President to Give Back-to-School Speech, Minus the Drama

Early last September, about a week before President Obama was to give a "a national address to the students of America," Florida Republican Party chairman Jim Greer released a blistering statementclaiming the president had plans to "indoctrinate America's children to his socialist agenda."

The statement from Greer, who has since been indicted, helped kick off a wave of criticism of the president's planned speech from conservatives. Talk show host Tammy Bruce urged parents to have their kids skip school so as not to have to hear from "that shady lawyer from Chicago"; columnist Michelle Malkin complained that "the left has always used kids in public schools as guinea pigs and as junior lobbyists for their social liberal agenda."

And Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, a likely 2012 GOP presidential candidate, called the planned speech disruptive.

Obama to Students: Work Hard, Focus on Education

"I don't think he needs to force [his message] upon the nation's school children," Pawlenty said. Some school districts ended up not showing the speech amid complaints from parents.

The White House insisted that the speech would be apolitical, and mocked the controversy. "I think we've reached a little bit of the silly season when the president of the United States can't tell kids in school to study hard and stay in school," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said at the time.

Indeed, the speech the president delivered ended up being little more than a call for children to stay in school, study hard and fulfill their responsibilities to themselves and the country; it was notably free from partisan politics.

Mr. Obama is planning to give the back-to-school speech again this year - he's delivering it Tuesday - but this year he'll be making it largely without the attendant controversy. (Though not entirely.) What's changed since last year? Certainly not the tenor of the political debate, which remains as strident as ever.

But there are crucial differences from last year. The Department of Education's initial recommendations to teachers concerning the president's 2009 speech urged students to write a letter to themselves on "how to help the president," a detail that was seized on by conservatives as evidence that the speech was meant to indoctrinate children. (That language was changed in response to the uproar to a recommendation that kids "write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals.")

The White House last year also did not initially stress that the speech would be apolitical, allowing the controversy to gain steam in conservative media. (It ended up releasing the full text early in an effort to lessen the controversy.)

This year has brought no such missteps from the Department of Education, and the nature of last year's speech has lessened fears that the president will be engaging in partisan indoctrination.

And so while mild concerns are still there - some school are giving out permission slips for parents to sign before showing the speech - there has not been a repeat of the uproar that preceded the president's first back-to-school address.

"It's nowhere near what it was last year," Jon Felske, school superintendent Jon Felske told Michigan's Grand Rapids Press. "There is less apprehension this year."