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Yep. This has been bizarre. I think it needed to be planned and thought out a little better before it was introduced since there hasn't been one since 1991.
It seems to me that we're at an intensely polarized point politically, so it wouldn't have been asking too much for the Obama administration to have reflected on the idea of how it would be perceived before they unveiled the plan for the speech AND to have worked more closely with the lesson planners at the DOE so the first set of lesson plans that the talk radio and TV personalities latched onto didn't contain anything that could seem like indoctrination through the schools.
On the other hand, this has been one of the worst topics for misinformation I've ever seen from the usual right wing suspects. The topic of the speech isn't controversial. There is no honorable opposition to the idea that kids should set goals and value their educational opportunities. It shouldn't be fundamentally threatening for the President to address school kids.
On final note as a teacher: the administration really needed to get the word out much earlier than they did. Almost any teacher could have worked some aspect of the speech into his or her curriculum had the teacher been given advanced notice. If you just publicize something the week before though, most teachers will have lessons planned already. Unless they can really justify dropping the instruction planned, you aren't going to get the participation you hope for.
Similarly, noon on the east coast as the time makes it pretty hard logistically for all the kids at any east coast school to watch it since it's going to be right in the middle of lunch, probably. At a small school where everyone eats at the same time, it's easy to move things around or even to have the kids watch while they eat. But anyplace big enough that they have multiple lunch periods, this is going to be really hard.
(And if the solution is to Tivo or record for broadcast later, why did it need to be during the school day anyway? Obama could have sent out tapes or video streaming to make available for teachers to use at their discretion.)
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