Rant: Yes we can! ... continue to make stupid education decisions

President Barack Obama is promising to throw money at schools that will follow his lead on "change" in education.
How is this different from previous administrations? Every president comes into office with ideas on how to fix our schools, usually buzzwords such as Obama's "charter schools" and "performance pay."
For President Bush, it was "testing" and "accountability," which is how we ended up with No Child Left Behind, which is leaving thousands of children and schools behind. Now, as schools are still struggling to forcefeed children answers to federal tests in order to keep needed funding, they'll have to figure out how to satisfy the new president in order to obtain new funding.
But how is opening new schools that parents can opt to send their children to really going to improve education? What about when the next administration focuses on strengthening public schools and leaves these charter schools out in the cold?
And tying teacher pay to student achievement seems like a great idea, but then won't good teachers choose to only teach at schools with high-income students -- who usually have higher educated parents able to do more to help them achieve -- leaving struggling low-income and minority students falling behind once again?
Changes in administration, at the state and county levels as well as the federal, continue to force schools into adopting different goals and ideals, causing fractured education structures that leave administrators focused on the wrong things, teachers confused and students uneducated. Many schools have goals and ideals that look like the California law books -- filled with the well-meaning but shortsighted rules set forth by countless politicians that counteract each other and leave everyone in a vortex of unpredictability.
President Obama is working to create more common academic standards nationwide, which is laudable, but the rest of his goals are just empty ideas that seem great now but will fall apart in the future. Meanwhile, as the quotes in the Washington Post story from state education officals prove, he will get enough lip service from schools to hand out the money, and they will use half of it to halfass their way to what he wants them to do and use the other half to actually educate their students.
And the cycle continues ...