Bill Moyers commented on his PBS program that when President Barack Obama came into office, people remarked, "This is a Rooseveltian moment."
James K. Galbraith, the son of the famous economist and a formidable academic in his own right, responded, "The public certainly wanted a Rooseveltian moment," but he added, Obama's situation "is much more like Herbert Hoover's."
Those who know presidential history recognize that Republican Hoover came to office after a landslide win in 1928. He appealed to volunteer efforts to cope with the stock market crash that began the long Depression a year into his presidency.
Hoover applied the tools of the past and a hope and a prayer for contending with an economic conundrum, answers woefully short for what was needed. The wrong solution can make things worse when a re-visioning is called for, which only came about after Roosevelt was elected.
If you judge by current discussions concerning education, you would think no one learned anything from the past. Education and immigration reform, both of huge importance to 51 million Hispanics, are widely considered on the White House's agenda after the health care debate. But are we getting reform or a warmed-over past?
The recent book "The Obama Education Plan,'' by the respected publication Education Week, provides insight into what influentials are thinking and proposing. The bulk of the report is another soup-to-nuts re-visitation of gripes and expectations: early childhood, No Child Left Behind, math and science, dropouts, rewarding teachers, college affordability, etc.
Of course, the data are updated, latest case examples pointed out, and key words of the moment applied; otherwise, it is a rerun of the last 40 years that has made a virtual mockery of the term "reform" when used in the same sentence as education.
It is glaringly obvious how many self-serving groups there are and how their pet projects are pushed as if they were imperatives. Hardly any of these leading "educators" recognize today is not 1970, not that this is a demographically changed nation. For instance, youth today is a reference to those between 16 and 25, and more likely Hispanic, either in school or the workplace.
In a section of the book called "Advice for the President," UCLA researcher Kris Gutiérrez has the guts to point out what's needed is to "change the discourse in education," She says the everyday lives of people, not just of technocrats "telegraphing individual policies (for) fixing this and changing that," are at the core.
She has a point. Given the near-death financial and economic experience we just endured as a nation, what is the road ahead? And what is the new education role to make things better?
This is no small question. Marc Tucker, in the same publication, points out that the United States has one of the highest-cost, lowest-performing education systems in the industrial world. He focuses on better teachers being put in charge, in a similar way that doctors run hospitals. He champions a new system that is, mercifully, not called "reform" but "redesign."
The old matrix of looking at how much money is to be spent is a deceptive measure because we allocate twice as much to secondary education. Measuring high school graduates, we slide to 18th among the 36 industrialized nations, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. But why expect anything different when our public education was intended for an industrial society that is passing from the scene. Tucker calls it a "dysfunctional design."
Many Latino advocacy groups and individuals have been either on the wrong side of this debate or they are not up to speed with cutting-edge thinking. This matters because they will soon be invited to the policy casino and asked to turn their nearly 70 percent vote for Obama into chips to play Administration poker. But the Latino electorate did not cast a vote for Hoover-type solutions. They voted for the future. They wanted an FDR-type improvement, for the nation and their kids in school.
(Jose de la Isla writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. E-mail him at joseisla3(at)yahoo.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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