god bless you. god bless the united states of america. president obama clearly full of hope, speaking for a good half hour there in miami at miami central high school, and he could not have been more clear and talk about the timing, speaking there in miami about education and jobs on this day when the unemployment rate is down, private sector jobs up for the 12th month in a row and couldn t be more clear about the connection between investment in education, thus improving the economy and growing jobs but let me back up and talk to you why he was here at this particular school in mime dade. miami central senior high school committee it was one of those underachieving school. talking about the grades, for years they were getting an f grade from the state of florida, and what they did, and all of this is because of the thousands of dollars from the president s school improvement grants, is they fired their principal and they replaced nearly half of the teachers, so pretty strong medic
champs can t be easy. but why is it sometimes we expect people to be working out hard on the football field and then suddenly everybody is surprised when you ve got to work out hard in the math lab? same principles apply. you ve got to work hard to achieve your goal. so outstanding teachers and principals, a common mission, a culture of high expectations, that s what it takes to turn a school around. that s what accounts for progress here at miami central, and that s why we are going to support you with what we call school improvement grants. you re one of nearly 1,000 schools across america that we re helping turn around by spurring reform from the bottom up, the bottom up. and the approach that we re taking with school improvement grants and school turnarounds is the same approach that we re
to defend a broken status quo. what do you say to the mayor? well, of the 11 states and plus district of columbia that did receive race to the top, most of them did have the collaboration of the teachers union and that essential, and the idea that you can change what is happening with america s kids without involving the people who are there is crazy. we must disrupt the status quo, and it is not acceptable, but somebody from the outside cannot change that system. for us, it is so imperative on literally hundreds of schools, every single school that receives school improvement grants from the government, and we have members there, we re sitting down with them to say let s turn this around. let s change the reality for these students. we believe that student success is number one, and we re going to make a difference. thank you very much. thank you. and what political story will be making headlines in the next 24 hours? it was so complicated. there was a lot of information out t
principals, we have to challenge students themselves, parents. our department of education has been part of the problem. we ve been this big compliance-driven bureaucracy. we have to become this engine of innovation. all of us have to move outside of our comfort zones and we have to do so with the urgency that our country frankly hasn t had. and your school improvement grants, this is 730 different schools? what we re doing is challenging the country. those dropout factories where students aren t learning and falling further behind, we have to do things differently. the country wasn t in the business of turning around schools. we have 730 schools 44 states where they re putting in place radical plans to improve student achievement. this woman is tough, controversial, takes great courage. you re not hearing yelling, not hearing screaming, not hearing fighting. adults are making the hard decisions to do the right thing by children in the communities. i m so proud of the courage they
here it is. you can t defend a status quo in which a third of our kids are dropping out. you can t defend a status quo when you have 2,000 schools across the country that are dropout factories where more than half of the kids are dropping out. in those schools you have to have radical change. what kind of radical change would you suggest or go along with to turn those numbers around, mr. van roekel? i agree with the president that the status quo is not acceptable. what we re doing as a union, the school improvement grants which are aimed and targeted to schools under performing, the ones president obama was talking about, every single one of those schools that receive funds, we re going to include in priority schools campaign. we don t call them high-need schools. we believe they ought to be high priority. we re going to part with them and say, get management, school board, employees and their union at the table. reach out to parents in the community and decide together what are