President Barack Obama met Monday with the superintendents from several large school districts and vowed to support their efforts to gain more funding for poor students.
The president discussed education issues with members of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of urban school systems meeting this week in Washington.
"There’s some core principles that all the leaders here believe in--making sure that we continue to provide resources to the poorest school districts and not creating a situation where we can suddenly shift dollars from...poorer districts to wealthy districts, or alternatively, that education aid suddenly can start going to sport stadiums or tax cuts at the state level," Obama said in remarks to the media after the meeting.
Anticipating the coming budget battle with Congress, Obama said that educators and the lawmakers that provide funding for schools should continue to focus on directing more resources to low-performing schools; on maintaining high standards for students and providing schools with the resources to meet those standards; and on providing sufficient funding for special-education students and English language learners.
"We are making too much progress now in terms of graduation rates, improved reading scores, improved math scores, increasing standards, increasing access to the resources the kids need for us to be going backwards now," the president said.
