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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?
Tell me, how do you "grade" teachers? Why can't you simply go to your PTA meetings and your teacher in service meetings and be a responsible parent and know what your children are doing?
The reason i don't want teacher "appraisals" outside of what a school district does in and of itself is because some people would rate teachers poorly because they're not christian enough, not moral enough or not forcing "family values" enough or other non public educational focused education based issues.
Start by giving teachers livable wages, start by funding real programs that put books, science and math into students hands. Start challenging and teaching kids AT school. Get away from homework, let kids live a life after school and make school about learning.
BTW, if the middle class is doing better, so will the schools. Fix it from the bottom up, not top down.
Obama'08
In the end, I couldn't care less about the creation myths others have, even our President. After 6 Republican Presidential terms, they still haven't managed to overturn Roe.v.Wade.
On the other hand, taxes are never found unconstitutional, and rarely reduced significantly. The only way to avoid them is to never increase them.
I vote my financial self interest, and regardless of what the Obama propaganda is it has nothing to do with $250k
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
That is, frankly, because your libertarian views are stupid.
No, seriously. "Libertarianism' is a scam invented by the rich, who want the government to only do things that benefit them and no one else. (Like run a police force and court system, to keep people from stealing their shit or living on their land for free.)
They hide this by making claims about the 'original' purpose of government, which is, in fact, exactly that, to protect the rich, although they won't come out and say that.
More to the point, they then make the rather absurd claim that they should get this while paying as little taxes as possible.
While a large percentage of Americans haven't figured out the premise of the party and have a sort of grudging respect for it as the underdog, under no circumstances do they actually want to implement those policies.
Thus libertarians who actually show up and debate on their views for the general election get smashed, and that normally applies to the primaries too, although we saw a fun exception with Ron Paul doing pretty good with some viewers because the GOP has gone so spectacularly off the rails in a different way.
But if Ron Paul had show up against Obama, he would have been crushed. Probably more than McCain, even with the advantage of being able to actually present himself as separate from the Republican Party and without making such a dumb VP choice.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Hmm... As someone who's served the country to ensure you have a right to vote I have to agree. You have a right to vote, even an arguably moral reason to vote, but the electoral system is so fraught with insanity that your vote truly means little.
This does not, in my mind, absolve one of their duty to vote. I consider it my duty to vote (and at least bitch enough in the many emails that I send to my congress critters) and hope that the remainder of the citizens feel the same way. It's a false hope, let's not go there. Allow me some shards of hope.
I do discount the opinion of those who don't vote. I don't go so far as to say that they're not entitled to an opinion. I just say that I'm entitled to not listen to their opinion or to not give their opinion as much weight as I would if they'd shown themselves to be an active participant in this so-called democracy.
Voting doesn't do shit in the larger scale other than give us the illusion of having accomplished the task of making our opinion known. This is, to me, true and yet I still vote. I'm all for changing the system but until it is changed I will cast my vote.
On the idea of accomplishing something...
Voting and protesting...
Letters and marches...
Emails and lobbying...
Those haven't done much in the past few years.
A million man march wouldn't even phase Washington D.C. these days. So... I've been thinking, a dangerous act, and I have a solution but we might get arrested.
Get a million people WITH cars together. During rush hour, downtown, when they're breaking for a holiday, drive into the city from the direction you came from and drive as far as you can into it until the gridlock stops you. Get out of our vehicles and stand there or simply sit in your vehicle and hold your horn button down. Do so until we have press coverage.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
And yet, when two countries are on the brink of war, we use diplomacy to come to a mutually agreed outcome, not voting. Huh. It would be absurd to vote - what if the population of one country was twice that of the other? How come in that situation it is instantly obvious that "winner takes all" voting is unfair, while within a country it's seen as fair?
My preference is not for laws to govern millions of people, anyway. It is for localised governance at a scale that people can join in and actually have a say that makes a difference to their own community. As a country expands and a population increases, the size of each council should stay the same, but there should be more of them. So you don't have one law for the entire country - so what? Many of the problems in society are due to the fact that there is nowhere else to go - everywhere is the same. I'd like to live somewhere with sane drug and privacy laws, and I don't want to have to leave my country to do that. We need to wake people up to the fact that laws are made up, and we can change them if we want to.
3. Private schools get to choose who they admit and keep, which allows them to only teach smart, well-behaved, native English speakers with parents who care about education.
I presume you have extensive experience with private schools on which to base this analysis? Or are you just spouting something you heard elsewhere, and thought sounded good? I thought so.
The reality is that some private schools do that, but not all and not, IMO, the best ones.
The best school any of my kids went to was a private school that *specialized* in problem cases and was founded by parents who started by homeschooling their severely disabled (but brilliant) son because the public schools failed him. Unable to give him the time he needed and still hold down jobs, they decided to take in other students and start a school, using their large home plus some "portables" in the back yard.
When it became clear the public schools were failing my son, we found a way to come up with the tuition for the private school and were surprised to find that it required far less of our attention to his education than the public school had. In fact, his private school teachers tried not to assign homework, and the principal provided reports on behavior issues, but handled them herself. The school also had a large number of native Spanish-speaking children, and used this fact to help all of the English-speaking children learn Spanish (Spanish was part of their curriculum in every year, K-6).
The school's students consistently averaged in the 80th percentile on standardized tests, in spite of an overabundance of kids with major learning disabilities, so academic quality was excellent. The kids were happy -- my son LOVED that school. The key to their success was hiring excellent teachers, keeping class sizes very small (NO class larger than 10 students, and most smaller) and ignoring all of the administrative overhead found in public schools. All of the teachers took a pay cut when they left the public school system, but they were okay with that because it was a much more rewarding environment to teach in.
Oh, and the final nail in the coffin for public schools, as far as I'm concerned: The tuition for this fantastic school is 20% LESS than what the state spends every year. And tuition includes all books, paper, school supplies, TWO hot meals per day (breakfast and lunch), field trips, etc. We never paid a penny more than the $3500 tuition. The only thing the school didn't provide was bus service, but the school had extended "latch key" hours before and after class so that working parents could drop their kids off on the way to work and pick them up on the way home.
The state spends $5000 per year per student for the public schools, and that doesn't include the $500+ per year that parents are expected to come up with for meals, book fees, school supplies, field trip fees, extra-curricular activities, etc. It does include bus service, though.
If we want to improve education in this country, we need to break the monopoly held by the inefficient, bureaucratic and ineffective public schools. We need vouchers, to introduce some competition.
BTW, the school I'm talking about is only K-6, so my son moved into the public Junior High for 7th grade. We tried it for two years, but realized that the public schools were continuing to fail him, that the only education he was getting was what we (my wife, really) taught him in the evenings at home, so this year we've switched to homeschool, and he's once again getting an education.
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