Washington D.C.’s public schools aren’t good enough for President Obama.  This past week, Obama stated on the Today Show that the public schools in Washington D.C. can’t offer his children what the private school (Sidwell Friends School) they attend can offer.

According to the Washington Post, Obama made his comments on NBC’s “Today” show in response to a woman who asked whether Malia and Sasha Obama “would get the same kind of education at a D.C. public school” that they would get at the D.C. private school that has educated generations of the city’s elite.

“I’ll be blunt with you: The answer is no, right now,” Obama said. D.C. public schools “are struggling,” he said, but they “have made some important strides over the last several years to move in the direction of reform.

There are some terrific individual schools in the D.C. system.”  The comment does not come to a shock to anyone – from the officials in charge of the public schools to parents with children attending public schools.  It seems as though Americans have become complacent with the idea that our public schools cannot compete.

The reality is that if parents could afford higher-performing private schools like Sidwell, parents would be sending more of their children to private schools.  In the D.C. public school  the president’s daughter’s would attend slightly fewer than half of the students tested in the school, which goes through eighth grade, met or exceeded proficiency standards in reading and math this year.  With tuition cost over $31,000 per year at Sidwell, many parents have no choice but to send their children to the lower-performing public school.

A new documentary, Waiting For Superman, chronicles the lives of inner-city children who hope for a better education.  The president’s comments regarding the current state of schooling coupled with the release of this new documentary should bring issues with the current state of public education to light.  The documentary, from Davis Guggenheim (Inconvenient Truth), paints a grim picture of America’s public schools.

The film’s trailer tells us, “In America right now, a kid drops out of high school every 26 seconds. That’s… 1.2 million a year. These drop-outs are 8 times more likely to go to prison, 50% less likely to vote, more likely to need social welfare assistance, not eligible for 90% of jobs, are being paid 40 cents to the dollar of earned by a college graduate, and continuing the cycle of poverty.”

With statistics like this and the President’s view of the public schools his daughters would attend if a private school was not an option, it is time for talk of reform to turn in to action.