So my colleague, Vashali Honawar, blogged Barack Obama speech at the National Education Association’s convention this weekend. You can read all about it here. And you can watch most of the speech over at the Education Intelligence Agency.
There’s been quite a lot of reaction to the speech - and particularly Obama’s mention of merit pay - out in the education blogland. For instance, according to eduwonk, the NEA replayed portions of the speech throughout its convention...but deleted the parts where Obama expressed support for merit pay and charter schools. And Joe Williams over at Democrats for Education Reform, has a post titled “Obama’s Velvet Snub”, which refers to those portions of the speech, as well as Obama’s decision to accept the endorsement by telecast instead of in person. Williams praised Obama for showing he’s willing to disagree with the NEA. And Alexander Russo said the speech meant Obama hasn’t “flip-flopped” on education.
There hasn’t been any reaction to the speech posted on the blogs of either of the two unions (Joel Packer over at the NEA, or on AFT’s NCLB blog). But I’m curious what they thought...