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Discuss the US Presidential Election & Education
In 24 hours, many of you will be able to vote. So as we come down to the wire, this is really our last chance to talk about the issues. We've already discussed Health Care, the War, and the Economy. Today I'm opening up the floor to discuss education. Perhaps no other issue will matter more in 50 years. Which candidate will make the next generation smarter?
... belongs in the philosophy class, not science. Science is a set of facts seeking a conclusion to support them- Intelligent Design is a conclusion seeing a set of facts to support it.
In a philosophy or comparative religions class? Absolutely- go nuts! Be sure to include a whole bunch of other religious theory, including Hindu creation myths etc. Would be a fun class.
But as science? ... Do not want.
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
MAYBE Obama will get rid of NCLB, but I don't see him getting away from the typical left position of supporting the teachers' unions goals and just throwing money at education without real standards.
He plans on reforming it, not eliminating it. From his site:
Reform No Child Left Behind: Obama and Biden will reform NCLB, which starts by funding the law. Obama and Biden believe teachers should not be forced to spend the academic year preparing students to fill in bubbles on standardized tests. He will improve the assessments used to track student progress to measure readiness for college and the workplace and improve student learning in a timely, individualized manner. Obama and Biden will also improve NCLB's accountability system so that we are supporting schools that need improvement, rather than punishing them.
What I emphasized does seem to align with your assessment of throwing money at the problem. Those are the best details I can come up with so don't ask me how he plans to improve accountability ... I wish he had thrown out some metrics or requirements that he was aiming for. But if he did that, we might be able to hold him to it!
My work here is dung.
Promises about improvement in education by federal politicians are pure pandering.
See this chart.
See how small a percent of education is actually funded by the federal government. It should be obvious that even significant changes to federal spending will have an insignificant effect. They spend in a whole year what they spend in Iraq in less than 3 months.
Palin's stance on creationism? You mean that evolution should be taught exclusively in science class, as it is in Alaska? And that there's nothing wrong with discussing alternative views, in an appropriate context, without putting them in the curriculum? What's wrong with that?
I'm a scientist. I think that intelligent design and creationism are hogwash. But because of America's foundation in religion, they are concepts that anyone will come across outside of school. I think they should be discussed, at the teacher's discretion, especially if a student brings up the question, but should not be mandated in the curriculum.
Palin said in one interview "teach both... don't be afraid of information". The next day she went on to clarify her position by saying that they shouldn't be part of the curriculum, but it's ok to discuss them if a student brings it up. Actually here's the exact quote: "I don't think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class. It doesn't have to be part of the curriculum."
They may have originated with those banks, but because Fannie and Freddie were buying up those mortgages and they had an implicit government guarantee. If Fannie and Freddie didn't exist, those private investment banks would not have had an irresponsible gov't entity to sell their questionable loans to, so they would have had to scrutinize their borrowers more.
Oh really?
In every political commercial that I've seen so far, both McCain AND Obama were throwing poo at each other.
All that post sounds like is propaganda, not any "informative" input.
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Obama is slinging the mud faster than McCain, except Obama isn't doing the slinging? And yet Obama is slinging more mud? That's a bit of a contradiction there.
McCain is clearly slinging much more mud than Obama. Just lately you have the "Obama paling around with terrorist" speech, and the "if you don't vote McCain/Palin, you are not a real American" nonsense. This is in addition to nonsense like "Obama wants to teach children about sex" and similar lies. Sites like FactCheck.org all confirm that McCain has been far worse than Obama.
Is that so? Interesting. When did he apologize for Palin's terrorist remarks? When did he apologize for claiming that Obama wants to teach children about sex?
You do know (or would know if you had any ability to use a keyboard beyond typing idle speculation) that Obama graduated Magna cum Laude from Harvard Law so he was in the top 10% of his class. That is enough for me to go on. Does it matter what his Columbia grades were?
Actually, there are four "Ross Perot" (read: 3rd party) candidates in this election:
Bob Barr / Wayne Root: Libertarian Party
Charles Baldwin / Darrell Castle: / Alaskan Independance Party, Reform Party
Cynthia McKinney / Rosa Clemente: Independent, Green Party
Ralph Nader / Matt Gonzalez: No Party Affiliation
You can check the facts yourself at VoteSmart.org
$> man woman $> Segmentation fault. (Core dumped)
Correction: President of the Harvard Law Review. Not "just" an editor, in other words.
Actually, Nebraska and Maine both do it.
(Note my restraint)
In most districts, schools have a mandatory 165-180 day school year. With holidays and spring break, this makes for a school year of at least 9 months and often closer to 10. I know of no teacher that gets 4 months off for summer vacation. I have to believe you're just totally lying. Add to this, the fact that most teachers require a couple weeks to prepare for the start of the school year.
However, that doesn't really count here, since in most cases they're not paid for it.
I also knew a teacher who taught three classes and a study hall. He was getting paid $18K a year. Most teachers have a mandatory 7 hour work day with a 30 minute lunch. However, its common for teachers to spend 2-4 hours of time after the end of the school day preparing for the next.
I know a few teachers who'd love to show you where to put your head for implying that they were too lazy to try and get a second job to fill out those last four hours of spare time they have a day.
I suspect the real problem here is that you simply don't have a clue what you're talking about. You cherry picked an example which made you bitter and never used another neuron to think about it.
No, you have it backwards. And reveal the downside of popular democracy. If everyone votes for their bests interests, not for the common good (however you choose to define it) then yeah, the morjority wants will be voted in everytime.
That's why the US is democratic republic. The people don't vote on every issue. The people vote for other people to represent their desires on various issues.
If you don't bother to vote for a representative, then what gives you the moral right to complain about the choices any of those representatives make?
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
I don't he's hiding anything, it took me 2 seconds to find it with google:
3.8 GPA ---Columbia Poly Sci major with a specialty in international relations.
4.0 GPA with high honors. ---Harvard Law
Fanatically anti-fanatical
Yeaaaah... That's not how it works, remotely. Welfare doesn't pay out equal to a living wage, and doesn't remotely cover the expense of maintaining a child.
The fact remains, welfare isn't actually a significant drain on the average taxpayer. Social security, maybe, but social security benefits are specifically not based on poverty, and you stand to benefit from them as much as anyone else.
Reagan actually made up the example he used when he coined the term, and the fact is, while welfare fraud does exist, it's never been the TERRIFYING HORROR DISEASE that alarmist rhetoric has made it out to be.
Also, through both community work and less fortunate family members, I can tell you for certain that that is not how HUD housing works. The income does scale, but even with extremely low income (my mother has no steady work, my brother unemployed), they pay $750 in rent per month. Add to that that, if they find work that brings them up to the poverty line (collectively, not singly), they have to move out.
I very much hate to say this, but you are uninformed. Do actual research. If you're interested, I can find the names of good books on the subject for you; I don't have them off the top of my head.
To my knowledge this claim has been debunked, and the Obama campaign still firmly stands behind the original $250,000 cutoff.
If you don't want to believe them, that's fine, and another issue altogether; but this crap about "surrogates" is ridiculous. The Obama campaign has been clear and stable on their plans from the time they laid them out until now, all that's changing is how other people are talking about them or interpreting them (in particular, the press to some extent misinterpreted the original plan and presented it as a lot more win-win than it was). Regardless, Gov. Richardson has no authority to set Obama's policy, so I don't know why anyone considers that statement in any way indicative of Obama's stance.
Frankly I don't care about whether anyone got a tax cut under Clinton - whatever he did, his tenure in office resulted in one of the most steady periods of economic growth that this country has ever seen, so his policies were clearly within the bounds of what we require to thrive (not to attribute the success of his economy to his policies or the failure of ours today to Bush's, though - I don't think presidential policy ultimately has a very large effect on the economy, at least in any predictable way, to be perfectly honest - if there was such an effect, we could calculate the "right" answer to these political questions, but every calculation I've seen comes up with a different result, so there's just way too much interpretation involved to be sure that there's any causative effect at all). I think that's the most we can hope for.
I'm not sure if Obama will cross that line or not; I suppose you probably think he will, and I sympathize a bit with that fear. It's not so much that I think his stated policies are over the line (we've had other periods with parameters at those levels and we came through them just fine), but that I worry that a full Democrat Congress will push things even further, to a ridiculous point. I half expect that things may get so nutso that we'll swing the other direction four years from now and play political ping-pong for the rest of my life, each party screwing the country further into the ground with each tap of the paddle.
Where's the freaking reasonable middle when you need it? Sheesh!