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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (82678)	9/7/2008 12:04:44 PM
From: Sam	Respond to of 541736

What I found was a very long list of things for which the federal government would spend lots of money. Mom, apple pie, and the kitchen sink. Which of those things would get the limited amount of money available and whether the money would do any good remains to be seen. Advocating providing money, particularly unavailable money, is a poor excuse for a plan. Effective as a campaign tool, but questionable as to results. As you say, the devil is in the details. Everything depends on balance, and on priorities. As I said in my prior post to you, you want a detailed plan. A detailed plan at this point is a nonstarter. For anyone. No candidate puts out a detailed plan at this point, unless it is lassez faire, which essentially says the same thing I said above (a detailed plan is impossible) but substitutes it for policy. Everything will get negotiated, both in Congress and in state legislatures and at the local level in school boards and among pricipals. The truth is that local communities should be the locus of responsibility for education. The problem is that when that happens, prejudice (I'm talking generically here, not specifically "racial" or "gender" prejudice) can frequently take over. There must be guidelines and there must be accountability, which is where the genius that underlies federalism takes over. The situations are all different. The Harlem Children's Zone, which as you probably recall Obama and I think is a wonderful model, won't work in every or possibly even in most situations. There have to be dozens of "models," which have to be tailored to individual community circumstances and realities. That is what makes the issue of education so tricky and so frustrating and what makes it so difficult to address with "a plan" and not simply "generalities." What is appropriate in Harlem isn't appropriate in rural Ohio or in suburban VA or in small town Oregon. It seems to me that if we want to make top tier science a priority that we would put the money into supporting the honors students, the universities, and the research programs, not, as Obama suggested, take our best and brightest science students and turn them into teachers of those left behind. I'm not advocating either making that a priority or implementing that approach, just saying... As I said in a previous post, I think that more money must be given to gifted students, who have, contrary to the usual perception that "they are smart enough to take care of themselves," have special needs of their own. But that isn't a "plan," that is one small part of a plan.