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