If you look just at dollar signs or rhetoric to measure the education success of Barack Obama’s first one-hundred days, then the President should get an A. Base it on meaningful reform, however, and he’d be lucky to get a passing grade.

Obama’s overwhelming education focus has been on getting roughly $100 billion directed to education through the American Recover and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). But he and his education secretary, Arne Duncan, haven’t just turned on the money hose. They’ve poured on the rhetoric as well.

“The time for holding us -- holding ourselves accountable is here,” the President told the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in March. “What's required is not simply new investments, but new reforms. It's time to expect more from our students. It's time to start rewarding good teachers, stop making excuses for bad ones. It's time to demand results from government at every level.”

That all sounds great. But how do you make all that good stuff really happen?

The first thing you don’t do is bail out massive inefficiency and failure, but that’s exactly what Obama’s ceiling-shattering “investment” is doing. Spending billions upon billions to save jobs in a system that’s seen huge staffing increases, skyrocketing per-pupil expenditures, but student-achievement stagnation is not forcing reform, it’s rewarding failure.

Ah, but there are reform requirements attached to all that dough! States have to promise to address teacher-quality issues, establish student-progress data systems, set “rigorous” standards, and help “turn around” bad schools. And states that seem to do a good job will be eligible for a slice of the $4.35 billion “Race-to-the-Top” fund controlled by Secretary Duncan.

But we’ve been hearing tough talk like this for decades and not a lot has gotten better. Is there much reason to believe that Obama will finally make the jump from rhetoric to real reform? Continued...