Rare Admission From Liberal: Education Woes Not Due to Lack of Funding
By Jack Coleman | December 28, 2010 | 19:56
Only time I recall a left-winger saying this, but hey, it's a start.
Here's Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter, author of "The Promise: President Obama, Year One," talking about the economy and education on Ed Schultz's radio show yesterday with guest host Jeff Santos of WWZN 1510 AM in Boston --
ALTER: What (Obama) really needs to do is he has to outline a real vision for the country and for making us competitive again. And that is going to be a combination of traditional liberal ideas, like investment in infrastructure, and also some things that have been more associated with conservatives over the years, but that liberals I think are starting to get with the program on, like accountability in education. You know, the problem has not been that we haven't spent enough on education. The trend lines on that are straight up over the last 25 years. But we're not getting our money's worth because it's not structured in the right way, with the right sort of accountability. And the president made a great start on that in 2009, 2010 with his Race to the Top education program and you're going to hear him talking more about it in the State of the Union address.
Speaking of education, Santos might want to brush up on his Soviet history before making comments like this, as he did while interviewing Alter --
SANTOS: I wanted to tell you, though, that I think a lot of progressives and liberals that we talk to, Ed and I, on this show and on my morning show, it's less about making a black eye of Boehner or McConnell. It's about, I think, leading with some force, meaning, look, we'll take the black eyes and the abuses but we're moving an agenda and this is what the agenda is and this is how different it is from the Republicans. And it's not about just tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts. It's about investing in America and it's about a five-year plan and it's about rebuilding America, and I think that that to me has to be the mantra and, you know, where they can compromise, great.
Five-year plans and new deals, wrapped in golden chains ...
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Comments
When someone like Santos
Submitted by bkeyser on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 8:34pm.
When someone like Santos advocates pressing the Progressive agenda regardless of it's obvious shortfalls, I wonder if they're simply an ideologue who's been effectively brainwashed to parrot the talking points, or if they actually believe something like our failing education system is nothing more than a fiscal issue...
In either case, I can't identify with that level of ignorance.
You gotta love 'em.
Submitted by pbthinker on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 8:39pm.
The Liberals always talk about the great things they do with everyone elses money. They've invested in America? How much money did they "invest" in the states to keep public employee union people working, while the rest of the country collected their other "investment" unemployment? They didn't invest squat, they squandered billions and achieved little, except for legislation that was going to sap more money from the private sector.
I'd peg a good deal of it on...
Submitted by jimspice on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 8:39pm.
...the anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-higher education elements at several levels of society, one of which is typified by the i'd-rather-vote-for-someone-just-like-me-rather-than-some-pointy-headed-egghead attitude.
More like they vote for the
Submitted by Dan The Man 2 on Wed, 12/29/2010 - 4:02am.
More like they vote for the ones who make sense. In 2008 the LSM poisoned the well and the people were fooled. A good reason to well educated. I voted for President Bush twice and he had an MBA from Harvard. Waht we hate is the ineffectual who says many words but means nothing ... like Obama.
25 years and millions of dollars later....
Submitted by CobraMan on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 9:00pm.
"You know, the problem has not been that we haven't spent enough on education."
25 years of investigations and hundreds of millions of dollars of government funded studies related to the "problem" and they're just NOW figuring that out? Bush had that figured out at day one!
The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States. The US Constitution
Unless you're a fetus. The US Supreme Court
Or Anwar al-Awlaki.
Are you saying that Sarah
Submitted by redfish on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 9:01pm.
@jimspice:
Are you saying that Sarah Palin type conservatives are the ones influencing the youth? Really?
Do younger people, their teachers, the movies they watch, and the music they listen to, lean conservative or liberal?
Maybe, just maybe, there's a reason that conservatives are skeptical of the elements of society that you're referring to as pro-intellectual, pro-science, pro-higher education.
One of the basic problems
Submitted by Chris Norman on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 9:12pm.
One of the basic problems that's never discussed publicly about the low quality in education is that we have a lot of kids who have parents that didn't care when they were in school and now they don't give a rat's hiney if their kids don't behave and study. They're ignorant thugs and their kids will be ignorant thugs and they drag the rest of their class down. It's been getting worse with each genration and it's going to continue. There are a lot of problems in education - bad teachers, too much influence by unions, wasted money, etc - but a good education starts at home and a good home these days is not a given.
I don't think its that the
Submitted by redfish on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 9:15pm.
I don't think its that the parents don't care, most parents prefer that their kids stay in school and behave and study.
Its that there are a lot of aspects to our culture today that make it difficult to be a good parent, and a lot of parents just aren't up to that job. In what era do you think it was easier to raise a child, in the 50s or today? (I'm not romanticizing the 50s, I'm just making a specific comparison.)
I have to disagree redfish.
Submitted by Radical1979 on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 9:23pm.
I have to disagree redfish. I know several people who teach inner city kids. Their parents don't value education, or they come from extremely disfunctional "homes", where violence, drug use, and alcohol abuse are rampant. The kids come to school with no interest in school, and the parents don't come to conferences etc.
The hispanic community, in particular a lot of people from Puerto Rico don't value education. The students miss a great deal of school for family events and trips back to Puerto Rico. The parents just don't care.
I owned three food
Submitted by Chris Norman on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 9:23pm.
I owned three food establishments for twenty years and hired countless teenagers to work there. The majority of them didn't come from a whole home. Many of them didn't have a functioning parent. Several hadn't seen their parents for a year or more and were being raised by relatives. One kid (18) had a mother who crashed on his couch. We assume that every kid has parents that act just like us - that they all work hard and try to enforce rules and raise their kids right - but that is simply not the case. Go to an inner-city school, you'll be hard pressed to find parents yearning for the simplicity of Ozzie and Harriet - they just don't care.
Well, if parents who
Submitted by redfish on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 9:45pm.
Well, if parents who are well off and do care about their children have a harder time raising a child, think about how doubly difficult it is for parents who grew up in an inner city and maybe have bad habits for themselves.
I'm not saying there aren't bad parents, I'm saying its really easy for bad parents to be bad parents today.
There's a lot of bad culture
Submitted by Chris Norman on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 10:27pm.
There's a lot of bad culture out there that glamorizes and affirms the desirability for an uneducated and thuggish lifestyle. I realized that when talking to some of my employees - the chasm between me and them was vast and deep - I didn't unstand what they admired and why they did and they didn't understand the culture I advocated.
But its parents having the
Submitted by redfish on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 11:26pm.
But its parents having the same values that are communicated to their kids in a host of other ways.
I simply think we need to build a more (intellectually and morally) mature culture. I'm not even a conservative, I'm a moderate. I don't want to go back to the 50s, but I'm not happy where we are now either.
"I don't want to go back to
Submitted by Agnostic on Wed, 12/29/2010 - 12:08pm.
"I don't want to go back to the 50s" - if this is what you think is a conservative goal then you can thank liberal media and liberal teachers. Respecting what works does not mean you want to turn back time.
And not everything worked in
Submitted by redfish on Wed, 12/29/2010 - 10:57pm.
And not everything worked in the 50s. I think there were some positive results out of all of the cultural revolutions of the 60s and 70s, but in every case, they went too far. In some cases, conservatives refuse to acknowledge that there were any positive results at all. We'd have to discuss issue by issue.
When I look around at the
Submitted by Chris Norman on Thu, 12/30/2010 - 1:30am.
When I look around at the wreckage that surrounds us, I'm not in the mood for thanking the cultural revolutions of the 60s and 70s for anything. Yes, the civil rights acts were noble and necessary, but they were twisted into the basis for all sorts of government programs that destroyed so much. Yes, women have every right to work outside the house for a fair wage. Yet, I'm having a very difficult time thinking of just exactly what positive things the anti-war, drug, and sexual revolutions provided.
Chris add to the fact that
Submitted by Radical1979 on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 9:25pm.
Chris add to the fact that teachers have no power to discipline students, the b.s. that is added to the curriculum (diversity and sensitvity education), and the good teachers burn out and leave for a career in which they can accomplish something.
Exactly. I knew a young 7th
Submitted by Chris Norman on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 9:43pm.
Exactly. I knew a young 7th grade teacher at a public school in North Carolina who was planning on quitting. She confided that she was burned out by having to re-teach the English education her students were supposed to already have had in grammar school. They had graduated 6th grade but were totally unprepared for the planned 7th grade level. She said most of the year was taken up by going over old ground. She also told me she had gotten in trouble with the administration for "rocking the boat" when she told some parents their kids were failing (that is, the ones that came to parent/teacher conferences - she said many of them were no-shows). She was accused by the parents of everything up to, and including, "racism". She had only been teaching for five years, but was already cynical and burned out as if she had spent a lifetime of futility. Sad.
Yea all of that is what I'm
Submitted by redfish on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 9:45pm.
Yea all of that is what I'm talking about when I'm referring to our culture. Its not just things on tv and in music, but also the types of values that are in educational system, the types of values that parents have. Its the same thing.
The breakup of the nuclear
Submitted by Dan The Man 2 on Wed, 12/29/2010 - 4:06am.
The breakup of the nuclear family. When kids have to rely on themselves for guidance and support then chaos occurs. The breakup of the family has been happening for the last 70 years.
Virtually no Infrastructure project
Submitted by Deskpilot on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 10:59pm.
has ever come close to being on time and on budget. The only one that comes to mind is an elevated ramp structure in the LA area where the state laid a deadline and a cost cap, and very strangely, an INCENTIVE to get it done early in order fot the contractor to earn a CASH bonus. The contrator opted for the bonus and came in under time and under budget. It was a good year for their balance sheet.
if more contracts for infastructure were written this way, I wouldn't have too much to bitch about. But with Obama's passionate affair with the Unions, I can't help be EXTREMELY skeptical of ANYTHING construc and government related.
What?
Submitted by Junk Science Skeptic on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 11:07pm.
Do you actually mean to tell me that incentives matter?
Hell, next you'll be trying to tell me that gravity exists.
According to
Submitted by Deskpilot on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 11:37pm.
Sir Isaac Newton and Chicken Little, it's a lot more provable and constant than global warming or government stimulus being a positive thing.
Earth to Jonathan Alter:
Submitted by djwolf12 on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 10:59pm.
It's time to drop the promotion of your book on Year 1 or Obama's presidency; we are heading into year 3. Now is a good time to start thinking of your book title when this blundering fool gets tossed out of the White House onto his ass in year 4. Also, your publication "Newsweek" sucks, and the only people that believe you watch M.S.S.R. (MSNBC).
Which is it?
Submitted by Junk Science Skeptic on Tue, 12/28/2010 - 11:03pm.
Alter: "And the president made a great start on that in 2009, 2010 with his Race to the Top education program"
And people don't understand why I could never be a liberal. My friggin' head would explode from all of the cognitive dissonance.
On one side of the coin, liberals have decided that it's ok for the federal government to "help a limited number" of the states with extra money for education in Race to the Top (RTT), while on the other side of the coin, the liberals shut down the wildly successful DC charter schools program because it would only "help a limited number" of DC students, those who had the opportunity to attend the charter school(s).
Which is it? Should everybody have an equally bad education, or is it ok to start out by helping a limited portion of students, and then duplicate what works?
On one side, the liberals considered the Bush era effort to set a common standards and performance measurement for school effectiveness in the form of No Child Left Behind, as if it would be the death of education (remember "teaching to the test"), but on the other side, 70 out of a possible 500 points in the RTT program are for employing common standards and performance measurement.
Which is it? Are common standards and performance measurement good or bad?
On one side, liberals fight charter schools anywhere and everywhere, but on the other side, 40 points in the RTT program are for ensuring successful conditions for charter (and othe innovative) schools.
Which is it? Are charter schools good or bad?
On one side, liberals claim to be the party of choice, especially if you make their preferred choice, but on the other side, liberals are dead set against school choice.
Which is it? Is choice good or bad?
I could go on, but by now any thinking person gets the idea.