Obama goes to school.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: Political Eye - Barack Obama in James C. Wright Middle School

It was a big, big day for the students at James C. Wright Middle School in Madison, Wisconsin, when the President came to town.

"The President of the United States is here in the same place where you walk the halls, where you learn," Wright principal Nancy Evans told the students. "Take this moment in history as nourishment."

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Wright is a charter school with a mission to promote community involvement. It is also the school with the largest percentage of minority students--and students in poverty--in the Madison Metropolitan School District. Obama's visit lit up the crowd. Before the President walked into the gym to deliver a speech on education and pitch his "Race to the Top" initiative, he met with forty students in the school library. The students who were picked for that meeting filed wide-eyed into the gym, where the rest of the school was assembled, just ahead of the President.

Eighth grader Deion Ford had shaved Obama's name into the back of his head.

The staff was giddy, too. "I learned today that I respect our President more than anyone in the universe," the school band teacher gushed.

Obama's symbolic impact is hard to overstate. But the substance of his speech--an education policy talk that left the sixth, seventh, and eighth graders glassy--eyed was a letdown.

For too long, Obama told the crowd, "we've let partisanship and petty bickering stand in the way of progress. It's been Democrat versus Republican, it's been voucher versus public schools, it's been more money versus more reform."

So began the pitch for what education professor Todd Price, who spoke at a Books Not Bombs rally outside the school, called "No Child Left Behind on Steroids."

Obama introduced "one of the best secretaries of education we've ever had," Arne Duncan, the controversial former "CEO" of the Chicago public schools. And Duncan explained the Race to the Top: States can get a chunk of the $4 billion in federal grant money if they comply with certain requirements. The most hotly debated of these is the rule that they get rid of so-called firewalls: laws that, in some states, forbid linking teacher assessment and compensation to student test scores.

But critics say that tying individual teachers' pay to student test scores means there is a direct disincentive for teachers to work at schools that serve English-learners and other students who generally don't score as high on standardized tests.

And then there is the relentless emphasis on...