The President's Laugh Line

By Daniel Wolff

In President Barack Obama’s first major speech on education, in March of this year, he presented five “pillars of our education reform agenda.” Only one of them got a laugh.

As well as better standards and assessments and more charter schools, he proposed merit pay for teachers. Plenty of controversies there, not so many punch lines.

But at one point, the president declared: “Our children spend over a month less in school than children in South Korea—every year. That’s no way to prepare them for a 21st-century economy.” He suggested that we have to “rethink the school day to incorporate more time.” That was met with applause from the Hispanic Chamber of...