Today President Obama delivered a speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce calling for new measures to revamp the education system at all levels and cut the dropout rate “with the goal of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by the year 2020.” This was his first major education speech since inauguration.

Here is a highlight from the speech:

Well, the time for finger-pointing is over. The time for holding ourselves accountable is here. What’s required is not simply new investments, but new reforms. It is time to expect more from our students. It is time to start rewarding good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones. It is time to demand results from government at every level. It is time to prepare every child, everywhere in America, to out-compete any worker, anywhere in the world. It is time to give all Americans a complete and competitive education from the cradle up through a career. We have accepted failure for too long. Enough. America’s entire education system must once more be the envy of the world.

Policy specifics after the jump.

I was going to try to cull a list of reforms from Obama’s speech but I found a really good one on The American Prospect. Here’s their take:

• Charters: In the biggest concession to reformers, Obama said he supported every state lifting caps on the number of charter schools allowed to open in a year, provided that states also have accountability guidelines for assessing charters and closing down ineffective schools. To put this in perspective, just two years ago, Randi Weingarten, now the president of the American Federation of Teachers, was aggressively lobbying in Albany to prevent New York from raising its charter school cap.

• Curriculum: National standards are emerging as a consensus point between teachers’ unions and free market education reformers. Obama also supported higher standards today, saying, “Our curriculum for eighth graders is two full years behind top performing countries. That is a prescription for economic decline.” But his agenda stops short of pursuing national curriculum guidelines or tests, promising only “to promote efforts to enhance the rigor of state-level curriculum.”

• Teacher pay: Obama promised a federal investment in developing “performance pay” plans in 150 school districts. The language here is key. “Performance pay” is supported by teachers’ unions, and awards salary bonuses to teachers based on a variety of factors, including classroom observations, teaching in hard-to-staff subjects and schools, and improving student achievement. “Merit pay,” on the other hand, is understood as directly aligning teacher salaries to student test scores.

• Higher-ed: Obama promised to cut out middle-men in federal student lending, simplify the FAFSA form, and invest in community college efforts to better prepare students for the job market.

• Early childhood: Obama’s budget will include “incentive grants” for states to develop uniform quality standards and target care and education to the most disadvantaged children.

This is so promising. His proposed “performance pay” is a big step forward for secondary education – it will attract and retain good teachers, even in poorer, more rundown schools. This, on its own, will help to curb dropout rates in high school as students get motivated by their great teachers.

I wrote a couple weeks ago about his great idea to cut banks out of the student loan process by instead having the government directly lend to students. This will both save money and allow for more loan availability, a crucial policy during the current recession.

His plans include both ideas favored (performance rather than merit pay) and opposed (charter schools) by unions, which should boost their bipartisan appeal. Whether or not any education legislation will be able to work its way through Congress anytime soon remains to be seen (particularly with the economy in its current state), but this is a really great start.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user LizMarie – used under CC license.