President Obama came to the defense of teachers on Monday, when he encouraged people at an education meeting in Des Moines, Iowa, not to vote for anyone who thinks teachers are part of the problem.
“If you hear a candidate say that the big problem with education is teachers, you should not vote for that person,” Obama said during a question and answer session at Des Moines’ North High School.
“I can’t tell you who to vote for,” Obama added. “But I can tell you who to vote against; and that is somebody who decides that somehow teachers don’t deserve the kind of respect, and decent pay, that they deserve.”
His comments are a possible shot at Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has fought the teachers union in his home state for the last few years. Obama originally declined to answer the question, although his answers seemed aimed more generally at Republicans.
“I’m going to beg off this question a little bit … on this one, I’m going to wriggle around a little bit,” he said. “Right now, I’m going to try and stay out of the campaign season; partly because I can’t keep track of all the candidates,” he said, continuing a theme of speeches where he pokes fun at the crowded GOP presidential field.
“A society’s values are reflected in where we put our time, our effort, our money,” Obama said in laying out what he thinks is important in education policy. “It is not sufficient for us to say ‘we care about education’ if we aren’t actually putting resources into education.”
At the same time, Obama said that he and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have gotten complaints from other Democrats for saying “money alone isn’t enough.”
“If a school isn’t teaching consistently kids so that the can achieve, then we have to change how we do things,” he said, adding that over the years he and Duncan, whose back-to-school bus tour Obama met in Des Moines, they have “had some disagreements with teachers’ unions.”
However, he added that a school’s quality is measurable by how it treats its educators.
“The bottom line is, you can measure how good a school is if they are respecting and engaging teachers,” he said.
