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Former Supreme Court Justice Switches to Video Games
TechDirt is reporting that former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has moved into the one industry that I don't think anyone might have expected, video games. Not only did she speak at a recent gaming conference, she is also working on creating a video game about the courts. "There have been many similar 'civic education' video games out there, like the UN video game to teach kids about world hunger and, my personal favorite, a video game to teach kids how to gerrymander voting districts to get political support. It's not clear how successful any of these sorts of games really are, but it's nice to see a former Supreme Court Justice taking an interest in these sorts of things. Though, some might point out that this could be seen as something of a gimmick, and students might just be better served by adding a decent civics curriculum back into school (it's apparently gone thanks to No Child Left Behind)."
Dear next president, please kill that program on your first day.
Thank you.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
http://www.redistrictinggame.com/
Try it out.
Legalize highly explosive fireworks and wait a month?
There is a problem in that the Federal government has no mandate to enforce common standards in education. But lets say the states allowed the Federal government that power, and I agree this might be a good thing to do for some under performing schools. I also agree blaming NCLB isn't addressing some of the serious problems. But by the same token, NCLB itself doesn't address the serious problems, and in its implementation is a hindrance to effective education.
I don't see the evidence that the litigious nature of schools and hyper-sensitive parents have a significant detrimental effect on education. Short of hitting kids, what methods of classroom discipline are teachers scared of using and getting sued for? More to the point, it is the parents that flat don't care to foster a learning environment for their children that create the most problems in schools, and long term in our society.
There is also a great disparity in funding between schools in rural Alabama vs. inner-city New York, etc. If the Federal government is going to place standards on education, I think school funding should be federalized and equalized based on local expenses and needs for meeting the standards.
Conversely teachers and administrations are under threat of losing funding and their jobs if children don't pass the NCLB tests. There are 2 problems here, standardized tests don't teach children anything in and of themselves, not all children are good at taking this one kind of pseudo-objectified test, and of course this incentivizes teachers and administrators to teach to the test up to excluding other valuable education to become a well rounded person.
NCLB must be scratched. If we chose to reenact national standards, we first need to look at the outcome we want, think about how to incentivize that outcome, and then craft subtle regulations and funding mechanisms to create that reality, along with looking at the larger social picture. The bellicose political proclamations that became the NCLB are not an appropriate method to resolve the large and important problems here.
Describe in a thousand words or less how you accomplish that without facism. [wikipedia.org]
1. Remove all government fiscal incentives (direct and indirect) for having children.
2. Thorough and compulsory sex education.
3. Free contraceptives.
I wonder how many stories of Republican political crimes I could drag up, if I were to reach back a half century, before practically everyone on Slashdot, or their parents even, were even born.
Um, Clinton? There you go. You don't have to go back a half century. Hell, I thought it was vogue to dig up the Clintons' dirty laundry now that it supports the golden boy, even though it's the same damned laundry the Dems spent 10 years discounting when they were in office.
Hey, Lincoln was a Republican, and he was honest. I guess if that's all you've got, that's all you can run on.
Just like you guys have Kennedy, and he was honest. OK, well actually he wasn't.
You bring up a very good point that I was thinking about earlier. The federal government has no real authority to do I'd say 75% of the things it does given a strict interpretation of the Constitution, yet citizens expect and demand a good deal of services from the Federal Government.
I could suggest that democracy in action has yielded a good deal amount of power, even if it wasn't implicitly stated, so that the federal government do more.
Does the government have the right? Arguably no. Should they however attempt to provide services that the people want? That's a good question.
think about how to incentivize that outcome
That is a matter of semantics. We increased spending on education across the board, but we're penalizing those who perform poorly. You could look at it as those who perform well are getting more money under the new system.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
That won't happen in a million years. Americans are split evenly on abortion, but, nearly unanimously would prefer that the morons that get themselves pregnant take care of their own problems.
I fail to see how "taking care of their own problems" excludes abortion.
Regardless, the GP didn't ask for a solution that would be politically acceptable in the United States of Jesusland, he asked for a way to do it without resorting to fascism (which I assumed was being used in the colloquial "oppressive government" sense). I gave him one - remove external incentives for having children and make it trivial to avoid having children.