Back to school
This year’s political conventions conveniently coincide with the start of school for area students and educators, which prompts a reminder that through the noise and spin of both major party’s campaigns, surprisingly little has been heard from either candidate about education issues beyond the usual platitudes.
That may be due in part because so many other issues bulk so large. Whoever inherits the White House next year will have a full plate of problems and leftover business from the outgoing Bush administration.
Let’s start with foreign affairs. Arranging some kind of graceful exit from Iraq, if that is even possible, would alone be a task challenging enough for the nimblest of administrations. While there’s been some good news from Iraq lately in terms of an improving security picture, it could all evaporate in the blink of an eye, or a wave of suicide bombings. We need to leave Iraq, or at least drastically scale down our forces committed there, to quell a growing problem in Afghanistan, which could have been avoided if we hadn’t gotten sidetracked in Iraq. That’s water under the bridge now, but we face many years of continued involvement there in all likelihood, fighting the real war that we should have “stayed the course” with back in 2003.
And now of course, we face a heightened level of tension with Russia. Their invasion of Georgia — an independent, democratic state that wants to be allied with the West — may not be the start of the second Cold War, but the authoritarian Russian state has served notice it’s back to business as usual, now that we’ve helped refill their once-depleted coffers with money for their oil and natural gas.
Meanwhile there’s all the other big picture stuff — relations with China, who, despite the glow of Olympic harmony is ready and willing to claim its place as an economic superpower — and all the other gnarly Middle Eastern business like finally coming up with a workable solution to the Palestine-Israeli conundrum and the rest of the global war on terror.
Then there’s the economy. It’s number one on the list of voter’s concerns, the pollsters tell us, as well it should be. The past year has seen a housing market and mortgage meltdown, panic on Wall Street, an economy hovering near a recession and unemployment and inflation rising. We have gas prices at painfully high levels, and other commodity prices, which may finally be showing signs of easing only because of the specter of economic recession, at near all-time highs.
It’s enough to make you wonder why anyone wants the job.
Against that background, education is somewhere in the second half of the top ten.
It shouldn’t be, because ultimately most, if not all, of the nation’s problems will be solved through a smarter workforce, one that knows how to creatively exploit the opportunities made possible through technology and awareness of the great world beyond our borders. If there is one red flag that’s flashing brighter than ever it’s the chronic inability of U.S. education to recruit enough qualified math and science teachers. That's not to say there aren't many talented and dedicated ones currently serving in the ranks of teachers — just that there aren't enough of them. All other subjects are critical too, but for years the pay scales for would be mathematicians and scientists have been severely out of balance between what teaching offers and what is available in the private sector. Somehow, being a math and science teacher needs to become something other than a vow of poverty relative to what else is out there for the best and the brightest in these critical fields.
Instead of getting bogged down in endless arguments about No Child Left Behind, or even more foolishly, re-debating settled science on the theory of evolution with nonsense about “intelligent design,” let’s get with the program and stop wasting time and resources. The rest of the world is passing us by.
TRIM for Edit
It doesn’t have to be that way, but it will be if we allow our politicians to go on believing that we are in fact, as stupid as many of them apparently think we are.