The President continued to advance the left-wing vision for education: free college for everyone! To him, if our high schools are broken and leave graduates woefully unprepared for the real world, the solution isn't to fix high schools, it's to send everyone to college. Education by quantity, not quality.
He actually had some good rhetoric about education being about families, not schools. President Obama lauded his Race to the Top initiative which, while resulting in some states adopting laudable goals, ultimately is about the implementation of national standards.
And, of course, he sounded like a hypocrite when claiming, when discussing teachers, that we "want to stop making excuses for bad ones." He carried out the agenda of an organization dedicated to protecting bad teachers when he killed the DC Opportunity Scholarship program. Seeing Obama butt heads with teachers' unions, a la Governor Chris Christie, would put a lot more weight behind those words.