School Districts Still Struggling Over How to Treat Obama Speech

DEVELOPING ...

Shortly before President Obama is set to deliver a stay-in-school address to students nationwide, some districts are still struggling over whether to allow the speech to be shown.

The speech has stirred controversy, with some parents, school officials and conservative groups expressing concerns that the president is injecting politics into local education.

In Florida's Indian River County, the superintendent still is trying to determine how to treat the broadcast. According to the Press Journal, school officials last week decided that the speech had to be taped and reviewed before showing students, meaning it would not be shown live.

But that decision drew protests, and even charges of racism, and Superintendent Harry La Cava was meeting with officials on the move ahead of the speech.

Elsewhere, officials are going ahead with plans to screen the speech, even though prepared remarks were released by the Obama administration Monday.

Some Wisconsin schools, for instance, will not watch Obama live. The Elmbrook district's Superintendent Matt Gibson told FOX News that teachers should have a chance to review the message first so they can determine how best to include it in the curriculum.

ORIGINAL STORY ... 

President Obama plans to tell the nation's school children that they ultimately are most responsible for their own education.

The White House posted Obama's remarks Monday, for a speech scheduled Tuesday, on its Web site.

Obama's planned talk has been controversial, with several conservative organizations and individuals accusing him of trying to delve too directly into local education and indoctrinate students with what they call his "socialist" agenda. But White House officials, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan, have said the charges are silly.

In the remarks set for Tuesday, Obama tells young people that all the work of parents, educators and others won't matter "unless you show up for those schools, pay attention to those teachers."

Click here to read the speech.

Obama also emphasizes the importance of staying in school.

"And no matter what you want to do with your life -- I guarantee that you'll need an education to do it," he said. "You can't drop out of school and just drop into a good job. You've got to work for it and train for it and learn for it."

The debate over Obama's speech Tuesday has dominated cable television and talk radio for several days, signaling again the stark divisions in the country both over politics and social issues.

But Obama avoids any partisan shots in his prepared remarks and instead encourages students to set goals for their education and to maintain focus in the face of life's challenges.

"At the end of the day, the circumstances of your life -- what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home -- that's no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude," he said. "That's no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That's no excuse for not trying."

"Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up," he continued. "No one's written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future."

On Sunday, Obama's education chief dismissed the furor over the speech as "just silly," and a conservative senator who led the Education Department in the first Bush administration suggested teachers make it a civics lesson.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan's department has taken heat for proposed lesson plans distributed to accompany Tuesday's speech. He acknowledged that a section about writing to the president on how students can "help" him meet education goals was poorly worded. It has since been changed.

But Duncan rejected claims that the speech is an attempt by Obama to indoctrinate students with a socialist agenda.

"That's just silly. They can go to school. They can not watch. It's just, you know, going an 18-minute speech," Duncan said on CBS"s "Face the Nation" .

He said Obama had no intention beyond talking "about personal responsibility and challenging students to take their education very, very seriously."

Sen. Lamar Alexander, education secretary under President George H.W. Bush, said he understood "some of the concern, because, you know, people say, `Oh, here's another Washington takeover.'

"But of course the president of the United States should be able to address students. And of course, parents and teachers should decide in what context," Alexander, R-Tenn., said on "FOX News Sunday."

He added, "If I were a teacher, I'd take advantage of it, and I'd put up Lincoln and Eisenhower and Reagan and teach about the presidency, and then I'd put up the head of North Korea and say, In that country, you go to jail if you criticize the president. In our country, you have a constitutional right to do it."

Duncan said the guides distributed to schools "were put out by teachers, for teachers. And there is one that wasn't worded quite correctly. It was talking about helping the president hit his goal of having the highest percent of college graduates by 2020. He's drawn a line in the sand in that.

"We just clarified that to say write a letter about your own goals and what you're going to do to achieve those goals. So again it's really about personal responsibility and being accountable, setting real goals and having the work ethic to see them through," the secretary said.

Declaring that viewing the speech is "purely voluntary," Duncan said the hubbub is something "I frankly don't pay any attention to." Rather, he said, he is focused "laser-like" on the big problems in the U.S. education system.

"There's nothing political about it, and it's a shame that some people have tried to politicize it," Obama adviser David Axelrod added on NBC's "Meet the Press."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.