At a rally in Beaumont, Texas, Barack Obama gets all specific on how to improve education in the U.S. and then he gets to the heart of the matter: “It doesn’t matter how much money we put in if parents don’t parent.”
Tag Archive for 'education'
John Edwards speaks to every parent whose child is being tortured by standardized testing taking over the classroom thanks to the testing mania of no child left behind. (Can you tell I speak from personal experience?)
Sound bite: “I don’t believe a child learns anything filling out a bubble on a cheap, standardized test… A friend of mine from South Carolina says, ‘You don’t make a hog fatter by weighing.’”
Bill Richardson’s has a new 30-second spot running in Iowa that details the candidate’s “bold plan” for education: nuke No Child Left Behind, institute minimum teaching wage, guarantee universal pre-K and kindergarten, establish math and science academies.
Speaking at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute’s Presidential Forum, Hillary Clinton says the reason one-half of Latino children drop out of school is because the government isn’t doing enough for them and their families. As President, she says she’ll have a whole lot of programs to change all that.
Sound Bite: “I’m setting a goal of cutting the Latino dropout rate in half. I’ll achieve that by supporting our children and their families from the day they’re born. We need to reach into families, work with parents.”
John Edwards appeared today on an MTV-MySpace interactive “Presidential Dialogue.” Viewers were able to immediately grade the candidate’s answers — either positively: “Good Ideas,” “Understands Reality,” “Answered Question;” or negatively: “Wrong Ideas,” “Out of Touch,” “Dodged Question.” The aggregate responses were displayed in a pie chart that understandably confused Edwards at first.
In this clip Edwards is asked how he’d pay for his “College for Everyone” program. Why, that’s as easy as Finance 101: He’d “get rid of banks as the intermediary in student loans,” and he’d collect taxes that aren’t currently being paid, particularly taxes on capital gains that those rich folks are avoiding.
Next up: A discussion of his “Straight A’s for Everyone” plan.
