Entries Tagged 'Politics & Legislation' ↓

A: My mom is so nice that the Purple People Eaters won’t even eat her.
A: My mom is so smart that she can even get three articles done in one day!
Z: My mom is so nice that she won’t even be mean to my dog when I’m at school.
Z: Mom, can you make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?
A: Mom, can you look up Purple People Eaters to see if they’re real?
Z: MOM, peanut butter and jelly!
A: Mom! Purple People Eaters aren’t real. Their cartoons. I’m not scared any more.
Z: MOM! Peanut . . .
MOM: What!?!?! Don’t ask me again!

Enjoy the 2012 video Mother’s Day Card from Mom’s Rising.

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The whole state just finished their Standardized Tests. If you’re a parent you know that the entire school year has been hijacked by making sure kids pass these tests. It’s legislation called No Child Left Behind and was the major education reformation of George II.

The test had a number of consequences — some good, some bad. The good part was that it created a national tracking system that allowed us to get some idea of who was learning what. Prior to No Child Left Behind schools and districts were using their own tracking system or no tracking system at all.

The bad part is that it took a lot of creativity out of the classroom, substituted rote memorization for actual learning and put a ton of pressure on school boards, principals, teachers, parents and students.

In other words, the Standardized Test became the central focus of education. Which robbed our kids of the experience of actual learning through creativity; substituted artificial learning for an organic, authentic education. It made kids conform to a “cookie cutter” education.

It also increased Title 1 participation, because if your kid diagnosed with autism, ADD, dyslexia or whatever their issue is, their test scores are counted, but they get special tutors, services and accommodations in order to ensure that their test scores improve. If you’re a parent, you want your kid to have the best education and performance possible, and if you’re on the faculty you NEED these kids to perform well. In other words, it is likely that the increased number of kids with a diagnosis is, in part, a result of Standardized Testing.

Another downside is that it really isn’t appropriate for schools and the public education system to bear the burden of making sure kids learn well when it is obvious that there are other factors at play. Time Magazine’s article Why It’s Time to Replace No Child Left Behind points out that there actually are children left behind and they are the same children that were being left behind before this supposed magical reform of America’s education. While middle-class and upper-class kids have improved their scores and do well, poor minority children still lag behind.

Part of this is the way we fund education in this country. If you live in a rich community there are dollars to spare for education through higher property taxes or at least property taxes on more expensive homes, which equates to more education money. Money buys better technology, safer classrooms and halls, better faculty, better and more extra-curricular activities, more educational resources — in other words, a far better education. If you live in a poor one — you’re screwed. Education isn’t equal in this country and it never will be unless we reform how we fund the education of our students. One solution is to distribute dollars equally through gambling or lotteries as Nevada and a few other states do. Another is to fund education entirely by the state, property taxes which fund education dollars go to the state school board, as opposed to the local one, and the state distribute funds equitably regardless of the income of certain neighborhoods and parts of town. For obvious reasons upper- to middle-class communities will likely oppose this, because hey, their kids’ get a great education.

But, money is not the major issue here, as New Jersey schools show quite clearly. New Jersey spends far more per student than average and they have far more than average failing schools and failing students.

Yes, yes, fire the sucky teachers, sucky administration, etc. You’ve heard it all before as the big solution to education’s problem. God bless the teachers who are willing to go into these failing schools, stick their feet into quick sand and fight the battle for these kids. Certainly, moving away from a failing school and students who don’t score well would be most prudent for their careers. Unless, of course you choose to believe that all teachers who enter these institutions couldn’t get a job elsewhere and don’t care at all about their students, only their retirement. I think that’s pretty far fetched.

What I don’t understand is why schools are being held accountable for the factors that have nothing to do with education at all: the culture of African Americans where the numbers of single mothers and absent fathers is staggering; the astronomical number of minority males who are in prison; the communities that are drug-infested nightmarish nests of violence; or the culture of certain communities whether from religious persuasion, cultural norms or just plain apathy that don’t value education at all. It seems absurd to me that we expect schools to overcome these obstacles, in fact, it’s absurd to assume that schools have any responsibility to change the consequences of these environments for these kids. It’s simply not their job.

For the most part, I haven’t had a serious problem with Standardized Testing. Probably because Ainsley performs well on them and I have no reason to believe that Zack won’t perform well too.

My problem this year was the way Standardized Testing is being delivered to students. Ainsley sobbed that she went over and over her writing essay and didn’t finish the last sentence. It was confounding to me.

I didn’t finish the last sentence, now I won’t get my candy bar and I won’t get a good score! 

You’re a better writer than most people in your class, how will they even know you planned to add one more sentence at the end? I’m sure your score will be above average. If not, it’s not a big deal. Everybody bombs a test now and then.

No, my teacher saw me not finish when she called time.

Your teacher isn’t grading the test. 

My grade is going to go down. 

This test doesn’t effect your grade at all! 

What? It’s practically my WHOLE grade. 

It’s NONE of your grade. They aren’t grading you with this test, they are grading your school, your teachers, your principal. If you don’t score high on the test then they take money away from your school. 

No it’s not. It’s a big part of our grade, the teachers said it was really, really important that we do our very best on the test. 

Yeah, because they need the money and they want to keep their jobs. Not because it effects your grade. 

Well, I don’t want my teacher to be fired either! 

People, my daughter didn’t believe me at all. My neighbor’s daughter didn’t believe her mother either. These are high-performing students who work hard and care about their grades and their performance on tests. The school bribed the children with candy bars of their choice and class parties if they showed up, finished the section and tried their mightiest to score as high as possible. They told, or at least implied, students that this test would be a major part of their grades. Good God, the emotional trauma this testing has inflicted on faculty, school boards, parents and children should be enough to motivate us to think of a better method.

As Americans we’re supposed to be innovative. This isn’t innovative at all, it reduces a real education to a factory line. We’re not going to be more effective in the global marketplace with this stunted thinking. Genius is born of creativity and the guts to make million mistakes before success. Intelligence is born of exploration. Things do not not get invented by the people who have excellent scores on Standardized Tests, things are invented and discovered by curious people who daydream a lot. The people who ask, “what if this is possible?”

Surely, we can think of something more . . . creative. Surely, we can dream a bigger dream for our kids, for our futures.

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Women Invented Language

You know how “they” always say that women weren’t allowed to be literate until like the 1800s or something ridiculous like that?

Well that’s just stupid.

One only has to compare the verbal and written communication skills of a boy toddler and a girl toddler to know what one is more naturally gifted with language than the other. Surely every Kindergarten and preschool teacher has witnessed the obvious. One only has be in a relationship to know that the idea that men felt the strongest desire to communicate is a down-right absurdity.

Women invented language. They formed words and wrote them down and then taught those skills to men, finding a way to force them to communicate.

At some point in history men got intimidated and wanted to flex their muscles and burned, destroyed and otherwise silenced women to gain power. Destroying a vast amount of world history in the process. Which is a tragedy.

It’s true. I would prove it, except they destroyed all the evidence.

Equal Pay Is A Dumb Idea

We’ve been begging congress to give women equal pay since 1963. They don’t want to. If they did, we’d have accomplished this by now. It’s not because they are sexist (well, maybe it is), but it’s mostly because they are capitalists and men derive pleasure from competition. It’s the merit system.

Equal pay as a law was probably a good idea in 1963 when men held all the power and ran all the companies and women were just barely entering college in mass.

But, in 2012 it’s a low, low bar. We shouldn’t rob ourselves and our sisters the opportunity to out-earn their male counterparts after 2,000 years of economic oppression. That would be short-sighted and wrong.

Women are attaining higher degrees than men. In large cities young professional women are out-earning and out-advancing their male counterparts.

Most important, women are starting more businesses than men. THIS is how we’ll achieve equal pay — if such a low bar is to be achieved. Women CEOs will decide whether they choose to reward gender, merit or pay a flat rate for each employee in a certain job. It will be interesting to see what we choose when we hold the power in our own hands.

Smart Women Don’t Run For Office

We always say we want more female representation in political office. Well, mostly liberal women say that. Of course, they don’t mean they want more female representation, what they really mean is we want more pro-life Democratic female representation. Republican pro-life women are to be publicly tarred and feathered.

Personally, I think a more feminine Republican party benefits everyone. If only because it’s getting stale looking at those smug stubborn grey-haired men’s faces. Women are more creative. A good maternal Republican woman would slash the hell out of extras in the budget and lock those smug men in a room with generic bags of cold cereal and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches until they could agree on budgets and bills.

Still, that would be the only fun part. The rest of it sounds like a lot of crap that no woman in her right mind would want to deal with. I mean, what’s great about the job? First you have to spend all your money in the ridiculously junior high school popularity contest they call campaigns, you have to put up with rude, disrespectful and insulting questions from journalists and tabloid writers calling themselves journalists, people dig in your garbage to find scraps of paper with something incriminating on them, they hack into your email, you have to make your taxes public, half the world hates your guts and wants to see you dead, they drag out all your old boyfriends and lovers to say something bad about you, they Photoshop your face on naked people and have porn stars pretend to be you in ironically titled adult films, they rake your religion over the coals, they harass your children, they criticize your every parenting choice and the neighbors tattle about the time you yelled out the door “Get your butt in here and clean up your room or you will face DIRE CONSEQUENCES!”

Then, you get the job and every word, choice, haircut and lipstick color gets picked to death by the blogosphere. You can’t accomplish everything you said you would because that’s how the system was designed — but they blame you anyway. You never make enough money to make back what you spent on the campaign in the first place. Then you have to pay for an apartment in Washington and kiss people’s ass all the time.

Repeat.

Who in their right mind would want this job? Essentially it’s committing quality-of-life suicide. If you love yourself Ladies, don’t run for office.

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Last year I wrote a post about Jess Weiner’s body issues. I feel bad about it. I want to apologize and make amends. Jess Weiner’s body issues are Jess Weiner’s body issues. They are her issues whether she chooses to talk about them in public or private. My point could have been made without calling her out directly. Or I could have let the point go.

I don’t normally call people out personally, even if they are famous. I think it’s an international cop-out “they’re famous so they signed up for the entire world to say whatever they want about them.” No they didn’t. They’re famous and they are people and the entire world just uses this justification to allow their mean flag to fly.

This is one of the most effective ways we silence girls and women, especially politically and in important social activism roles. I’ve often thought that I’d make a good politician with effective with out-of-the-box thinking and lots of new ideas. But, I love myself and my children too much to go through the insane nonsense that we put politicians, especially female politicians, through in this country.

Oh, you made gang-bang porn with a Sarah Palin look-a-like? Hilarious! You forwarded a Photoshopped photo of Sarah Palin in a bikini carrying a semi-automatic weapon at a pool party to a billion people? So funny! Well, she did disagree with your politics and your sense of social right. She deserved it. (Yeah, not so hilarious. Really. Disgusting and disrespectful to all women is more like it.)

You’re a horrible mother!

You’re too fat!

You’re too skinny!

I can’t believe someone would marry you!

She’s a practicing Witch!

She’s a whore!

A woman would have to grow emotional armor the thickness of a T-Rex in order to withstand, to willingly subject themselves and their families, to this kind of treatment for being willing to serve . . . from other women who are supposedly on their own side (in their own political party or of their own social activist realm or religious denomination or whatever group or category a woman tries to make headway in).

So, to Jess Weiner, I’m making a public apology because I made public my criticism.

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Reagan: Not A Viable Candidate for 2012

I find it so irritating when pundits declare a candidate “a waffler,” claiming that they lack a moral compass or they stand for nothing if they have had the good sense to change their mind about something in the last 30 years.

I call this growth and maturity. For me this is a primary criteria for relationships of any kind. If you have lived for over 30 years and you haven’t changed your mind about anything, then I don’t trust you enough to have a vote in congress or to be President of the United States.

Changing your mind signifies a couple of vital things:

• Admitting you could have been wrong about something in the first place. Changing your mind shows humility and a willingness to admit when you’re wrong. It shows you’ve got your ego in check.
• Acknowledging that something in the world has changed. Changing your mind shows that you agree that new research not supporting your original opinion or hypothesis might have been presented between the time you made your original opinion and your current one. Changing your mind only shows that you have been paying attention.
• Illustrating there has been some personal growth. If you don’t grow from personal experiences and that growth doesn’t inform your opinions and positions, then I don’t I trust you as my political representatives. Humans are meant to grow.
• A willingness to be educated or enlightened. Changing your mind is sometimes about being educated about something you really didn’t know anything about before, or about letting go of an unfair judgement about a group of people you really didn’t know before or even just saying, “I don’t get this, but I see that it’s important to you and it really doesn’t impact me, so I’m willing to concede the point and give you what you want.” It’s about allowing light and compassion in.
• An ability to compromise and listen to your constituents. A senate and house of representatives full of stubborn people, on the extreme right or left, who believe compromise is a moral flaw is a broken system going nowhere. Nothing happens. The deficit grows. Laws don’t get passed. No one gets anything they want. Because our lawmakers are being pigheaded. I think I can speak for the majority of Americans when I say, we’re sick of your childish pissing contests. We want balanced budgets. We want to pay off the deficit and we are willing to make sacrifices, though bitching and moaning on the Internet might be our hobby. Conceding a point or a position and allowing the other side to get something that’s important to them doesn’t make you a pussy and it doesn’t make you wrong. It moves things along. Stop thinking about your next election and do the next right thing. If the next right thing is raising taxes, raise them, equitably. We’ll suck it up. If it is outlawing second-trimester abortions, trade that for more funding of more forms of birth control like Plan B. If it’s letting gay people get married, just let them already; If you want to protect marriage, work on your marriage because it’s the only one that’s any of your business. Stop being dicks about everything. Pick your battles. Decide what’s really, really important to you and the people who voted for you and draw the line there. Don’t draw the line everywhere because at this point all of the people are sick of all of you.

Voters, consider the political, technological, medical, pharmaceutical and information advancements of the last 30 years and ask yourself why many candidates are using the same canned responses about teen pregnancy, drug addiction, crime, health care, abortion, education, immigration, world politics, global economics, the domestic economy, social security, entitlement programs and taxation as Ronald Reagan did. If it was such a great plan would we be having the same problems magnified now? If a candidate doesn’t understand that everything has changed since 1980 then we don’t want them in office in 2012.

If a candidate believes they knew everything they needed to know while cheering for Reagan at the Republican Caucus in 1979 or even if they solidified their political ideology while campaigning for Barack Obama in 2007 and they haven’t experienced a shift in perception about anything since, then they won’t serve us well in the present or the future.

We need candidates that are ready to respond to the issues that concern today’s rapidly changing global economic structures; who have new and reasonable ideas about our vastly changed and changing medical and pharmaceutical landscape and can achieve an affordable and equitable system; who understand today’s shifting global political climate and can be wisely diplomatic; who can look at new education research and can consider the possibility that all kids don’t think and learn the same; who can look at a correction system that fails us all; who can look at both parties and see one people.

We want people who understand they don’t know what’s coming next in the waves of advancement, but who have histories of responding to the flow of ingenuity, change and rapid upheaval with optimism and out-of-the-box thinking rather than digging their heals in the sand and screeching that the end of the world is near.

I want candidates who will say, “I didn’t foresee the impact of the Internet when I was in college,” “I didn’t have a full understanding of this issue when I ran in 1994,” “I was overwhelmed with anger and passion when I voted for Iraq and didn’t foresee a decade-long, extraordinarily costly war if I had I would have insisted we finance it differently, but I also feel there was a legitimate threat to world peace in Iraq,” “I wish I wouldn’t have spoken so adamantly about not raising taxes, I think that might be a good idea now to help balance the budget,” “I didn’t understand the impact of sex education or how Plan B really worked when I said that,” “I was an ardent supporter of the 2nd amendment and I still believe in the right to bear arms, I just don’t think you need a rocket launcher or an uzi to kill a dear or to defend your home, and also think gang members and teenagers probably should have less access to them.”

Whatever the position or opinion that has changed, I hope voters can spot signs of maturity and growth and signs of immature pigheadedness and realize that the latter serves only their own ego.

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