While this isn’t usually a political blog, I felt a strong need to discuss my political view out of frustration as an American and because it’s really feasible that my generation is going to have to shoulder a lot of the world’s problems many, many years from now. Let’s just say that Atlas and many Americans have something in common: A huge, heavy, impossible burden to shoulder, or a multiple trillion dollar debt.
Ironically, that’s why we –those who 18 and over and who skew towards being technographically more active on the Internet–wanted Obama in the White House in the first place.
Everybody can admire Obama’s presidential campaign, which was lauded as one of the best social media campaigns in history. His team was good at two things: raising funds and getting us excited about his campaign promises. He said Change is Possible, and yet his State of the Union speech was a re-run of last year’s spectacle.
We’ve hired Hamlet as president,. He thinks too much, claims action, and is amazing at monologues, and potentially has too many false advisors. Basically, he can’t seem to get a cohesive policy together to cure us of this nagging and dangerous malady that is our government.
We should have hired a MD instead of a JD. Preferably someone who understands Chinese medicine methodology, or in other words, somebody who knows how to treat root causes, not prescribe medications for all the symptoms of a disease.
Case in point: the budget and $50 million is set to “change education policy,” which means
government spending to push further the already over-used public services lever. The objective is to ensure that we will have a long term effective working class. In theory, it sounds fair, but the proposed method to execute lacks true substance.
It is enough to aggravate an already sore and infected budget wound even further. Government proposes to do this by creating a “carrot and stick” effect to reward schools that do better in the aggregate and pay less to schools that don’t. Great idea, Genius President. For all that flowery rhetoric, I feel like I have to go “from the beautiful pacific coast of California all the way to the end of Political Street in DC” to mentally shake the brain of the White House to do the right thing.
So let me see if I got this right. Are you proposing to reward schools in rich neighborhoods MORE money (where students already do well), and allow schools with less money to suffer? This makes me so angry–because it’s representative of a lot of Obama’s policies so far–they push money into places where it doesn’t belong because government’s aim is to placate and reach political compromise rather than to achieve real, lasting results.
I’m no expert, but at first glance, it looks to me like Obama and his Education Policy team never read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point.
They continue to treat effects instead of the root problems. If you want to focus money into education, focus on encouraging schools to invest in their teachers, encourage creativity, and offer avenues for teachers to get more training and be better teachers. People who don’t belong as teachers will get psychologically squeezed as the field becomes professionally competitive and those unqualified people will move into other areas where they may be more suited. As a result jobs will naturally be reallocated people who really deserve it.
If we continue to push forward more standardized testing, two things will happen. One, we will continue to have the same problems in education that we have had for a very long time and many teachers may simply take their wages and do what is easy. Two, we will be teaching kids to think like standardized tests which is not at all good for the economy in the long run. Our edge in America against China is that we have innovation, a value that China is still struggling with under Communist rule.
I’m not claiming to be an expert economist or even prime to run for President, but seriously (srsly?!) ? Come on, Obama, get to the root of the many diseases that we have developed as a nation and stop treating symptoms.
