WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama took aim Monday at the nation’s school dropout epidemic, proposing $900 million to states and education districts that agree to drastically change or even shutter their worst performing schools.

Obama’s move comes as many schools continue to struggle to get children to graduation, a profound problem in a rich, powerful nation. Only about 70 percent of entering high school freshmen go on to graduate. The problem affects blacks and Latinos at particularly high rates.

Obama described the crisis as one that hurts individual kids and the nation as a whole, shattering dreams and undermining an already hurting economy.

“There’s got to be a sense of accountability,” Obama said in announcing his latest get-tough school proposal at the U.S Chamber of Commerce.

The president’s plan would seek to help 5,000 of the nation’s lowest-performing schools over the next five years.

“In this kind of knowledge economy, giving up on your education and dropping out of school means not only giving up on your future, but it’s also giving up on your family’s future,” Obama said. “It’s giving up on your country.”

Obama has been pushing schools — using federal money as his leverage — to raise their standards and prod them to get more children ready for college or work. It is a task that former President George W. Bush and Congress, along with many leaders before them, have long taken on, but the challenge is steep.

Obama’s 2011 budget proposal includes $900 million for School Turnaround Grants. That money is in addition to $3.5 billion to help low-performing schools that was in last year’s economic stimulus bill.

To get a share of the new money, states and school districts must adopt one of four approaches to fix their struggling schools:

• Turnaround Model: The school district must replace the principal and at least half of the school staff, adopt a new governance structure for the school, and implement a new or revised instructional program.
• Restart Model: The school district must close and reopen the school under the management of a charter school operator, a charter management organization or an educational management organization. A restarted school would be required to enroll, within the grades it serves, former students who wish to attend.
• School Closure: The school district must close the failing school and enroll the students in other, higher-achieving schools in the district.
• Transformational Model: The school must address four areas, including teacher effectiveness, instruction, learning and teacher planning time, and operational flexibility.

The administration also is putting $50 million into dropout prevention strategies, including personalized and individual instruction and support to keep students engaged in learning, and better use of data to identify students at risk of failure and to help them with the transition to high school and college.

Obama announced his plan Monday at an education event sponsored by the America’s Promise Alliance, the youth-oriented organization founded by former Secretary of State Colin Powell and his wife, Alma. Obama also planned to discuss ways to better prepare students for college and careers.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): GOERIEBLOGS

In a poignant farewell for his family and thousands of mourners, the elaborate funeral procession for Senator Edward M. Kennedy is expected to begin from his family’s Cape Cod compound Thursday afternoon on the 72-mile journey north to Boston, where the motorcade will wind around city landmarks that were important in the life of Mr. Kennedy and his family.

Mr. Kennedy died at age 77 late Tuesday night in Hyannis Port, Mass., after battling brain cancer for 15 months.

A Senate stalwart and the longest-surviving brother of a tragic and triumphant political clan, Mr. Kennedy was hailed by many who knew him as a man as fiercely dedicated to public service as he was to his extended family.

Accordingly, the day’s events began in Hyannis Port with a private Catholic mass for the family that was closed to the press. A flag flew at half-staff in the center of the circular driveway surrounded by clusters of fading brown hydrangeas.

Around noon Eastern time, family members entered the white-shingled, green-shuttered house, The Associated Press reported, including Mr. Kennedy’s son Patrick Kennedy, a Rhode Island congressman; Caroline Kennedy, daughter of Mr. Kennedy’s brother John F. Kennedy, and Maria Shriver, daughter of his sister Eunice, who died in early August.

The Mass, according to a pool reporter, was held overlooking the ocean in a room traditionally reserved for family masses, but one the Kennedy clan called its “fun room.” Father Donald MacMillan from Boston College officiated.

About an hour later, the hearse, a motorcade of black limousines, hulking black Cadillac Escalade sport utility vehicles and motorcycle police from both local and state agencies were still lined up outside the house.

Members of the honor guard, with nine representatives of all branches of service from Washington D.C were stationed in front of the hearse.

Mourners gathered along the streets of Hyannis Port and in the Boston Common on a refreshingly cool, sunny late summer day to view the procession Thursday afternoon. The planned route was scheduled to end late in the afternoon at the John F. Kennedy Library in Dorchester, Mass., where Mr. Kennedy’s body will lie in repose for public viewing Thursday evening and Friday. The funeral mass will take place at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Basilica in Boston on Saturday morning, with President Obama delivering a eulogy. Mr. Kennedy is to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery outside Washington on Sunday, near his brothers John and Robert. The motorcade on Thursday is due to reach Boston around 2:30 p.m., heading first to St. Stephen’s Church in the city’s North End, where his mother, Rose, was baptized and her funeral mass was celebrated, according to a statement from Mr. Kennedy’s office.

From there, the motorcade will cross over the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway, the park Mr. Kennedy helped create, and pass by Faneuil Hall, the colonial-era landmark where Mayor Thomas Menino of Boston will ring the bell 47 times — once for each year Mr. Kennedy served in the Senate.

It will also pass by 122 Bowdoin Street, where Mr. Kennedy had his first office as an assistant district attorney. His brother John lived on Bowdoin Street while running for Congress in 1946.

From there, the procession will pass by the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, where Senator Kennedy maintained an office in recent years, and travel to Dorchester Street in South Boston and then to his brother’s presidential library and museum, which Senator Kennedy helped to build.

The visitation will be held at the library’s Stephen E. Smith Center. The Boston Globe reported that since Mr. Kennedy’s death, museum officials have been hastily constructing an exhibit in the center’s foyer, with photographs and artifacts relating to his speeches, including his 1968 eulogy for his brother Robert F. Kennedy and his Democratic National Convention addresses from 1980 to 2008.

By late morning, crowds had gathered at the library, and mourners had already left American flags, flowers and a stuffed teddy bear, according to The A.P.

James Jenner, a 28-year-old culinary student from Boston, placed his Red Sox cap at the impromptu memorial.

“It was Teddy’s home team,” Mr. Jenner said, according to The A.P.

“It just seemed appropriate to leave him the cap. It symbolizes everything that he loved about his home state and everything he was outside the Senate.”

Source (article): NYTIMES

Source (pictures): OURCOMMONCONCERN, LEWISCOUNTYDEMOCRATS, I.DAILYMAIL

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama on Saturday challenged Iran’s government to halt a “violent and unjust” crackdown on dissenters, using his bluntest language yet to condemn Tehran’s post-election response.

Obama has sought a measured reaction to avoid being drawn in as a meddler in Iranian affairs. Yet his comments have grown more pointed as the clashes intensified, and his latest remarks took direct aim at Iranian leaders.

“We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people,” Obama said in a written statement. “The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.”

Obama has searched for the right tone in light of political pressures on all sides. On Capitol Hill, Congress pressed him to condemn the Iranian government’s response. In Iran, the leadership was poised to blame the U.S. for interference and draw Obama in more directly.

Obama met with advisers at the White House as developments in Iran grew more ominous, with police seen beating protesters.

“Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away,” the president said, recalling a theme from the speech he gave in Cairo, Egypt, this month.

“The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government,” Obama said. “If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.”

Protests at White House
Obama’s comments came as protesters outside the White House waved Iranian flags and denounced Iranian government efforts to suppress the protesters.

Protesters in Iran have demanded that government cancel and rerun the June 12 elections that ended with a declaration of overwhelming victory for hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Reformist presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi says he won and claimed widespread fraud.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said there was no ballot rigging. He warned of a crackdown if protesters continued their massive street rallies.

Then on Saturday, police in Iran beat protesters and fired tear gas and water cannons at thousands who rallied in open defiance of Iran’s clerical government. Witnesses described fierce clashes after some 3,000 protesters chanted “Death to the dictator!” and “Death to dictatorship!” in downtown Tehran.

Obama’s criticism came one day after both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to condemn the actions by the Iranian government against demonstrators and moves to interfere with Internet and cell phone communications. That was seen in part as a veiled criticism of Obama’s response, too.

Responding to critics
The president already was on record as saying the United States stood behind those who were seeking justice in a peaceful way. He responded to critics that he hadn’t been forceful enough in support of protesters, telling CBS News: “The last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States. That’s what they do.”

That was Friday, before the conflict in Iran appeared to deepen.

Obama has refrained from passing final judgment on the underlying question of the legitimacy of the election itself, although he has expressed “deep concerns” about it.

The president returned Saturday to his theme that the world is watching the way the Iranian government responds.

Obama cited Martin Luther King’s statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): UPI

GREEN BAY, Wis. - Ten-year-old Kennedy Corpus has a rock-solid excuse for missing the last day of school: a personal note to her teacher from President Barack Obama.

Her father, John Corpus of Green Bay, stood to ask Obama about health care during the president’s town hall-style meeting at Southwest High School on Thursday. He told Obama that his daughter was missing school to attend the event and that he hoped she didn’t get in trouble.

“Do you need me to write a note?” Obama asked. The crowd laughed, but the president was serious.

On a piece of paper, he wrote: “To Kennedy’s teacher: Please excuse Kennedy’s absence. She’s with me. Barack Obama.” He stepped off the stage to hand-deliver the note — to Kennedy’s surprise.

“I thought he was joking until he started walking down,” Kennedy said after the event, showing off the note in front of a bank of television cameras. “It was like the best thing ever.”The fourth-grader at Aldo Leopold elementary in Green Bay already knew what she was going to do with the note: frame it along with her ticket to the event. She said she’d make a copy for her teacher.

Kennedy said she had never seen Obama before. “He’s really nice,” she said.

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (picture): MSNBC

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - President Barack Obama arrived Wednesday in Saudi Arabia, where he will begin his latest bid to open a dialogue with the Muslim world by paying a call to Saudi King Abdullah, guardian of Islam’s sacred sites in Mecca and Medina.

Saudi Arabia’s monarch greeted Obama at Riyadh’s main airport with a ceremony when the new U.S. president arrived after an overnight flight from Washington. A band played each country’s national anthem, the Saudi national guard was on hand and there was a 21-gun salute.

Obama and Abdullah then sat together in gilded chairs, sipped cardamom-flavored Arabic coffee from small cups and chatted briefly in public before retreating to hold private talks on a range of issues at the king’s desert horse farm. There, guards on horseback flanked the long driveway, carrying swords and flags of the two countries as the king and his guest arrived.

Obama and Abdullah were set to discuss a host of thorny problems, from Arab-Israeli peace efforts to Iran’s nuclear program. The surge in oil prices also was on the agenda. The president was to stay overnight at the king’s horse farm in the desert outside Riyadh before heading to Egypt.

Saudi Arabia is a stopover en route to Cairo, where Obama is to set deliver a speech that he’s been promising since last year’s election campaign — aiming to set a new tone in America’s often-strained dealings with the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims.

Many of those Muslims still smolder over Iraq, Guantanamo and unflinching U.S. support of Israel, but they are hoping the son of a Kenyan Muslim who lived part of his childhood in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country, can help chart a new course.

“I … don’t want to load up too many expectations on this speech. After all, one speech is not going to transform some very real policy differences and some very difficult issues surrounding the Middle East and the relationship between Islam and the West,” Obama told NBC’s Brian Williams on the eve of his trip.

“But I am confident that we’re in a moment where in Islamic countries I think that there is a recognition that the path of extremism is not going to deliver a better life for the people,” the president told Williams.

‘Sustained effort’
Aides cautioned that Obama was not out to break new policy ground in his Cairo speech, which follows visits to Turkey and Iraq in April and a series of outreach efforts including a Persian New Year video and a student town hall in Istanbul. And they said the president is not expecting quick results, even though the speech will be distributed as widely as possible.

Officials said Obama also wouldn’t flinch from difficult topics, whether it’s the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, the goal of a Palestinian state or democracy and human rights. Obama has been criticized for setting the address in Egypt, where President Hosni Mubarak has jailed dissidents and clung to power for nearly three decades.

Obama likely will be looking for help from Saudi Arabia on what to do with some 100 Yemeni detainees locked up in the Guantanamo Bay prison. Discussions over where to send the Yemeni detainees have complicated Obama’s plan to close the prison. The U.S. has been hesitant to send them home because of Yemen’s history of either releasing extremists or allowing them to escape from prison.

Instead, the Obama administration has been negotiating with Saudi Arabia and Yemen for months to send them to Saudi terrorist rehabilitation centers.

The president was to stay overnight at the king’s horse farm in the desert outside Riyadh. Abdullah, who hosted then-President George W. Bush at the ranch in January of last year, keeps some 260 Arabian horses on its sprawling grounds in air-conditioned comfort.

Saudis are key
In any effort to court Muslims, the Saudis will be key — not just for their oil wealth, but by virtue of the authority they wield at the center of Arab history and culture.

Obama’s meeting with the 84-year-old Abdullah will be his second in three months. The two saw each other at the G-20 summit in London, a meeting both sides called friendly and productive. Perhaps a bit too friendly: Critics accused Obama of bowing to the Saudi monarch during a photo-op. The White House maintained he was merely bending to shake hands with a shorter man.

“This in many ways will be one of the pivotal relationships President Obama can develop,” said Robin Wright, a scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “Saudi Arabia is important not just in terms of the Gulf and oil prices. It sets the tenor. It’s one of the most conservative regimes. It’s also important because King Abdullah is, among the various royals, more open-minded than others. These are two men who might actually deal well with each other.”

Source (article): MSNBC

Source (pictures): MSNBC, MONROEANDERSON, TEHRANTIMES