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Originally Posted by Skerlnik
Nor have I ever heard any legitimate proposals to do so. Let's keep the anti-government fearmongering to a minimum.
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All it takes is for someone in government to propose it and then it becomes "legitimate." Given where the United States is going, don't be so stupidly naive to think it can't happen. I'm sure if you or I had suggested 20 years ago that there would be something like the Patriot Act, we would have received the same naive response that you gave here.
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True. My insinct is to see what can be done about that in the public system, rather than dismantle it. Higher standards, better review....things that our fearless leadership think is too difficult to tackle.
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That's your problem: you're willing to put your trust in government.
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Ah, the legendary slippery slope argument. The answer: nothing. It's has ALWAYS been the parents responsibility to get the kids to school, NOT to teach them, as well. That's what trained, qualified teachers are for.
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We got where we are in America (the Patriot Act, huge government bureaucracy, etc.) through the slippery slope.
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What I am going for is a situation where EVERY kid has radically improved education. The voucher and other ideas I have heard simply do not address the fact that we can't tolerate ANY school underperforming, and having parents endlessly "shopping" for K-12 education seems like it's missing the whole point, and leaves schools to try to figure out how to do it on whatever budgets they got. I'd rather they had anything they needed, MORE than, so we could get arts and music and PE back into the curriculum.
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Not that I was ever suggesting vouchers. Competition, the "shopping" for K-12 education can be a good thing.
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Now, my ideas involve really big changes like busting the unions, yearly performance reviews of teachers, more standardization, and major investments in infrastructures and facilities. I want American schoolkids to whip up on any international comparison (and I bet I would really piss a lot of comfortable people off to acheive that.)
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Your leftist buddies will never let you bust up the teachers union.
__________________
A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
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