Mandatory community service still included in Obama's preK-12 education plan

Yesterday, we discussed how one page at Barack Obama's new change.gov site said he'd push for mandatory community service. The campaign later changed that page to match the more voluntary-oriented statements the campaign made elsewhere.

However, there's still one thing they'll probably want to send down the memory hole. The file barackobama.com/pdf/issues/PreK-12EducationFactSheet.pdf (available under the link "Read the Pre-K to 12 Plan" at barackobama.com/issues/education contains the following:

VIII. ENLIST PARENTS AND COMMUNITIES TO SUPPORT TEACHING AND LEARNING

[...]

Service. All students in grant recipient districts will be expected to engage in some form of community service.

That certainly sounds like mandatory service to me, and note also that the PDF refers to the plan as belonging to both Obama and Biden, so someone did review it recently.

I'm sure there are more nuggets elsewhere in the 14 page PDF, but I'm not an education expert and I never saw people pounding the table about all the other things that are no doubt wrong about his plan during the election. One article from June is at humanevents.com/article.php?id=27186, and see the blog posts here and here. The GOP highlights vouchers and BHO's flip-flop on NCLB here, rather than discussing more fundamental issues.

And, see also my failed attempt to let everyone know that Obama wanted to use pre-teens to get votes.

Politics · Sat, 11/08/2008 - 13:10 · Importance: 1