As Barack Obama’s time in the White House comes to an end, the White House recently released a report that discusses the progress made under his administration in public education.

The report, titled Giving Every Child A Fair Shot: Progress Under the Obama Administration’s Education Agenda, looks at some of the success in public education Obama has overseen as president, including training thousands of teachers in STEM fields and seeing high school graduation rates at an all-time high.

Much of the report discusses Obama’s dedication to making STEM a national priority, to setting high college and career ready standards, and to pushing for the eventual passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act to replace the long-expired No Child Left Behind Act.

• Some notable achievements the report highlights from the Obama administration include:
• Increasing national access to Internet through the ConnectED initiative; 77 percent of school districts had desirable broadband Internet access in 2015 compared to just 30 percent in 2013.
• Creating a budget proposal that aims to provide all students with access to computer science; Obama approved $4 billion in funding for computer science in all 50 states.
• Establishing the My Brother’s Keeper Task Force to "improve the expected educational and life outcomes for all young people, including young boys and men of color, and to address the persistent opportunity gaps they face.” The task force has helped make significant strides in bringing down rates of chronic absenteeism and curtailing harmful, often discriminatory disciplinary practices.
• Defining and preventing bullying. In 2014, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Education created a uniform definition of bullying for research efforts going forward.
• Recruiting 100,000 STEM teachers in 10 years to address the need for more STEM instruction in schools. At the “critical half-way point,” it was announced that the effort has already recruited 30,000 teachers and that it is on track to recruit 70,000 more by 2021.
• Expanding access and funding to Pre-K education; the report says investment into Pre-K has increased by $1.5 billion
• Seeing a decreased dropout rate of 17 percent since being elected into office

The report highlights many other efforts of the Obama Administration and the whole report can be found here.

Nicole Gorman, Education World Contributor

5/4/2016