Obama: Schools can improve with right incentives [View All]

[Freddie Stubbs]

Source: Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- Trying to make his case for overhauling the nation's education laws, President Barack Obama is highlighting progress at a Tennessee high school as evidence that the proper incentives can help all schools succeed.

Obama focused his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday on Memphis' Booker T. Washington High School, where the president delivered the commencement address Monday.

Graduation rates at the school, which is in a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood, have risen impressively in just three years. The school won a national competition to secure him as its speaker by demonstrating how it overcame challenges through innovations such as separate freshman academies for boys and girls.

"Booker T. Washington High School is no longer a story about what's gone wrong in education," the president said. "It's a story about how we can set it right.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/05/21/2227356/obama-pushes-education-overhaul.html