President Touts Innovation in Education

For the first time in several years, a sitting U.S. president visited Brooklyn. President Barack Obama’s trip to the city’s largest borough on Friday was to deliver what the White House called a major policy speech.  It was about the future of the U.S. economy as told through the story of one very unique Crown Heights school.

P-TECH educates students from Grades 9 to 14, rather than to Grade 12.  During those six years, students take college courses with professors from the City University of New York’s College of Technology.  The professors come to the P-TECH campus to teach.  Students are also given paid summer internships at IBM which, along with the City University of New York (CUNY), are partners with the school.

“P-TECH is proof of what we can do,” the president said about the school’s classroom-to-work curriculum.

Obama pointed out that Brooklyn had become well known historically as a place where strivers, especially immigrants, could find solid industrial or service sector jobs, whether or not they’d been well educated.

“Those days are over, and are not coming back,” President Obama said to an auditorium full of eager, boistrous high schoolers, as well as prominent elected officials from Sen. Chuck Schumer, to the entire New York City congressional delegation to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Democratic mayoral nominee Bill de Blasio. “However,” said the president, “the future strength of the U.S. economy features programs like P-TECH’s long-range arc to the middle class.”

Photos by Shimon Gifter for CrownHeights.info