The Road to Hell..

I really don't see what freakin problem is here. Seems to me Obama has made it clear that he wants to offer more opportunities to serve ones country, alternatives to joining the military. He will accordingly place put incentives in place. You serve, you get tuition credits for example. I thought republicans liked incentives, ECON101.

The view point expressed in the powerline link and by pettyfog is essentially consistent with the Repub view on every issue. "Things are pretty good and even if you insist there not theres absolutely nothing we can do to improve any of it so just get over your bitchin selfs. Gun's, eh shit happens people die, besides the more armed we are as a society the safer we are so theres no point in doing anything about and if you think other wise your a nut. War with Iran, its inevitable folks and don't even try negotiating, just get use to the idea. Health Care, blah blah blah all you do is complain we have the best health care system in the world and don't dare question that, just get over it, nothing can be done and anyone who says otherwise is a closet Marxist and don't you forget that. Education, well what do you expect outta of a bunch of libera morally corrupt institutions. And now on Community Service, everyone who's interested in community service is already doing it so there is absolutely no point in encouraging it further and any attempt at doing so is a front for a Marxists conspiracy and besides America's youth are STUPID and morally corrupt don't you know, the 50's now those were the days!

 

It's ridiculous to suggest Republicans are against encouraging public service (didnt dems have a field day making fun of Bush Sr's 1,000 points of light). What I imagine they are against is making schools responsible for people doing community service and making a school's federal assistance dependent upon having a department to handle this endeavour. Yes, let's just add another another thing that should be the responsibililty of parents to the list that we expect the schools to accomplish.

Our schools at the moment need to refocus on educating. Obama needs to lead and inspire people to serve not require it. And I think he is capable of that, why cheapen and risk loosing his inspirational leverage by making it a school program.

And Don please tell me how every child in this country doesnt have at least "a chance" to attend college. Plenty of people with no money go to college. I interview students applying to my alma mater and I have interviewed poor innercity students from single family homes. Many of these students have been in programs (that are often worthless based on what I see) to keep them on the college track since 5th or 6th grade. There is something called a bridge application that allows these students to apply to all of the best schools via one free application. Never mind that they cant even say the names of the particular schools they want to get into. Most of these kids are totally unprepared for what lies ahead of them in a top university so many universities have special programs for the inner city kids to acclimate them and bring them up to speed. How is this not giving all kids a chance. It seems to me we go beyond giving kids a chance to attend college.

Spencer, no one has said anything about kids today being morally corrupt. However, there are plenty, including Obama, who think they arent being educated as well as they used to be. I certainly feel that my childrens curriculum is lacking compared to what I had and it all stems from a desire to make kids like and enjoy school and learning. Once again, a nice intention, but executed poorly and with the misguided notion that you can actually succeed in making every child like school. The sad result is that important aspects of education are being missed.

 

Ah, Mo.... he knows damn well that I'm talking about schools being used for social engineering rather than providing opportunity and seeding for individual growth.

I bet he prefers soil grown over hot-house tomatoes, though, dont you?

Here's what's coming:
Toddlers may be racist
It's never too early to nip that individual expression and preferences in the bud.

Seriously, though, one of the problems seen here is that the social-activists having failed with the previous generation, they will try to make up for it by even more force feeding of the young. Obviously those parents are incapable of guiding their kids in the right and proper manner.

Don.. was "No Child Left Behind' a mandate or not? You cant say one is and the other isnt.
It seems to me that Dubya's idea, dont know about Teddy's, was simply that a knowledge progression testing program be used.
I dont recall it being said that now schools had to teach a new curriculum, targeted on the test.
Yet the complaint was that schools now had less time to teach what they already were because of the need to teach to test success.

 

I am just surprised how many of you claim to have gone to college, and still cannot spell nor use basic grammatical structure.

:3d tongue:

 

FFC, I think you just made the point that college doesn't necessarily make you smarter. Being an accounting student, I struggled through my required Lit courses and got out. Basic sentence structure, grammar, spelling should all be tought well before college. If you're lucky, like me, you get through it and then when you get to college, you never have to deal with it again.

 

I certainly never said college made anyone smarter, dtwondough-nut.

Reading comprehension is also a fairly decent skill to have.

 

are you throwing nut on the end calling me a nut, or just a doughnut. I think either one fits. Reading Comprehension and writing are two different things, right? Like i said, getting through english was tough. I'm from the South and I like Math. I was at a disadvantage to begin with.

 

mmmmmmmmm, dooooooooughnuts........

 

Those links are just sad.

Our public schools are now providing free lunch and free breakfast to students even though plenty are from families capable of providing these meals. During the week of state profeciency testing, they gave every child a free breakfast because I guess they felt they just couldnt trust that even parents with means would feed their children.

Thankfully, this is what Obama says about school and parenting

Sorry Spencer but even your man Obama thinks there is a lot more to parenting than baking cookies and not feeding your children processed food.

And I know you guys didnt like the article I posted about Obama, but this is one of the reasons why I liked it. Obama can say things like this and possibly have an impact. If McCain says the same thing it will just be some old white man who doesnt know what its like to be poor or a minority.

 

I'll pay higher taxes if it were to go towards education, i.e., higher teacher pay, better buildings, etc.

... and I agree with Mo on the impact Obama could have. He'll be able stomp on the worst parts of the left to possibly get some real 'change' accomplished. He's already calling out his own supporters for their personal failures (like disparaging MoveOn.org for questioning Gen. Petraeus' patriotism and basic humanity).

 

As it pertains to government, it's often not so much the amount of money but the manner in which said money is used.

Here in TX (in the last 5 yrs), we have more funding designated for education (per capita) than most states (ranking around 13-15th for state & local funding). However, we finish around 36th in graduation rate and in the bottom five for SAT and ACT results over the same period.

 

I think that if we could be sure that higher taxes would lead to better schools and better education then we would all be happy to pay. However, I agree with FulhamAg that reality has shown us this is often not the case. I think there is a misconception that schools with good results get those results by spending more money. Just because a wealthy school district gets good results, you cant conclude that it's because of their spending per student. You need a cause and effect. I would bet that well performing school districts are mostly the result of parenting, expectations, and peers rather than the amount of money spent. Read this

By the way, Shaker Heights is the district where my kids go to school so we experience this first hand and this is not an exaggeration.

 

That's because Texas also has a ton of immigrants from countries that don't speak or write in English. Texas has it's issues with education (like less affluent rural schools), but many of its Independent School Districts are models in mass education. Texas' state university systems are also probably the best in country, along with the California and New York systems.

Money can't solve everything of course, but the money should definitely be there so those who want to take advantage of it can. If you don't fund it properly, the less well-off will definitely get the short-end of the stick.

 

No argument that we have unique challenges that many states don't have (or have to a lesser degree). Since you mentioned it, I looked up the numbers for CA, AZ and NM since they share similar challenges/demographics. Comparing graduation rates to those 3 states, we do outperform all 3, however on SAT/ACT testing, we're dead last.

I don't have an education background, so I'm not familiar with the ins and outs of this issue. But looking at our ROI, I'd like to see less disparity before opening the checkbook further.

 

I do think paying teachers well makes a difference. Our school district pays teachers very well (>$70,000 avg salary) and I think it makes a big difference because we can attract the best teachers in the area. However, if you suddenly paid all teachers that much, it probably wouldnt work. The best teachers would just go to the nicest schools. So schools either need to pay based on performance or we need to find a lot of really good teachers willing to go into poor performing schools (of course it would still make very little difference)

 

Mo, just curious, if attracting better teachers with the salary you listed doesn't improve the academic records, what do you think they should do?

 

SAT/ACT scores also aren't the end all, be all in figuring out who is educated and who is not. Lots of dummies matriculate into Rice, Harvard, and MIT. Texas A&M has its fair share of dummies as well.