A letter published in the Wall Street Journal, asked Obama to support charter schools and performance pay structures as a way to close the education achievement gap between minority and white students.
"In the afterglow of your election, Americans today run the risk of forgetting that the nation still faces one last great civil-rights battle: closing the insidious achievement gap between minority and white students. Public education is supposed to be the great equalizer in America. Yet today the average 12th-grade black or Hispanic student has the reading, writing and math skills of an eighth-grade white student."
"What can you and your administration do to close the achievement gap? Beyond expanding federal support for charter schools, as you have proposed, we would urge you to press forward with other policy reforms. The federal government should take most of the more than $30 billion it now spends on K-12 education and reposition the funding to support the recruitment and retention of the best teachers in underserved urban schools. High-poverty urban schools have many teachers who make heroic efforts to educate their students. But there is no reward for excellence in inner-city schools when an outstanding science teacher earns the same salary as a mediocre phys-ed instructor."
WSJ Full Letter from the Black Alliance for Educational Options
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