The President's "Race to the Top" is a "competition to get states to implement school reforms that produce real results". Unfortunately President Obama hired Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education. Arne Duncan was formerly the "CEO" of the Chicago Public School system (CPS), the second or third largest in the country with literally, actually, hundreds of thousands of students (and 666 schools). At CPS, Mr Duncan only ever got around to closing "bad" schools, allowing a selection of its students to attend a decent one across town, and stuffing the rest into another overcrowded, failing school, also usually not in the hood.

It's sad to hear President Obama speaking in terms of a standardized assessments approach to reformation rather than giving our Public Education System the major over-hall it needs, a process for which many of the rest of our industries will get major money.

The "Race to the Top" grants $4.35 billions of dollars to competitive education innitiatives, which sounds like a lot, but only amounts to the same old Federal rap saying do things our way, or no Federal Funding For You (FFFU). And those billions are well off the mark of investment into our other races, like the one to the moon, or to arms.

Of what would major .edu over-hall consist? No less an effort than to turn our gasoline-powered cars electric, and our coal-powered electricity solar: A constructive approach to learning, rather than catechism. Complete technological integration. A thousand-fold increase in arts education. And is there any reason children shouldn't be exposed to another language or two, to better equip them to be global leaders? Major education reform is to build a network of many smaller schools, which are resources unto each other, and but also serve their respective communities. More money, obviously.

I think that ($$) is a pretty good civilized-people-meter: how much invested are they in their civic institutions. It's all about resources, isn't it? Education reform, from the bottom up, is more about educating children, it's also about community development. You don't find many bad schools in well-established neighborhoods.

The best futures market is indeed what Barrack Obama preaches when he speaks always not of his generation, but of the "current" one. You see, we have the ability raise a generation of genius--a legion of brilliant people to master all of the fast multiplying dendrites in the fields of micro-sciences and macro-technology, of omni-media and social organization. Forget not to mention global policy and that more Perfect Union. Today's babe could be in twenty-something years the LeBron James of Quantum Computing, or the Facebook CEO of Atomic Medicine. And they could be manifest. The Oprah of international cultural relations.

On one hand, we understand President Obama has a lot going on, and so maybe has not really imagined the true scale of the future and education (as both distinct and connected entities), even as continuously he uses those same stumps as the platform he stands on for the sake of stabilizing the economy and debt and war. It's always about the future. He doesn't have to know anything, exactly, about the future, and he can't. No oracle is he. His job is only to lead--to preside. For The President to succeed, the future as he presents it to us must be one thing: make believe. And you better believe: the future can be what we imagine.

Sell soy! Buy early education!

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