Ohhhhbama

How rarely we encounter a statesman with true courage. Rarer still, an eloquent one. Hell, at this point it's nice to encounter a literate statesman.

In Philadelphia this week, Barack Obama gave us all hope that an American president does not have to be a mindless greedmonger or a spineless moron. He also begged the distracted multitude to pay attention and avoid letting sound bytes replace genuine, difficult, meaningful discourse in yet another presidential campaign.

Our favorite part over here at Education Action!, of course, was when he actually spoke the truth about American public education. (I mean we're happy when candidates even mention education, never mind tell the truth.)

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students.

What?! But segregation is illegal! Yeah, well, so is driving above the speed limit. Finally a candidate who uses the word SEGREGATED to describe our schools. Is that reality I smell? Foul though it is, we won't deal with it until we admit that it stinks.

Then he goes on to issue a challenge. Hey! Nobody challenges Americans! We don't have to give anything up, except the occasional son for a war. We don't have to listen to speeches that are challenging to understand. We don't have to read headlines that are more than three words long. We get a nice little bit of money back after taxes so we can buy some stuff. We don't have to cut back on using any nonrenewable resources, in fact we can drive a hummer. We don't have to really fix schools, we'll just test them repeatedly until they fix themselves. We don't have to care about other people's kids. We don't have to do much of anything... But look what happens in a classroom when you don't challenge students. They get bored. They feel disrespected. They start to hate school. They drop out. We need a challenge, and Obama issues one I like a whole lot:

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news....But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids...

We need to REFUSE to accept showmanship and spectacle as our government or our justice system. We need to be stronger than the fear mongering nightly news. We need to read beneath platitudes. We need to do something really hard - actually have a difficult conversation, over and over, until we solve a problem. And the first, most essential problem Senator Obama thinks deserves our efforts? Education. Because it is fundamental.

(You should really read the whole thing, if you haven't yet. Or watch it.)