Follow up to the Plan-B fiasco

    It looks like were going over the cliff unless people start working together on this.  The fact that Boehner was unable to get the votes necessary to get his Plan-B through the House means that his ability to negotiate with Obama is seriously hampered.  How can he and Obama come up with a fix if the Speaker of the House can't rally his own party?  So the end run around the President has really blown up in Boehner's face.  The freshman Republicans that rode the Tea Party wave into office have pushed the party to the right, and it seems like they might not play ball with the party establishment.  Is this going to be a the new dynamic in the House?  I'm not sure if moving further to the right is the best way to return the Republican Party to power. 

Plan B - a great name for a flawed budget plan

So the House Speaker John A. Boehner, wasted a bunch of time and political capital on a "Plan B." It was a desperate attempt to make an end run around the President. It is clear that this plan was dead on arrival, which makes its name too appropriate.
I think Boehner is trying to salvage a situation that places him and Congressional Republicans in a sticky situation. I still don't expect the President to budge on letting the Bush era tax cuts expire. Which leaves the Republicans a choice, cave in or go over the cliff. Or you could try and paint the President as the bad guy by trying to get a different plan through congress, and reacting when the plan is killed. Boehner could then try and reframe the debate saying that they had a good plan and that it was Obama's fault we went over the cliff. Oh wait, Plan B was stopped before it was even conceived!

Media coverage of the Sandy Hook Shooting

    I'm torn over the media coverage of the Sandy Hook killings.  I think the national dialogue concerning the American gun culture and gun control is good.  I think we, as a nation, need to figure out whether or not we will regulate guns better or resign ourselves to random killings.  Unfortunately, many people will value the Constitution's protection of gun ownership over the lives of children.  We should ask these people if they would trade their own children's lives for the Second Amendment.  I wouldn't.  We need a Constitutional Amendment to limit guns in America.  Without an amendment, any affective gun regulation is in danger of being ruled unconstitutional.  I think that people don't need anything more than a bolt action hunting rifle (single, hand fed) and/or a shotgun.  Assault rifles and handguns are not really necessary.
    The part about the media coverage that I don't like is the interview of the children, the pictures of the despairing families, and the focus on how many times each child was shot.  America doesn't really need to know every gruesome detail.  It is pure sensationalism meant to get ratings and profit.
    I think if America is unwilling to give up its guns we need to start better protecting schools.  Officers, controlled access and metal detectors to start with.

The Fiscal Cliff

    Well, it looks like high stakes politics are here to stay.  Obama doesn't appear to be willing to compromise on the issues of tax hikes on the wealthy.  So there are two options, either we go off the cliff or we don't.  I don't think that Democrats or the Republicans want to go off the cliff.  The question is who turns first in this game of economic chicken? Coming off the election victory, I don't think Obama will swerve first, that leaves the Republicans to come to the table with a viable alternative, because I don't think they'll cave in to the President's plan.  The Republicans could also be planning to run the country off the cliff Thelma and Louise style in the hopes that Obama is left holding the political and economic bag.  Fortunately I think only Fox news would see it that way.  Moreover, if I remember correctly the Republicans tried the same thing before with governmental shut downs and it didn't work.  They need to get it through their heads that the trickle down economic plan is a myth and America doesn't buy it anymore.  Tax cuts for the wealthy grows off shore bank accounts not jobs.

Mahmoud Abbas or Hamas?

    The US and Israel made a huge mistake voting against the Palestinian's bid for Observer State status in the UN.  Fist of all it was the president of the PLO/PNA/Fatah Mahmoud Abbas that was at the UN, not the leader of Hamas, Ismail Haniyah.  It was the PLO/PNA/Fatah that the US and Israel have been working with for decades to find a solution to Israeli/Palestinian conflict, not Hamas whom we've considered a terrorist group.  I think everybody but Hamas was disappointed when they won the 2006 Palestinian elections effectively splitting the Gaza Palestinians from the West Bank Palestinians.
    If the US and Israel would have been smart, they would have sided with Abbas in the UN.  Since the observer status is largely ceremonial, we could have delegitimize Hamas by reaffirming Abbas as the man who can negotiate with the world.  Moreover we could bought some free good will with the Palestinian people.  What did we do instead?  We voted no, pushing the Palestinians further away from us, giving Hamas more legitimacy and then Israel capped the nightmare response off by approving more settlements.  Way to go guys.  If it wasn't clear before, which it has been to the Palestinians, the current administrations in the US and Israel are not really serious about effectively addressing the issue.
    Disclaimer: I'm not against the state of Israel, I think they should exist.  Push comes to shove I would side with Israel.  But you have to agree that the Palestinians have been subjected to some nasty treatment over the years. 

Education Part II

    So as I discussed earlier, America will never really tackle the home/student side of the teacher/student equation.  Our American ideology, based on individual rights, our economic system based on maintaining a large population of working poor and a culture that values entertainment over education ensures that the educational system can only really exist within the walls of the school.  Families have to value education in order for students to value education.  Families have to provide a stable environment for student to exceed.
    Its no mystery why parents of "A" students overwhelmingly show up for student conferences, while the parents of "F" are like ghosts, even their phones don't work.  Its no mystery why after spending 20 minutes looking at district test scores you'll find that high achieving schools are in the middle class neighborhoods and lower achieving schools are in low income neighborhoods.  Are those schools underfunded?  Not where I live, these schools get tons of federal funding.  Are the teachers bad?  No, not where I live.  I theorize that if you could exchange the people,  or transport the school, things would not change.  So are lower income kids dumber?  No, not where I live.  There are very smart kids who have distinct, and learned, anti-intellectual beliefs.  Their parents either don't value education or are not around.   More and more their entertainment instills their values, how many rappers value education over women, guns and drugs?  How often is education valued over physical power or attractiveness on TV?  How are smart people portrayed in our country?
    So we can't go into everybody's home, we cannot raise peoples children.  We cannot tell people what to believe.  So in order to do "something" our society hammers on teachers.   This will never produce the results we want.  Part of the political answer is to institute mandatory testing.  Not surprisingly, many of the deadlines race ahead into the future and many states, including Washington, have applied for wavers.  I believe that if mandatory testing was actually, and honestly, implemented our society would quickly realize that there is a huge socioeconomic problem.  Schools in low-income areas would struggle and society would question, why are these teacher failing our students.  They would never wonder why all the "bad" teachers magically ended up in the low income areas.  Or ever realize, maybe their not really bad at all.

Education

    The longer one spends in education the more new programs, state and nation wide initiatives, new curriculum, and new strategies you experience.  Moreover, each year teachers and prospective teachers have to take more classes and tests and evaluations to obtain and maintain their certification.  Yet, even after all of this effort society at large is still generally dissatisfied with the state of education.  You can hear and read reports about how America no longer leads the world in the education of its citizens.  The response to this state is the continual tweaking of the educational model in the hopes of finding the answer.  In reality, the root aim of these efforts is to increase the efficiency of the educator and the educational system.  Better teachers and better schools equal better students, it makes perfect sense right?  But it doesn't.  Even with the most scientifically awesome curriculum and several massive buckets of funding I believe that the gains would  ultimately be unsatisfactory.  However, we are assured that the new system will punch through the ceiling of student achievement.
    The problem is that a system can only become so efficient before the return in performance per dollar increase in funding would become minimal.  It would not be worth the expenditure.  The law of diminishing returns.  This though is not really a problem because education has never received tons of funding to begin with when compared to other government spending programs.  Yet, the politics of education demands that "something" is done so teachers have to continually prove and refine their proficiency or lose their job.  However, teacher proficiency suffers from the same law of diminishing returns.  No matter what we do we will never create the army of super teachers that can have an entire class of hard luck cases and petty criminals reading at grade level while paying wrapped attention, hanging on every word, running to class in order to start learning as soon as possible.  "But wait," you say, "I've seen _________ movie and read _________book where Mr/Mrs _________reaches those hard luck cases in the inner city, I cried, and we can all be teachers like that."  Bullshit.  These individual cases are the exceptions and not the rules.  It is a fallacy to believe these individual cases can ever become the norm.
    So the problem is that the politics of education works only one side of the teacher/student equation, the teacher side.  They work it and work it and wonder why the miracle never occurs.  Lets look at two schools (names removed to CYA).  School A is a school made up of mostly white middle class children who have no problem passing all state tests.  Using the logic of our system School A must have the best teachers.  Conversely, School B, made up of mostly poor Hispanic students, struggles to get their graduation rate over 50%.  Using our logic their teachers must be vastly inferior to the teachers at School A.  I think we all know what the real problem is.  It is the side of the equation that America is afraid to tackle, the place they dare not look.