An insider's view on education

Let's face it, education is doing a fast and furious downward spiral. I have to admit that Obama is failing me in this arena, though I'd like to get his ear and let him know all of the consequences of the policies he's putting through. Here's the simplified version of Bush's and Obama's policies and the effects they have on the kids:

No Child Left Behind turned into a few things... No Child Left Untested... All Children Are Exactly The Same And Should Have Exactly The Same Education. Any way you looked at it, this policy left millions of children behind. Schools slid into "SURR" (school under registration review) status faster than they could be helped. Thousands of children were flung into the mainstream classes, both from classes tailored to children with special needs and from AP and excellerated classes.

Under the new administration, teachers are the enemy. Teachers are incompetant. If a school is failing, they'll give the district millions of dollars to fire everyone and start over! Starting over means they are allowed to rehire half the staff! There are four models under this administration that a district can follow when a school is designatted PLA (persistantly low achieving... as opposed to SURR under the previous administration): 1) Closure - exactly what it sounds like. Everyone in the building goes somewhere else. All students are supposed to be redistributed to schools that are NOT designated PLA schools. 2) Restart - close the school and reopen it under a charter or educational management organization. 3) Transformation - get rid of the principal and provide the staff with the training necessary to succeed... oh yeah, and "reward" teachers who students perform well. 4) Turnaround - fire the principal and staff (50% of which can be rehired), "reward" "good" teachers, provide professional development to promote success.

Notice how neither of these administrations really look at FIXING poor performing schools. Being an educator, I see the all the wonderful and horrible things that happen. For example, districts who take the top performing 30% of students and places them in a few "special" schools and then takes all of the students with special needs and packs them into other "special" schools... I thought that was called segregation? If that's too strong of a word, I'm sorry. But think about how a school is going to succeed when they more than 50% of their students have special needs?

Today, all children in New York State are espected to get a Regent's diploma. In order to get this diploma, students have to pass five Regent's exams. Students with identified with special needs have special exams, but they can only take them once they have failed the Regent's. To combat this, the grading of the Regent's exams has gotten easier and easier. On the English Regent's exam, students only have to get 60% of the multiple choice questions correct and get a 6 out of 10 on the writing. The History Regents' are graded much like the English, but if they get a 6 out of 10 on the essays, they only need 32 out of 62 multiple choice! Better yet, to pass the Biology Regent's, a student only has to get 35 out of 85 points...that's 41%! The Algebra Regent's is slightly more dismal... 30 out of 87 points, which is only 34%!

What are the solutions? I'm not going to repeat what has already been written by Arthur Scott (http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial-page/viewpoints/article371710.ece) in the Buffalo News on Sunday. Read his beautiful article and think about over the next few weeks the impact that poor schools will have on the future of this country.

Lewis Black on Glenn Beck

Check out this video from The Daily Show:



I have to say that Glenn Beck is one of my least favorite people in the country. He is the most asinine RETARD I have ever heard speak. It kills me when I talk to people who WORSHIP him. I want to scream in their face "GROW A BRAIN!"

Musings from Mexico

This isn't a strictly political blog post, though the inspiration for it came from a conversation with a taxi driver in Zihuatanejo, Mexico about a recent election. Our taxi driver was a very nice gentleman somewhere in his late forties or early fifties, though it has always been hard for me to put an age to people from other countries. My husband asked him if there was an election coming up, as there were banners up all over the place. The driver informed us that the election had past and that the man with the yellow signs won. When my husband asked him if that was a good thing, his responde was: "Who knows! He made so many promises, like they all do. But no one ever follows through with them."

I think these sentiments could be uttered in just about any country in the whole world. Politicians are politicians. Everyone who goes into politics has an agenda, whether or not they are honest about it. "Civilians" who go into politics generally aren't too much different then the politicians. In general, I worry about them as much as the "professionals" because I wonder if they are power hungry or if they really know what they are doing. At least the politicians generally have some idea about the job ahead.

I am an optimist, and I guess I don't like to think that even the wildest promises are made knowing that they cannot be kept. I like to think that the people making the promises are just ignorant or what they will be capable of doing once in office. Ignorance isn't too much better than blatant lying, but at least it's not intentional.

The point of this post (as I said at the beginning) isn't political. Politics are just one thing that bond us as humans. Societies face many of the same problems, and many problems are handled in the same ways. Are there differences? Sure, but I think at it's core, humanity is humanity. To say that any one race is different or superior or lazy or anything out of the ordinary (because we are all equally out of the ordinary), is ridiculous and ignorant and politics is just one more proof of that.

And by the way, if you are ever looking for a beautiful, warm, sunny destination where you can relax and just enjoy a vacation, Zihuatanejo is the most beautiful place I have ever been (yes, I think it beats out Broome, Australia, the previous holder of this distiction). It's not the cheapest place, but it is stunning and the people are so friendly and it is just a great environment! We'll definitely be coming back!

Christopher Lee

What is it about men in positions of power that makes them think they are invincible? Christopher Lee is just the latest of a long line of men who have been caught with their proverbial pants down. Does the power go to their head? Or more appropriately, their penis?

If you haven't heard about Christopher Lee, yet, OPEN A NEWSPAPER! Turn on the news! He's all over it! Apparantly, he went into the "women seeking men" section of Craigslist and started exchanging emails with a women. In these emails, he describes himself as a 39-year-old lobbying and a "fit and classy guy". When pointedly asked if he was divorced, he said yes. He even had the nerve to say that the last woman he dated wasn't "as advertised"! Did he think this woman was too stupid to find him out? After doing a quick google search of his name, she discovered that he was in fact 46, A CONGRESSMAN and MARRIED! DOH! And check out the pic he sent her:

Seriously?! THAT'S the kind of pic you send to extra-marrital lady friends?! Nice muscles, pal! And then a second later he let out his breath that he had been holding and his whole body dropped five inches!

So then TWO HOURS after it hits the news, what does he do? RESIGNS! Oh no, he's not guilty! Not at all! It was all a lie! Someone hacked his email! HAHAHAHAHAHA! What a joke! My question is: what is out there right now that makes this picture and whole story look like child's play? Because seriously? You wouldn't resign if this was all. This is a pretty pathetic story compared to Spitzer's a few years back! And it took him TWO DAYS to resign! And he was sleeping with prostitutes! $1000/hour prostitutes! Lee just sent a lame picture to some woman and he resigns after two hours!

*head shake*

Wow.

The next few weeks should be interesting...

5 reasons why I am proud to be an American

I realize that it has been a long time since my last post... well over a year, but I am feeling particularly patriotic today and I am hoping to post a lot more this summer. Being Independence Day, I thought I would share some of the things that I love about this wonderful country we live in. These are the top five reasons why I am proud to be an America:

1. Universal Health Care. Criticize it all you want; it's not a perfect policy, but what is? Now all Americans have access to affordable health care. That is the bottom line. In a country that is supposed to be best and most powerful country in the world, it is ridiculous for people to be without health care and to be dying of diseases that insurance wouldn't cover because they were deemed "pre-existing". Universal Health Care is common sense. Yes, there are kinks to be worked out, but it is new, so we have to give it time. Hopefully we'll learn from other countries' pitfalls and in the future, be able to teach them a thing or two about it.

2. Diversity. While two-thirds of the US still consists on non-Hispanic Caucasian Americans, our beautiful country is becoming more and more diverse every year. For a country that was founded on freedom and diversity, this should be no surprise. We are welcoming more and more people into our borders who are facing religious and/or ethnic persecution in their own country, students and scholars to study and teach in our universities, experts to work in our premier industries as well as the uneducated, who do jobs that many Americans refuse to do because we are "too good" to do them. Is immigration a issue that needs to be handled? Absolutely. But isn't it incredible that our children will grow up knowing so much more than we did about so many different cultures?

3. Freedom of religion. I would like to think that when the country was founded, if Muslims (or Buddhists or whoever) were being persecuted, our forefathers would have welcomed them and made them part of this country. Our country was founded on religious FREEDOM. Here are the words from the Bill of Rights:

"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;"

No where in that statement does it say "Christianity". Christianity may be the most prominent set of beliefs in the US, but it is not the US official religion and I celebrate MY right to choose what I believe in.

4. Freedom of speech. I have a big mouth. Ask any of my friends, coworkers, family, in-laws, etc. I talk a lot and I am not shy about giving my opinion or telling people they are idiots. This being said, I enjoy my right to criticize the government, the president and whoever else I choose to. I enjoy reading newspapers and books and magazines, many of which would not be as interesting if the government had to "approve" them. (Let's face it, would The Artvoice get government approval if it came to that?!) We can say what we want, write what we want. Does that lead to a lot of people saying and writing stupid, idiotic things? Sure. And we should be careful of our words and teach our children to be careful of thier words, because in today's world, words can get you into trouble. But it's nice to know that if I want to call the president a thumbsucking lilly-lizard moron, I can with relative impunity!

5. "The pursuit of happiness". I highly doubt that this is a right given in any other country (please correct me if I'm wrong). Only in American is it your Constitution-granted-right to do what makes you happy. So if you want to make your living taking care of bees or painting houses or building windmills, that's your right. If you enoy hunting or skydiving or scrapbooking, that's your right. If you stay married for eighty years and have eight children, twenty-five grandchildren and fifty great-grandchildren, or get married and divorced ten times over and have 3 kids with 3 different partners, that's your right, too. We have the right to do what makes us happy and not worry about if it makes others happy. Maybe we get a little carried away with it sometimes, but we have every right to get carried away if that makes us happy! ;)

Happy 4th of July everyone!!!!!!!

FREEDOM of Religion

I consider myself fairly religious. I also consider myself Christian. Do I think that Christianity is the only "right" religion? The God that I believe in would not discrimanate people based on how they worship him... How would he handle non-believers? I'm not sure, but I do know one thing - IT IS NOT MY JOB TO CONDEMN THEM! And neither is it any person's job who is walking on our beautiful planet today!

I am sickened by people's outrage at Obama's inclusion of non-Christian faiths and non-believers in his inaugural speech. We finally have a president who represents diverse groups of people in our country and religion is what we're screaming about?! Religion is one facet of diversity people!

And I get REALLY pissed when people use "our Christian society" to verbally persecute other religions! Yes, our country was built (primarily) by Christians, but don't forget WHY it was built! It was built to ESCAPE RELIGIOUS PERSECUTION AND HAVE RELIGIOUS FREEDOM!!! It was built so that no one would have to suffer the same kind of tribulations because of their religious beliefs that the pilgrims suffered!

And let's not forget what we did to the Native Americans when we came here! That is something we still pay for to this day!

I work with Muslims and Hindus and non-believers everyday at my school. The religious systems of the Muslims and Hindus are just as intricate and interesting as Christianity. And I love all of my students and collegues FOR their differences! I have three Mulsim students who run in and hug me every morning. They do not care that my beliefs are different than theirs, just like I don't care about their beliefs!

So, let's be the country that we're supposed to be! People come here from ALL OVER THE WORLD, escaping atrocities that only happen in our nightmares! We can't even imagine what most of these people have been through to get here! Let's not judge someone because they wear a headscarf, a turban, a yarmulke, or anything else. Let's judge people based on their actions and their attitudes!

Obama was right to include everyone in his speech, because he was elected by everyone! Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, people from every race and creed voted for him! Should he ignore them just because they have a different belief system? ABSOLUTELY NOT! I give Obama props for making such a statement at his inauguration! YOU ROCK!!!!!

Check out this video!

Got out and VOTE!