TEXAS AFT LEGISLATIVE HOTLINE--FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2009
(copyright 2009 Texas AFT)
 
Presidential Speech to Students Coming on Tuesday
 
Remarkably, a furor has erupted over a presidential speech to students, exhorting them to work hard and stay in school, which will be made available for viewing in classrooms during the school day on September 8 and thereafter. Some school districts in Texas and elsewhere are refusing to permit the live showing of the president's speech on Tuesday. One member of the State Board of Education has gone so far as to encourage parents to keep their children at home on Tuesday, lest they be exposed to the presidential pep talk.
 
This inflamed response has been fueled in part by a couple of lines in the original version of suggested supporting materials for the speech from the U.S. Department of Education, which invited teachers to have students write about how they could "help the president." Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has acknowledged that this was a mistake, and this suggestion has been removed from the materials posted on the Education Department's Web site.
 
Apart from that since-corrected misstep, however, even some of President Obama's severest critics have found it hard to fault the idea of a speech urging schoolchildren to behave responsibly and stick to their studies from the nation's first African-American president, raised for the most part in a single-parent household, whose own story shows the power of education to overcome disadvantage. The Wall Street Journal editorial page, for instance, called the flare-up over the speech "overwrought, to say the least." The Journal editors added: "According to the Education Department's Web site, Mr. Obama ‘will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning’--hardly the stuff of the Communist Manifesto or even the Democratic Party platform. America's children are not so vulnerable that we need to slap an NC-17 rating on Presidential speeches."
 
As American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said this week, it can only be helpful for "the president of the United States of America to use his bully pulpit to talk to kids about the importance of education and to help inspire kids." Many school districts are sensibly taking the presidential speech in that spirit, advising teachers to feel free to use the speech in their classes. It's not mandatory, of course, and if it interferes with lesson plans or the flow of instruction, they are free not to show it live or not to use it at all. Beyond that, some districts also are bending over backward to invite parents, if they so choose, to exempt their children from hearing the presidential address.       
 
We encourage you to reach your own judgment about the merits of this upcoming presidential address by simply reading it in advance and seeing what President Obama actually has to say. You'll find the full text of the address, to be delivered Tuesday at 11 a.m. Central Time to students in Arlington, Virginia, at this site: http://www.whitehouse.gov/MediaResources/PreparedSchoolRemarks/.