First: Poor kids

[Johonny]

The president and lawmakers in both parties want changes to the five-year-old law — a key piece of his domestic policy legacy, which faces a tough renewal fight in Congress. Bush listed several ways for enhancing the law:
_Give local leaders more flexibility and resources;
_Offer other educational options to families of children stuck in low-performing schools;
_Increase access to tutoring programs;
_Reward good teachers who improve student achievement in low-income schools;
_Expand access to advanced placement courses;
_And, improve math and science instruction.


Bush has a domestic policy legacy? Let’s read through his talking points to hear what he really means. 1) Blame local leaders for failing to fund the federal program. 2) School voucher programs. Yip that’s been pretty much shown to be not effective.3) Oh yes tutoring. If you can’t teach a kid in a class room, teach him on a 1 on 1 setting. I’m sure he plans massive funding to pay for it. 4) Oh wait more spending. You know what reward those teachers would really like: basic funding so they don’t have to spend their own salary on paper and pencils for their class room. 5) Advanced placement sounds good, until you understand what that means to a republican. It doesn’t mean better opportunities and challenges for advanced students, it usually means forcing mediocre students into advantaged classes to drag down the class back to school level. “Look more warm bodies are taking AP math, we’re tough on education!” Not everyone makes the football team, but by damn it every kid deserves to be in advanced placement courses. And once again that’s going to require money because advanced courses require advanced teacher and resources. 6) teach creationism and the Earth is flat. There’s nothing wrong with math and science instruction that money and keeping religion out of the class room wouldn’t help. So here’s a guess when ever this thing passes congress and gets to Bushes desk he’s going to veto it, because Bush won’t pay for it and we all know the Democrats are going to produce a domestic bill that actually requires the federal government to pay for the federal program.