Obama Answers Question on Seeming Disagreement With Strickland on Charter Schools

President Barack Obama was interviewed this week by a group of regional newspaper reporters, including Stephen Koff of the Cleveland Plain Dealer.  During the interview the subject of charter schools, and specifically the seeming divergence of opinion between Obama and Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland.  The transcript does not identify the questioners by name, but perhaps this was Koff’s?

(Source: White House Press Office – Partial Transcript Below)

QUESTION:  Mr. President, yesterday you called for eliminating restrictions on the number of charter schools while enforcing some vigorous standards. In Ohio, the Governor has called charter schools a destructive influence on public education, a few years ago tried to have a moratorium on new charters, now wants to cut state spending by about 20 percent for charter schools and restrict some other funding. I’m wondering whether you’ve ever talked with him about this, and is this just a fundamental disagreement between the two of you?

THE PRESIDENT: You know, I haven’t had a conversation with Governor Strickland. I know that part of his concern was prompted by some bad experiences with charters in Ohio that weren’t up to snuff. And if you looked at my statement yesterday, what I said was not only should we lift the cap on charters, we should also shut down charters that aren’t meeting standards. I don’t think that’s inconsistent with Governor Strickland’s position.

My goal here is to create laboratories of innovation so that in the public school system, we are on a race to the top as opposed to stuck in the old ways of doing things. And we’ve got to — we’ve got to do that. In your home town of Cleveland, I don’t know off the top of my head what the dropout rate is, but I’ve got to assume that it’s hovering around 50 percent. If you look at the number of children going through the Cleveland public schools who are actually prepared to go to college, it’s probably one out of seven or eight or 10. And that’s just not acceptable. It’s not acceptable for them, it’s not acceptable in terms of America’s economic future. And so we’ve got to experiment with ways to provide a better educational experience for our kids, and some charters are doing outstanding jobs.

So, the bottom line is to try to create innovation within the public school system that can potentially be scaled up, but also to make sure that we are maintaining very high standards for any charter school that’s created.