WASHINGTON (AP) — Barely into the new school year, President
Barack Obama issued a tough-love message to students and teachers
on Monday: Their year in the classroom should be longer, and poorly
performing teachers should get out.

American students are falling behind their foreign counterparts,
especially in math and science, and that’s got to change, Obama
said. Seeking to revive a sense of urgency that education reform
may have lost amid the recession’s focus on the economy, Obama
declared that the future of the country is at stake.

“Whether jobs are created here, high-end jobs that support
families and support the future of the American people, is going to
depend on whether or not we can do something about these schools,”
the president said in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show.

U.S. schools through high school offer an average of 180
instruction days per year, according to the Education Commission of
the States, compared to an average of 197 days for lower grades and
196 days for upper grades in countries with the best student
achievement levels, including Japan, South Korea, Germany and New
Zealand.

“That month makes a difference,” the president said. “It means
that kids are losing a lot of what they learn during the school
year during the summer. It’s especially severe for poorer kids who
may not see as many books in the house during the summers, aren’t
getting as many educational opportunities.”

Obama said teachers and their profession should be more highly
honored — as in China and some other countries, he said — and he
said he wanted to work with the teachers’ unions. But he also said
that unions should not defend a status quo in which one-third of
children are dropping out. He challenged them not to be resistant
to change.

And the president endorsed the firing of teachers who, once
given the chance and the help to improve, are still falling
short.

“We have got to identify teachers who are doing well. Teachers
who are not doing well, we have got to give them the support and
the training to do well. And if some teachers aren’t doing a good
job, they’ve got to go,” Obama said.

They’re goals the president has articulated in the past, but his
ability to see them realized is limited. States set the minimum
length of school years, and although there’s experimentation in
some places, there’s not been wholesale change since Obama issued
the same challenge for more classroom time at the start of the past
school year.

One issue is money, and although the president said that
lengthening school years would be “money well spent,” that doesn’t
mean cash-strapped states and districts can afford it.

“It comes down to the old bugaboo, resources. It costs money to
keep kids in school,” said Mayor Scott Smith of Mesa, Ariz.
“Everyone believes we can achieve greater things if we have a
longer school year. The question is how do you pay for it.”

One model is Massachusetts, where the state issues grants to
districts that set out clear plans on how they would use the money
to constructively lengthen instructional class time, said Kathy
Christie, chief of staff at the Education Commission of the States.
Obama’s Education Department already is using competitions among
states for curriculum grant money through its “Race to the Top”
initiative.

“The federal carrots of additional money would help more states
do it or schools do it in states where they don’t have a state
grant process,” Christie said.

But the federal budget is hard-up, too. And while many educators
believe students would benefit from more quality learning time, the
idea is not universally popular.

In Kansas, sporadic efforts by local districts to extend the
school year at even a few schools have been met by parental
resistance, said state education commissioner Diane DeBacker.

“It’s been tried,” she said, describing one instance of a
Topeka-area elementary school that scrapped year-round schooling
after just one year. “The community was just not ready for kids to
be in school all summer long. Kids wanted to go swimming. Their
families wanted to go on vacation.”

Teachers’ unions say they’re open to the discussion of longer
classroom time, but they also say that pay needs to be part of the
conversation. As for Obama’s call for ousting underperforming
teachers, National Education Association President Dennis Van
Roekel said unions weren’t the main stumbling block there, as many
education reformers assert.

“No one wants an incompetent teacher in the classroom,” Van
Roekel said. “It’s in the hiring, and in those first three to five
years no teacher has the right to due process.”

___

Associated Press Writers Ben Feller and Julie Pace in
Washington, Karen Matthews in New York, Donna Gordon Blankinship in
Seattle and Alan C. Zagier in Columbia, Mo., contributed to this
report.