President Obama’s budget proposals for higher education

Maybe it was hope. I’m not certain. But for whatever reason I conducted an experiment the last couple days to force a personal reaction to President Obama’s budget proposals for higher education.

The experiment started by watching his speech to the joint session of Congress, paying particular attention to every mention of the words education, college, and university. You can do this nicely with interactive video that allows you to enter a search term and then jump to each of the points in the video where that term is mentioned. Here’s the link for the interactive video I used for this part of the experiment.

When the OMB released an overview of Obama’s budget proposals yesterday, I read the President’s Message, the analysis of past “misplaced priorities” in education, and the President’s ideas for change. The OMB report is here. It’s titled “A New Era of Responsibility: Renewing America’s Promise.”

As a third piece to the experiment, I deliberately avoided all analysis of the budget proposals from any source, trying to limit the influence that ideas of other people might have on me.

In the final piece of the experiment, I read the budget documents from two different perspectives. First was the traditional analytical one. I tried to understand what was said, what evidence was used to support the statements, and how the budget proposals addressed the educational problems identified.

From a second perspective, I listened to the cadence of words and tried to tap into the emotion of the budget message. What was there that touched the heart?

Since this experiment concerns education, I guess it’s fitting that I grade President Obama’s higher education budget. On an analytical level, I give it a solid C. On an emotional level where real leadership shines, I give it a weak D. I also tried to avoid grade inflation. And just for disclosure, these grades come from someone thrilled that Barack Obama was elected President.

Remember, too, I’m only talking about the higher education budget proposals and other more general education proposals that affect higher education. There are other sections of the budget document that would receive more generous grades.

I went into the experiment with modest expectations, a result of hope wizened by experience. So maybe it’s just me and other people will see the higher education budget proposals in an entirely different light. Or maybe it was just the best that President Obama could do at the time, given current political and economic reality. Or maybe things will change as the budget details emerge.

Who really knows? But, by golly, education systems have an uncanny ability to absorb any and all efforts at change, sucking up the dollars directed toward them, and yet changing only at the margins.

Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that no one knows how to stimulate systemic educational change. Maybe the best we can do is create a cauldron for innovation and creativity and entrepreneurial instantiation and then stand back in wonder at what, if anything, will emerge. That, of course, would require soft leadership, which seems so foreign to political culture in the United States as to be almost inconceivable.

Ahh well. Time to stop before I start to rant.