Obama praises Tenn. school's efforts

WASHINGTON - Trying to make his case for overhauling the nation's education laws, President Obama is highlighting progress at a Tennessee high school as evidence that the proper incentives can help all schools succeed.

Obama focused his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday on Memphis' Booker T. Washington High School, where he delivered the commencement address Monday.

Graduation rates at the school, which is in a poor, crime-ridden neighborhood, have risen impressively in just three years. The school won a competition to secure Obama as its speaker by demonstrating how it overcame challenges through innovations such as separate freshman academies for boys and girls.

"Booker T. Washington High School is no longer a story about what's gone wrong in education," the president said. "It's a story about how we can set it right.

"We need to encourage this kind of change all across America. We need to reward the reforms that are driven not by Washington, but by principals and teachers and parents. That's how we'll make progress in education - not from the top down, but from the bottom up."

Obama promoted his Race to the Top initiative, which has states compete for education money. But the program has drawn criticism, and Republicans on Capitol Hill are unwilling to devote more money to it. He also renewed his call for Congress to send him a rewrite of No Child Left Behind, the nation's governing education law.

Republicans devoted their weekly address to energy.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas accused the Obama administration of overregulating and not doing enough to spur production at a time of $4-a-gallon gasoline. Obama this month directed his administration to step up U.S. oil production through measures such as extending existing leases in the Gulf of Mexico and off Alaska's coast.

Hutchison complained that the administration's policies remained too restrictive.

"We call on him to put policies in place that cut the bureaucratic red tape and put Americans to work doing it," she said.

Analysts and many lawmakers say there's little Washington can do that would immediately affect gas prices.