Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
President Obama talked a lot about education in his
State of the Union speech in January. He said: "We
need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the
rest of the world."If Americans want to "win the
future," he said, then they also have to win the
race to educate their children.The president said:
"Over the next ten years, nearly half of all new
jobs will require education that goes beyond a high
school education. And yet as many as a quarter of
our students aren't even finishing high school. The
quality of our math and science education lags
behind many other nations. America has fallen to
ninth in the proportion of young people with a
college degree."Two years ago, Mr. Obama set a goal
to regain the world's highest rate of college
graduates by twenty-twenty. He says the
responsibility to give every child a chance to
succeed begins not in classrooms, but in homes and
communities. He said: "Only parents can make sure
the TV is turned off and homework gets done. We need
to teach our kids that it's not just the winner of
the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but
the winner of the science fair."President Obama
talked about his Race to the Top competition. It
offered states money to develop plans to improve
teacher quality and student performance. Also, he
called for preparing one hundred thousand new
teachers in science, technology, engineering and
math over the next ten years. Mr. Obama offered to
begin debate with Congress on immigration reform,
and he linked that issue to education.He said:
"Today, there are hundreds of thousands of students
excelling in our schools who are not American
citizens. Some are the children of undocumented
workers. They grew up as Americans and pledge
allegiance to our flag, and yet they live every day
with the threat of deportation. Others come here
from abroad to study in our colleges and
universities. But as soon as they obtain advanced
degrees, we send them back home to compete against
us."The speech came the same day the Education
Department released the latest results on student
progress in science. The goal is for all students to
perform at the proficient or advanced level. But
only about one-third of students in grades four and
eight and one-fifth of twelfth-graders did that in
two thousand nine. Just one to two percent of
students performed at the advanced level. For VOA
Special English I'm Alex Villarreal.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
