And I'm docking you one letter grade for each day late, Mr. President

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Thomas L. Friedman writes ("Obama's Homework Assignment"):

There's just no point in President Obama giving yet another State of the Union Address this year—boRING. Instead, he ought to give a State of the Union 800-Word Rant. Or, better, he should let Secretary of Education Arne Duncan give it for him, because Duncan's already written one, and it's a dazzler. But before I get around to telling you what's in Duncan's speech, or when and where he [jump]
presented it, or what its title and subject matter were, I'd like to say a few more words about how true it is, because that's the kind of unconventional prose stylist I am.

Thus, I have no fewer than two authentic anecdotes about the current state of American education.

One comes from a column in the Washington Post where Valerie Strauss got a full-credit byline for her one-paragraph introduction to a 26-paragraph email from a seventh-grade English teacher in Frederick, Md., who prefers to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from her school even though the letter claims to be one of resignation, and which complains that her principal wouldn't allow her to give out D's or F's (possibly around 2002, when the Frederick County Board of Education instituted a no-D policy in high schools, not middle schools, which they rescinded the following year, not that that necessarily has anything to do with anything).

The other, which I will call "virtually identical" although it is about something different, is from my own private collection and details the sufferings of an Oregon high school teacher whose students generally stopped doing any work at all in around 1992 (and they wouldn't get off his lawn, either, and what with the Facebook and the Twitter and the rock and roll music things have only gotten worse since then).

Duncan's speech, "Parent Voices for World-Class Education", was given last week to the National Assessment Governing Board Education Summit for Parent Leaders, and noted that President Lee Myung-bak of South Korea told President Obama in 2009 that his biggest problem in the education area was parents, who are always kvetching that their children are not being forced to work hard enough, demanding that he spend millions of dollars offering English classes to first-graders even though the national curriculum calls for English to be introduced in second grade.

South Korean authorities have had to put a curfew on tutoring schools, which are now required to close down at 10:00 PM, and the exhausted students wear little pillows on their wrists to help them nap at their desks during regular school hours. This shows that Korean parents really care about their children's education.  

Every time Secretary Duncan visits a school in Frederick, Md., and sees bright, alert children who have clearly finished tutoring by 6:00 or even earlier the previous day, if they've had any outside classes at all, raising their hands and talking out of turn with their egos boosted by grade inflation, he has to wonder whether we're ever going to catch up with the rest of the world.

And so do I, frankly. And the president, as parent-in-chief, needs to perform better too. Tell me a story or I'm not going to bed.

President Lee Mung-bak bows in full formal apology for his government's corruption for the sixth time of his five-year term, this time on behalf of his 76-year-old elder brother Lee Sang-deuk for taking a $500,000 bribe from a couple of bank chairmen, July 2012. Photo by Kim Myung-ban for AP. Other noteworthy features of his tenure included the total breakdown of cooperation with North Korea, tax reductions for the rich and failure to provide affordable housing, and approval ratings by the end of 18%. Also he was lying to President Obama about parental pressure over English lessons, although truthful about not wishing to fund them adequately; in fact his original idea, to have all instruction in English by 2010 (announced after the election but before the inauguration), was abandoned due to "strong opposition from parents, teachers, and education specialists" (Wikipedia). His general fondness for education leadership by scolding, flatnessizing, and the profit motive were such as might well warm the Mustache itself. Please, no gags about resolving tensions on the peninsula with a one-on-one between Duncan and Dennis Rodman.