Obama's Education Takeover

President Obama has laid the groundwork for an unprecedented centralization of education policy under the guise of promoting educational innovation, accountability, and improved student achievement. In reality, Obama’s new national standards, curricula, and testing in addition to huge spending commitments by the federal government shift the policymaking power from individuals and communities to the federal bureaucracy.

In this Broadside, Lance Izumi examines Obama’s education policies and shows us why Americans must protect and promote the power of individuals, especially parents, to control children’s education. We should look to the revolutionary school-choice and parental-empowerment laws passed by key states and other nations such as Canada. While Obama is pushing American education in the wrong direction, we can steer it back to local control.

Lance Izumi is Koret Senior Fellow and senior director of education studies at the Pacific Research Institute. He is the co-author of the groundbreaking book Not as Good as You Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice and co-executive producer of the award-winning 2009 PBS-broadcast film documentary Not as Good As You Think: The Myth of the Middle Class School. He also appears in the Academy Award-winning documentary Waiting for Superman.