investment of $75 billion dollars in expansive, high-quality early childhood education over 10 years, has yet to come to fruition. Last December, the president and Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced a $1 billion initiative, far short of the original Preschool for All initiative, to support early learning. About one-third of the investment comes from corporate and philanthropic sources.
The problems for states, according to David Baime of the American Association of Community Colleges, are the federal government’s requirements for the states to secure federal funding to finance the programs.
“There is a question of what kind of requirements states or institutions would have to meet in order to qualify for [America’s College Promise],” Baime, the senior vice president for government relations and research for the community college association, said. “We just don’t know what that might be at this point. Those details will matter a lot [for states].”
While the president did not disclose specific standards required of states during his address, a White House briefing of his plan does call for states and community colleges to bolster academic programs and increase support for students.
Both education plans are also based on programs already in existence in some states. Obama’s preschool plan was inspired by Georgia’s and Oklahoma’s commitments to early childhood education. His community college plan, originally announced at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, is based on a higher education initiative in Tennessee.
Because of this, Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, who stood alongside Obama during the announcement of the free community college plan in his home state, asserts that broad education policies must be expanded by the states themselves, not forced upon them.
“The right way to expand Tennessee Promise nationally is for other states to do for themselves what Tennessee has done,” Alexander, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said in a statement.
As it sits, Obama’s education ideas are a continuation of an expansion of society’s responsibility for public education. And implementation sits at the end of what figures to be a bumpy road.
“America thrived in the 20th century because we made high school free, sent a generation of GIs to college and trained the best workforce in the world,” Obama said. “But in a 21st century economy that rewards knowledge like never before, we need to do more.”
