President Obama Is Looking To Extend The School Year

I don't know what to propose. This isn't my area of expertise. However, you don't have to be an expert to see that it's broken.

RideMan said:
Seems to be about par for the course for this administration: pick a perceived problem, then propose a "solution" which completely ignores in every possible way the root cause of the problem and which, if implemented, will just as likely make the perceived problem even worse.

That's hardly an MO unique to the Obama administration. Seems that's the way government works regardless of who is in charge.

There is no power/money for politicians in limited government or actually solving any problems.

Won't be any money left soon.

Going back to my initial comment...No, it isn't an MO unique to the Obama administration. But it also isn't generalized to whoever is in charge, either. Most administrations actually prefer to ignore the problem entirely, relying instead on a laser-like focus on irrelevant nonsense.

Sometimes that works, because a government that is busy doing nothing isn't screwing things up for the rest of us. Just look how well things went when they were busy impeaching President Clinton, for example. :)

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Money isn't the problem. There is little to no correlation between spending and performance. How much money does it take to teach people how to read, write, and understand math? In the old days it was done in a one room schoolhouse with one teacher for all grades. I'm not sure we're doing it any better today with all the resources we provide.

Didn't the Kansas City experiment years ago prove that pouring money into the system gets you nowhere?

I went to a school with no A/C--heck, my daughter just started in a school with no A/C. I guess I was born "on the wrong side of the tracks." My family was poor, I lived in a poor, rural area with a typical school for that type of area. But I didn't have poor parents, so I did well in school, and the American dream lives for me.

Beyond the basics--making schools safe and organized, the area around them safe, and hiring competent teachers--you need students to have the right values. That's the tough part. Good parents enforce good values in their own kids. How do you enforce these values in other kids?

Much like the discussions about ride ops....you can't just pay people better in the hopes their performance rises to meet the increased paycheck - you have to raise the expectations of performance, and pay whatever is needed to upgrade your applicant pool sufficiently. As always, IMO. ;)

Did you walk to school uphill both ways too?

The problem in the burbs in Ohio is that there still isn't enough money even for the basics. Not enough rooms, not enough teachers. Urban sprawl not only breaks the inner cities, it hurts the suburbs as well.

The rich suburbs with the palaces for schools are too poor as well? If that's the case, how will we ever raise enough money? Are the suburbs of Cleveland 3rd world compared to the suburbs of Columbus?

We spend more today than we EVER have, and the results are not getting better. We also spend far more than any other country, and get worse results than many.

Are you familiar with the Kansas City school experiment??

We do not spend too little on education in this country.

Columbus is an interesting case, because Columbus has followed an unconventional growth pattern with the result that Columbus is an enormous, well-populated, economically diverse city, and has the mix of property types that has meant that the district actually has some money even at a lower tax rate. Certain economies of scale seem to work in the Columbus city school district. For those of you not familiar, a major difference between Columbus and, say, Cleveland is that virtually all of the urban development you see in Central Ohio is actually the City of Columbus; in fact Columbus completely surrounds some of its suburbs (Bexley, Grandview) and still maintains growth corridors in all directions. Meanwhile, Cleveland is actually a comparatively small city, especially when compared to its metro area, which is almost entirely composed of perhaps hundreds of competing suburbs, each with its own government, police force, and often its own school district.

That doesn't mean that bigger is necessarily better. In fact, one of the reasons that the Southwestern City School district is having so much trouble is that the district covers such a large and such a diverse area. Grove City has a bit of an education palace, but much of the district can't afford to pay for it, and so consistently votes "Hell, NO!" when they ask for another dozen mills or so.

Meanwhile, elsewhere around the city, we see certain boom-and-bust cycles in Dublin and Hilliard, where people move in, the suburb outgrows its school district, then the taxes go up, then the growth stalls. It remains to be seen whether those districts can weather the cycle as well as, say, Bexley or Worthington, or whether they will go the way of Grove City.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Even at the local level, education is an extreme political game. The latest scandal in northeastern PA was the revelation that several school board members and administrators in districts around Wilkes-Barre had taken bribes in return for hiring teachers and other personnel.

Hardly sounds like anyone has the kids' best interests in mind. But it could provide some new material for those standardized tests. "If Ms. Jones pays 7% of her $55,000 salary and Ms. Brown pays 6% of her $65,000 salary, how long will it take Mr. Smith to pay for his new Lexus?"

I worked in the Medina district, south of Cleveland. Simply put, the district has never been able to catch up to the growth. People move in and don't want to vote for new property taxes to pay for the schools they wouldn't need if it weren't for them moving in the first place. So what happens? Trailer cities pop up around schools for classroom space, while they can't cover the operating costs of it all, leading to cuts in music, art and athletics. It's a mess.

Lankster said:
Are there any local issues that our wonderful reps in DC will stay out of?

Our system has proven to be a failure. Spending more time in a failed system is a stupid idea.

Bingo! How about Japan where kids go 7 years straight and then to college?

^^ But that's probably why people moved there in the first place, lured by low taxes. Residential development alone hardly ever provides enough tax revenue to pay for all the services it requires (schools, fire, police, road maintenance, etc.). Commercial and industrial properties pay a lot of taxes (unless they're given freebies by the municipality) and don't require intensive services. Yet most people are up in arms whenever a new business is proposed, because it will "ruin" their town.

I remember talking to a barber years ago about development in the area. He said that he was all in favor of shopping centers -- because we don't have to educate their kids.

It's really sad to see the divisions that have been created in the Southwestern school district (Columbus, Ohio).

If you are interested, here is a good read on the issue.

The important issue is the kids these days need more time to learn how to be progressive and have a crush on Obama so more time in school is change we can believe in. If the amusement park industry fails, maybe he can provide a bailout. I wonder what kind of rides you can build for a hundred billion dollars? Maybe they should get cash for clunkers...trade in your SLC for a new Intamin and get some extra carbon credits...or something like that.

You should work on your sarcasm. It's not very sharp.

Oh, you'll know when I insult you. In the meantime, I'm not kidding.

Look, Obama has made plenty of mistakes and there is a huge amount of real estate, as it were, to level criticisms against him. I'm personally unhappy with his lukewarm support of the manned space program, for example.

But when you suggest that kids are being reprogrammed to worship Obama as if he were some kind of Kim Jong-Il, well, you come off sounding like an idiot. You can't actually believe that (or if you do, you really are an idiot and are one of the worse ones in this forum).

So, giving you the benefit of the doubt, it is my sincere hope that you are attempting to engage in sarcasm. But if that's the case, it didn't work very well. Sarcasm should be a razor-sharp knife, used to pry into the truth of some oblique matter. (It's also been called "a weak man's stick" since it's much easier to use sarcasm than to craft a serious argument, but since I use it as much as the next C'Buzzer I certainly wouldn't try to tweak you on that basis.)

Assuming you were engaging in sarcasm, what was your real message? That lots of Americans love Obama? That he has given a speech to school children? That he wants to be a dictator? See, I don't really know. That's why, in giving you the honest benefit of the doubt, I say that you need to sharpen your skills in sarcasm. Because I want to believe that you have something rational to contribute to this discussion.

EDIT: the intervening post by RavenTTD was deleted.

Obama probably deleted it himself.