Why McCain will Win

[Renwood]

Originally Posted by Professor S

Public Education - Its not as bad as people think and the core issue is broken families, not a lack of funds. We spend more now per student than at any time in history. Money can't make a kid care to learn or succeed in life.

I work in a public school system, and in a lot of ways, it is worse than people think. The federal mandates that come down on the states, and then on down to each city cause a stupid amount of red tape and wasted funds on repetitive, often duplicate programs. It isn't that there is a lack of money being injected into the system; its that its being injected ignorantly. Federal government throws out a blanket statement, and we're supposed to believe and act as if that works, without any fine-tuning for individual districts and situations.

As a for instance, we were told by the State here (who were told by Federal), that our population of special education children must not exceed 1%. There are some ideas behind this rule, but it doesn't apply to my area, because of the huge influx of military kids that are flooding in as their parents are assigned to the area; that inflates the percentage, and we've now had to go through audits and all this expensive, useless bullshit to determine that, yes, we are a special case. Its been a waste, and meanwhile, the minorities are still falling through the cracks. A department here actually made up an assessment that was okayed by the State, just to be stricken down at the federal level after an initial greenlight.

And yes, the amount of money spent per student is disgusting given what each child actually recieves.

The problem is both the broken families and the lack of money being spent to do something with them, though not for want of spending in other areas.

Fuckin' hate No Child Left Behind.

[Professor S]

Originally Posted by Jim

Fuckin' hate No Child Left Behind.

It will be interesting to see what happens after NCLB's mandate runs out, and inevitably fails. Its my opinion that NCLB was designed to fail to give the excuse to privatize national education. What do you think?

[Renwood]

It makes the main goal less about teaching and more about making the numbers look good. I think the worst thing is how it discourages any attention to programs that aren't directly tied to pushing up test scores. Gifted classes' budgets here are laughable, and Special Ed, given how fucked the weighting on grading is for the population, are being used more or less to hide the racial gaps in test scores.

Its discouraging to see how education is turned more and more into a business.

[KillerGremlin]

Obama has some easy material to work with. Bush's super low acceptance rating, the war, the causalities and the costs of the war. And then the fact that in two terms McCain will be 80......

We'll see how Obama holds up in debates, right now he has the hearts of America, and that's all that really matters. 3/4s of America don't give a damn about the politics.

I do like McCain, I've read up on him a bit and I've listened to him speak and I've warmed up to him a lot over the past month or two. So, I'm reserving my vote until I see the two duke it out in debate. I really think we need to flush out a lot of the Republicans, because even if McCain is a genuine guy there's still a lot of other not so great people.