Arne Ducan Praise

As you know I've been looking on the eduction reform that the Obama administration has been doing almost under the cover of the health care plan controversy. We all have been not blinded, but almost, purposely distracted from the reform thats actually causing quite a stir within the teachers unions.

There's no time to waste. He's been handed this portfolio and he's going to make the most of it before anybody catches on to what he's doing and mounts the opposition that in the past has always derailed major change to the status quo. Duncan turned heads when he entered the Ritz-Carlton in Washington early this month in part because he's so tall (6-foot-5), and because he is offering the kind of strong, spirited leadership that the education community doesn't often associate with Washington. He was there to make a presentation about improving student achievement to a meeting of the Strategic Management of Human Capital National Task Force (SMHC). Speaking in rapid-fire fashion and using phrases he surely could utter in his sleep, Duncan talked about our "fundamentally broken system" and the "magnitude of opportunities" that fixing it presents. He urged the assembled conferees, school officials, elected officials, and union leaders, to "move outside our comfort zone," exhorting them that for the first time in recent memory, lack of resources could not hold them back, only the lack of political will.

This is description of Arne Duncan, the secretary of eduction in the Obama administration. In my opinion this is a really positive view on him. Not that his motive is not good its just that there doesn't seem to be any press on how this man is changing our education system.

Giving Credit

Since the gallery is done I feel like I should give some people blogger credit even though they know how appreciative I am already. I'd like to give a shout out to Kyung Chyun for keeping strong through all this and actually completing her art on time, shes the best. Sydney Eaton saved my ass at the last second so I have to give her tons of thanks because she came in at the last second. I'd like to thank Anthony at Fast Frames in Lafayette for letting us have the show

I love Garfunkel and Oats, two hilarious cute girls that play music, can I ask for more?

I HAD THE ART GALLERY

I had the art show this weekend at Fast Frames in Lafayette. There was a lot of stress around the opening of the show because one of the artist pulled out at the last second but my friend Sydney Eaton covered for us and made the show happen which was really cool. We sold one painting! I didn't think that we'd sell anything at all and I was really exited. I learned a lot from this process, mainly that you actually have to micromanage people. I don't want this to come off negative I actually enjoyed learning from this process.

BFD

Classy Mr. Vice President oh so classy.

Union Vs Government

Education in the United States has be declining for the past 60 years is what some could say a known fact. As I look closer into the topic I see that even though there is an extreme lack of funding the system itself does need some reforming. I have this article from newsweek that had some experts on the debate of the teachers union vs the government education.

It's no wonder that people are looking for an entity to blame for school failures. But blaming unions for failing schools is like blaming the middle class for the recession. Our union's mantra is "what is good for kids and what is fair for teachers." If teachers' unions were to blame for failing schools, then places like Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, who have relatively few unionized teachers, would do much better than the states with the most densely unionized teachers—Massachusetts, New York, Maryland. But those are the states whose schools do best.

So there are problems to solve, one of which is poverty. And I would argue that having a strong union, an entity that will look at what is done right and what is wrong and solve things and change things, is the way to go. We need well-prepared and well-supported teachers, early-childhood education, and a focus on graduation. We find these elements in lots of different places, and the differences between the places that work and those that don't is good labor-management relations.

On this side of the argument it makes it sound like schools do better and do worst with teachers union. This seems to be a stupid way of arguing because all shes really saying is that unions don't make a difference in how schools perform. So I don't understand why they are rejecting government reform. The education system and unions are a very hostile place the more I dwell upon it.

Gallery is Up and Ready

So the past few weeks of me working on my community service has been really hectic due to a lot of let downs. At first I had spoken to the Lafayette library about doing a show there and I had gotten conformation that it would work out. I was told to wait for an e-mail from them so I could send them my proposition for what I needed. I waited for a long time and then I called them back and it turns out that the lady I had spoken to was really unorganized and no one knew who I was or who the lady I asked for was. Basically the library deal was off. So I called Fast Frames in down town Lafayette and asked if I could hang some stuff up and they were really cool and let me. As I was collecting everyone's art to go deliver it, one of the artist had a last second drop out. It was lame but I guess he had his reasons so I can't really hold a grudge. However I had someone to fill his place luckily. In the long run I feel like i went about it in an unprepared way but I never thought it would take that much energy to put together. I guess its a trial and error thing to do, I really wasn't happy about how rushed it ended up being, but I learned a lot about organizing people. Moral of the story is that you have to micro manage people from time to time.

Review: The Cove

I just recently saw the documentary called The Cove for a stretch mark for my psych class but I thought that it was so relevant that I should blog about it. The movie is based on the international whaling laws and how the Japanese government refuses to stop. It also informs you on the recent decline in marine life conservations both with whaling and the coral reefs. Its a really interesting and some what inspiring movie.

Tibet benifits from Chinses Involvement

I think that its funny that the more dependent we become on China for stabilizing our economy, the farther we go into debt, the more we villanize them. We loaned Europe money knowing that we would benefit from there post-war economy, China has done the same for us and we hate them for it. Now I don't agree with many of China's actions, but then again I don't agree with many of Americas either, but I found an article of China's brutal involvement with Tibet and felt that I needed to post it.

Since 2001, Beijing has spent $45.4 billion on development in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). (That's what the Chinese government calls Tibet, even though many Tibetans live in neighboring provinces, too). The effect: double-digit GDP growth for the past nine years. About a third of the money went to infrastructure investment, including the train connecting Beijing to Lhasa. "A clear benefit of the train was that it makes industrial goods cheaper for Tibetans, who, like everyone else in the world, like household conveniences, but normally had to pay very high prices," said Ben Hillman, a Tibet expert from the Australian National University's China Institute. The train also provides an opportunity for Tibetan goods to be sold outside of the region and for a massive increase in number of tourists, reaching more than 5.5 million in 2009—up from close to 2 million in 2005, the year before the train. The Chinese government's Tibet tourism bureau expects the numbers to keep climbing. While Tibetan independence groups like Free Tibet raise sustainability concerns about the increase in tourism, Hillman points out that "tourism is an important industry that can benefit local Tibetans."

I guess that China's involvement in Tibet had benificial after all to an extent. It shows the other side of things which is always an important angle to look at. I almost want to make a connection to China's involvement in Tibet to America's involvement in Iraq but I know that there would be too much of open broad comparison that I would be attacked. I just hope that even though both conflicts were violent that some good comes out of it.

Leprechaun Museum

Yeah this is actually real. Its opening tomorrow and I really want to go but I doubt I will because its in Ireland. I just wanted to spread the word, here is a article on the museum

Obama's Youtube Chat

This is one of the videos that Obama posts on youtube every week. Its his more modern version of Roosevelt's fire side chats. It's an introduction to him introducing his new education reform bill. I'm exited to hear how the American people think of the bill and how the congress will deal with it.

Obama Education Plan

Obama has been very progressive with many major topics involving the reform for a better America but he hasn't really tackled education with the intensity he has used on the war or the health bill. On March 13, 2010, the Bush Administration handed him a bill to reform the education system and Obama is currently re-writing it and will be proposing it soon. Time Magazine listed some of the highlights

— By 2020, all students graduating from high school would need to be ready for college or a career. That's a shift away from the current law, which calls for all students to be performing at grade level in reading and math by 2014.

— Give more rewards — money and flexibility — to high-poverty schools that are seeing big gains in student achievement and use them as a model for other schools in low-income neighborhoods that struggle with performance.

— Punish the lowest-performing 5 percent of schools using aggressive measures, such as having the state take over federal funding for poor students, replacing the principal and half the teaching staff or closing the school altogether.

— Duncan has said the name No Child Left Behind will be dropped because it is associated with a harsh law that punishes schools for not reaching benchmarks even if they've made big gains. He said the administration will work with Congress to come up with a new name.

Amy Wilkins, a vice president with The Education Trust in Washington, D.C., called the blueprint a "culture shift."

"One of the things America has not been clear about is what k-12 is supposed to do," Wilkins said. "In this, we're saying K-12 is supposed to prepare kids for college and meaningful careers."

Although I feel that like most politicians Obama will promise us more than he can actually give us, I still really like the idea of rewarding schools with success. It's planned that more than four billion dollars will be given to the education system, which hasn't been done in forty five years.

Classroom Chaos

Although teachers, unions, and improper funding are the main damage to the educational system the students are to be blamed as well. The control over students has declined over the past forty years. I'm not saying laws that protect children from being hit by teachers are good but when it wasn't illegal there were a lot more well behaved children.

The solution is probably not to encourage teachers to bean kids with erasers. But something is needed. Jennifer Scoggins, 32, a New York teacher currently working on her Ph.D., said she had no chance to succeed when she began her first teaching job in 2001. She was asked to take over a second-grade class in Harlem midyear—after several other teachers had given up. The kids were out of control when she arrived, and things never improved. "Chairs were being thrown, kids were stabbing each other with pencils," she said. "I felt absolutely like a total failure. The only thing I was proud of was that I never cried in front of the kids. But I cried everywhere else: in supply closets, on the subway, at home." Even though Scoggins had earned a master's in education, she said, "very practical things were never taught."

The more I look into the educational system and its problems, the more unfixable they appear. I feel like we need to change the people in education not the laws, we need society desperated for education because its what we need for the future.

School Reform

I've noticed that certain topics have always been on the political agenda for reformation. Health Care, Big Business, Congress, War, Foreign Relations, and Education. Why is it that although we speak of how we have a doomed generation, who will have to carry our nations debt, we don't even think to educate them to deal with the problem.

"People in unbelievably crappy school buildings, dealing with terrible conditions, whose classrooms are alive with learning. They are just unbelievable. And then across the hall is a classroom that's just the most depressing thing you've ever seen. The kids know it. The parents know it. The administration knows it. It's no secret." But it is hard to change.

In a newsweek article about school reform I saw two sides of the education reform debate. Although after reading both sides of the debate my oppinon didn't change, i proved to be just as liberal as ever, I still felt educated on educations.

Tattoo Time

I'm really happy that tattoo's aren't affected by the recession but I'm also surprised. Since tattooing is a luxury job it would be considered to be the first to go, not only because of money variation in tattoos but because of the smaller audience that get tattoos.

Rising Rates of Abortions

I was searching for some blog worthy articles to write a piece on and as I was skimming through tittles I saw the claim that 40% of women get abortions. I guess the article was the author defending the statistic that she had used in another article. Like many people, so many in fact that she had to do the math just to make the statistic legitimate, I questioned it.

I started with this statistic from the Guttmacher Institute, a think tank that studies reproductive health and supports abortion rights: “From 1973 through 2005, more than 45 million legal abortions occurred.” According to the census, the United States population was 295,753,151 in 2005 (I used this, rather than its most recent estimate, to stay consistent with the Guttmacher figure, which counted abortions only through 2005). That population is 50.7 percent (150 million people) female. Subtract the 24.3 percent of the population that is under 18 and you’re down to 113.6 million women. Forty-five million is 39.6 percent of that, or, as I wrote it, “about 40 percent.”

At first i thought i was a huge overestimate, but I feel like over time the number can only go up. The more normal having a sex life becomes the more likely more and more people will have mistakes. What I mean by normal is that the more socially acceptable it is the more likely the number of people having sex earlier will start there for having more chances to get pregnant.

AIDS Statistics

On my search for more blog worthy articles on Newsweek I saw tittle that caught my eye. I usually try to get sources from different sites because some sites generally stay to one side of the spectrum, but the article HIV Still Plagues the US had some really interesting statistics.

What’s interesting is that the research shows that a person’s sexual network, more than just his or her lifestyle choices, defines the risk of getting HIV in America. So, black and Hispanic women are at increased risk due to the instability of their sexual relationships —which is attributed to the high rate of incarceration of men in their networks—and their vulnerable or dependent economic situation, which may cause them to be fearful of suggesting safer-sex options to their companions. And black men who have sex with men are at high risk because of the likelihood of their choosing to engage in sexual activity with someone who is racially similar, and because of the prevalence of HIV within their sexual networks.

These statistics make me think that AIDS is a racist disease. It obviously doesn't only infect certain races, but they are more venerable due to their culture. I really don't have much to say on the matter the statistics say it all.

More than 1 in 30 adults in Washington, D.C., are HIV-infected—a prevalence higher than that reported in Ethiopia, Nigeria, or Rwanda. Certain U.S. subpopulations are particularly hard hit. In New York City, 1 in 40 blacks, 1 in 10 men who have sex with men, and 1 in 8 injection-drug users are HIV-infected, as are 1 in 16 black men in Washington, D.C. In several U.S. urban areas, the HIV prevalence among men who have sex with men is as high as 30%—as compared with a general-population prevalence of 7.8% in Kenya and 16.9% in South Africa.

The first sentence in this list of statistics is the scariest of all. More than One in Thirty adults?! You have a better chance of getting AIDS in DC than getting it in AIDS ridden countries.

Medication and Children

As I was looking for blog worthy topics I found this book review on Newsweek. It first stuck me because I had never seen a book review on Newsweek. Secondly when I read the discription of the book it was on medication and children which lured me in since I was given medication at a very young age. I read the description and I really want to go buy the book because half way the studying and writing of the book she had changed her mind on weather medicating your children was ok or not. She had started off like me, not thinking it was very good for the children, and then changed her opinion on the matter. I really want to know what information that she has because when i was forced to take medication i was just really bummed all the time. I really felt that it did a lot of emotional and psychiatric damage than ever helping me.
I really hope you go read the over view of the book, It called We've Got Issues by Judish Warner