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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?
Nuff said. (These issues are a stimulus to trigger a voting response, and have NOTHING to do with policies that will exist post-election.)
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The federal government really isn't the appropriate place to deal with any kind of primary educational policy.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
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. We spend more money - under left and right administrations - per student and don't see the results, which means the overall system is broken.
I don't see him actively supporting homeschooling as well, and we know he's going to be against vouchers.
The biggest problem, however, will NEVER be government involvement. I don't care who is in power, but the ONLY real influence on children's education is PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT. It doesn't matter what teachers, principals, politicians, and everyone else does if a parent doesn't care about how well their kid is doing in school - it's nearly too great a hurdle to overcome.
I think that the only thing that I have ever seen that may do something is a performance-based state-sponsored tuition program (like Louisiana TOPS or Georgia HOPE) which is directly tied to secondary school performance with college tuition on the line - there are a LOT of parents in those states that I know of who pushed their kids to get good grades simply because there was a near-free college tuition at stake (it's what paid for my own tuition at Louisiana Tech).
How long before we can do the same with Democrats?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
If you are concerned about the education in the United States, voice your concerns to your state and local government. The only thing the federal government has authority over concerning education is the ability to tax you and decide how it will spend that tax money. Looking to solve education issues at the federal level is a farce.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Why should the president, or the government, have a role in "making everyone smarter"? I also don't see how people can be "made smarter" when they are spoon-fed a pre-packaged education and are not driven to learn on their own - something they would be more motivated to do if we moved away from our current nanny-state that lets us get by without being informed about the choices we make.
Why can't McCain properly defend his education policy? It is the most important issue facing our nation, and it is where McCain is leaps and bounds ahead of Obama!
We have the best private education system in the world. We have the best college education system in the world, both public and private. We have one of the worst public school systems in the developed world. Why? What's the difference between our tremendously successful college system and private system, and our horrendous public school system? Guess what, it's NOT MONEY. Per-student spending in public schools is almost DOUBLE what it is in private schools! Surprised? You certainly didn't hear that in tonight's debate. Only the absolute top most elite private schools cost more per student than we spend on our public schools, and the difference is not much, just 10-20% more. And students at those elite schools get WAY more in return for that extra 10-20%. Oh, and public school teachers earn more than private school teachers, so that's not it either.
So what's the difference between how our public, government-run schools operate, and how our colleges and private schools operate? Here are the differences:
1. No teachers unions in private schools and colleges.
2. School choice: private schools and colleges must compete for your dollars. Public schools don't; the government decides which school you must attend, based on what neighborhood you live in.
Let's go into #1.
The teachers union is the most dangerous organization on the planet. They are more of a threat to our nation than Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea combined. They are ruining the education of our children and destroying our only hope of maintaining our prosperity and peace.
The teachers union has made it impossible to fire teachers for poor performance. To be fired, a teacher basically has to break the law or molest a student. They can't be fired for simply being a terrible teacher. It's gotten so bad that at public schools across the country, bad teachers are paid full-time salaries to simply sit in the teachers' lounge all day and not teach! Schools are forced to do this because they don't want these bad teachers anywhere near their students, but they haven't done anything that the union says they can be fired for.
In private schools and colleges, teacher pay is based on performance. In public schools, because of teachers union demands, pay is based on seniority (i.e. how long they've been working there). You can't pay good teachers more and bad teachers less, and therefore you can't attract and reward the best teaching talent. Public teachers as a whole lose the motivation that drives the private sector to work harder and better: more money.
Finally, the teachers union is 100% opposed to school choice. Why? Because it would force all public teachers to work harder and compete for their job, just like everyone does in every job in the private sector.
And this leads directly into Point #2.
It is school choice, in the form of vouchers, that will save our public education system. The way our system works now, schools tell the government how many students they have each year, and the government funds them with X amount of dollars per student. The way school choice will work is this: instead of the government giving those dollars to the school, that money will be given directly to the parents in the form of a voucher. The parents can then take that voucher and use it to send their kids to any school they want, public or private.
What affect will this have? Competition. The same thing that makes our private schools and colleges perform so well. They'll have to wise up, stop wasting money, become more efficient, and start teaching better, or else they'll start losing students. Parents will choose to send their kids to better-performing schools.
Cue the teachers union yelling "But you'll be taking money away from already struggling schools!". Of course, that's the point, and that's a good thing - because the struggling schoo
Looking at it from this side of the pond, it is not quite so clear. Compared with socialist-leaning political types we see in Europe, Obama is seen as a very centrist politician. However compared with the usual types of politicians we are used to in this country, it will be a significant shift toward the left if Obama gets the presidency and the Democrats keep control of congress. While this may be only a 2 year shift in power, looking at what happened to Bill Clinton and the Democrats previously, it is nevertheless makes me very nervous to think what might happen in those 2 years.
There is no candidate or their party that represents my more libertarian views on the world. Small government is not represented by either major party, personal gun ownership is shakily represented by the Republicans, and freedom of self-expression is shakily represented by the Democrats (for some history on the changes to what that party represents - look at what the Democrats did to the students in Chicago in the early 60s).
Obama may look right to you. However, I feel he represents the lesser of two evils between him and Senator Clinton. McCain would have been perfect 10 years ago. Now he just seems like a bitter old-man-puppet, who picked a hot "young" thing as his running mate and now will make all of us pay the price of a Democratic President due to his inability to pick a good VP candidate.
It is with pride that I go to the polls tomorrow, especially as a non-native citizen allowed the priveledge to vote via my naturalization. It is with some amount of shame that I pick a candidate that I agree less than 50% with on my topics of interest (including McCain, Obama, Bob Barr and Bill the Cat).
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It is not the government's job to plan things for us. It is hilariously bad at it, anyway. It is the government's job to protect our liberties so we can do things ourselves.
We are perfectly capable of organizing our own local educational systems. Some of them won't be as good as others, but they can learn from the ones that are successful.
Having the government plan it, and run it, will just guarantee that the quality continues to degrade universally.
Unless you happen to believe in creationism (like many do in the USA) then this is the trigger to vote for McCain/Palin.
Let's be honest here. Unless Palin is actually teaching the class her outlook on evolution has zero to do with her relation to education. Infact, keeping her in as a governor is probably more likely to get creationism pushed on more students than her being a vice president. On the federal level all she's going to do is go on and on about budgets. That's it.
If every intelligent person voted, these elections would never be too close to call.
Intelligent by who's standards? If your idea of intelligent is the normal Slashdot "everyone who thinks like me" kind of thing than I'm sure you're right. As for me? I know tons of vastly intelligent people who have some ideas that are far from my own. Enough to make me question who's really right. And out of these same tons of people many probably think creationism has some glimmer of truth to it. It doesn't bother me because I'm not asking them to teach biology to me.
Even if I were the difference between the evolutionist camp and the creationist camp means jack shit in the real world. How about we leave that stupid little debate behind and work on the idea that we're graduating kids that can't balance a checkbook. A fucking checkbook has a lot more to do with how this country progresses than whatever theory you have on the origins and progression of life. I bet you that if everyone in this country believed in creationism but could balance a checkbook we'd be a lot better off. We haven't even go an acceptable majority of the kids graduating to cover the basics of everyday life and we're busy bickering over evolution? Huh?
Also the nefarious involvement of unscrupulous people doing bad things to win, decreases the predictability of an outcome, when both sides are doing it.
It's just another reason to reject the two party system if you ask me. When we can finally shed ourselves of the "us or them" maybe we'll also let go of the hate that accompanies it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
Silly me. I thought the First Amendment allowed me to bitch until my heart is content.
I'm tired of hearing that I can't complain if I don't vote. Who made up this mantra? The people who want you to vote for them.
And the masses have bought it. They think they really have a say in what happens in government. Ha!
By choosing not to vote I *am* making my statement: I don't like the candidates or the system.
Enough with Groupthink.
If every intelligent person voted, these elections would never be too close to call.
Intelligent != ability to make good choices. There are plenty of folks of average intelligence who excel at making good decisions and plenty of brilliant ones who continually fuck up their decisions. Intelligent people are subject to irrationality, self-interest and bias, just like everyone else.
I'm sure that this isn't the popular opinion among the alpha dorks who worship on the altar of IQ, but so be it.
Over the last 30 years I've watched well-funded lobby groups essentially take over the entire political process. Since these groups are generally better funded when connected to commercial interests, the political process has once again become beholden to big industrial concerns (it was even more so 100 years ago). It's not that lobby groups are bad, pre se, its that they are, by definition, lopsided; they present a single view of the world that may or may no be countered by the "other side" of the issue. As elections become more and more expensive, this process has accelerated to its own quasi-democratic existence.
Obama managed to use Dean's model to rally the individual for his funding. He's still beholden to large groups, but so much less so than any presidential candidate over the last decade or so. This is a wonderful opportunity to mute down the influence of lobby groups, because he won't be committing political suicide by doing so.
And no-one's talking about it. It's completely off the radar.
Maury
how can we be free while subjected to Palin's version of Genesis?
Because, as you quoted, it is freedom of religion, not freedom from religion.
Neither Palin nor McCain has ever expressed a desire to force either you or your children to follow their religious choices.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Compared with socialist-leaning political types we see in Europe, ...
You have some curious notions, I think. A bit like saying that the Archbishop of Canterbury leans towards Satanism because he is not as far to the extreme right as the average American Creationist. And the funny things is, quite a lot of Americans I know seem to agree with a lot of Socialist ideas, as long as it isn't called Socialism. As far as I can see, you Americans are distributed politically exactly like people in Europe, only you call it something different, because you have grown up fearing the words "socialism" and "communism".
I don't think European scepticism about McCain has as much to do with him as with Sarah Palin; she may have put the "hot in hot", as I heard recently, but she's also put the "alas" into "Alaska". You are probably right - it doesn't matter much whether it is one or the other; except for the threat of Palin getting into power. Because to a great extent, the situation in the world is going to dictate which decisions the next president will make, if he has any common sense. McCain has, Obama has, Biden has, but I am not sure what Sarah Palin has.
I don't know what it is with you guys about "small government"; I mean, you do want public roads, education for all as well as judicial system, police and military, don't you? I doubt that many would prefer all those things to be privatised. And you cling to your guns like a drug addict to his next fix; it isn't even as if people who wanted to own a gun wouldn't be able to. I mean, if I want to own a gun in UK, I can do so legally; it is just not something you can buy in the local car boot sale.