Addressing a town hall meeting at Costa Mesa in California on Wednesday, Obama emphasised on the need to raise the standards of education and put more efforts in education, which he had been stressing upon since his election campaign days.
"It can't just be a single high-stakes standardised test -- but we do need to have strong, powerful measures of performance, because schools are like anything else," Obama said.
"We can't afford our kids to be mediocre at a time when they're competing against kids in China and India who are actually in school about a month longer than our kids," he said.
"So there's a whole bunch of reforms that we're going to have to do," he added.
He said that this is not the job of teachers alone and parents too have an important role to play in this regard.
"You can't put the entire burden on a teacher. If you're not making sure your child does their homework, if you're not reading to them, instilling a sense of excellence and a thirst for knowledge in them, then they're not going to do very well, no matter how good your teacher is," he said.
