Obama is a great speaker, no doubt there. However, I hate the State of the Union hoopla, and I didn't watch it last night. I did end up watching it today, largely due to the fact that I had off because of the snow. Honestly, those speeches would be 10 minutes long they didn't have to stop for applause after every three sentences.
It was nice not to see the very juvenile division between the teams where one side stands and claps while the other side pouts and scowls depending upon the speaker and the topic. Watching that divided seating is kind of like watching a middle school dance.
As for the speech itself, it was very eloquent, but not particularly enlightening. 'Good things are good, bad things are bad, and we should want good things over bad things.'
The one topic that interested me was education. Sure, it is great to return funding to the schools; a lot of them have cut back on their programs. The President talked about reforming education as well. However, the lesson from No Child Left Behind was that top-down educational reform is not possible in the current educational climate. You can design and require all of the standardized tests that you want, fund all the programs you can think of and emphatically implore the schools to 'do better', but none of that will improve so long as you have the same crappy teacher preparing the students for that test or running that program. Until you can enable administrators and supervisors to remove bad teachers efficiently, nothing will improve. This means dealing with the unions that protect bad teachers. This mean eliminating tenure. This means performance-based pay. Until those things happen, money, testing and supervision are pointless.
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