(Thumbnail image: White House Flickr)

President Obama: “We’ve got to make sure every child is getting a good, solid education.”

“No Child Left Behind”—a hallmark of President George W. Bush’s education agenda—will face more than a few changes under President Obama.

We're taking a look at perspectives from MSNBC, The New York Times, The American Prospect, and The Washington Post.

President Obama is proposing an almost 8 percent increase in federal education spending, focused mainly on overhauling the “No Child Left Behind” law.

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” had an exclusive interview with US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

“Under No Child Left Behind there are lots of ways to fail, very few ways to succeed and those places that are making improvement, we want to support that. We also want to have high standards. Under No Child Left Behind the bar got dummied down, lowered.”

For years now “No Child Left Behind” has been criticized for unfairly tying students and teachers to standardized test scores. One writer for the New York Times talks about why the program gets the failing grade.

"The current system issues the equivalent of a pass-fail report card for every school each year, an evaluation that administration officials say fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure."

California’s KGO Radio spoke with an education professional takes it a step further, saying he’s hopeful President Obama’s reforms will work.

“I think I’d call it a sweeping overhaul. … This overemphasis that somehow a test score can define quality is just wrong. … How do we really measure student learning? How do we measure growth within a year? … I’m optimistic about the direction established by this administration.”

President Obama also talked about his "Race to the Top" program, which encourages competition between school districts for government funding.

As one writer for The American Prospect says, this seems more like a tactic for the marketplace and not the schoolhouse.

"I'm wary of applying corporate rules to the K-12 educational establishment, where you reward players who succeed and ‘innovate’ -- and punish those who do not. Reforming public education should mean helping struggling school districts rather than making them compete against better-performing schools..."

So what do you think? Will Mr. Obama’s education initiatives provide the fuel for American schools to race back to the top?