Let's Fix It

by Michael G. Crawford

Bennett is not a Moron, just confused. And Mr. Ryan, since when is it LIBERAL to want a place for kids to go to that is entertaining enough and not so demeaning as to make them feel like second class citizens. Not only LIBERALS want a better education and life after school for their kids. As a moderate CONSERVATIVE, I guess I can't speak for the members of that particular political ideal, but I can speak for myself as a father.

Spending money on education rockets back and forth as a LIBERAL idea to a CONSERVATIVE idea depending upon who is in office and who is trying to do something about it, not which ideal you support. If Bush had wanted to pour money into the schools he might have lost the election for his second term because some majority of so called CONSERVATIVES wouldn't vote for him. Where was this mysterious stereotype in the polls when Clinton was elected? Did Bush lose anything by not putting enough money into education? Hardly.

Good Presidents and Good Congresses know that some ideals are bigger than the political parties. Competing in the world today, our kids have to be smarter, faster, and more creative than 2/3 of the earth's population. This was not the case when Mr. Fabiano and I were kids. In those days, the U.S. child was far ahead of the rest of the world. But that didn't last for very long.

If you look at the money expended per child in the U.S. today versus that spent in the early 50s and thru the mid 60s, I expect you'll find there is not much difference even if you include inflation's effects on the cost of books, equipment, etc.

If we resort to stereotyping people as LIBERALS CONSERVATIVES, or PEROTITES, we miss the point. Helping our kids find something to do with their lifes is not a political leaning, it is a parental guidance issue. Ask a junior in high school what he or she wants out of life. Sure some know already. Statistics show the majority have no idea. If they haven't figured it out yet, it doesn't mean they are doomed or a LIBERAL, CONSERVATIVE or LIBERTARIAN or any other political ideal. It means they don't know yet. Blame that on yourself, parent, but don't beat yourself to death over it, cuz it is a very common problem for kids of all ages, and yes even many adults.

It is not about money as a denomination, but about money as a percentage of value. If, in the 1950s we had determined that every kid needed a slide rule, and that slide rule cost anywhere from half to all our monthly take take-home salary, would we have sprung for one? No. But today, if a kid does not have a computer to do his homework on, he is being outclassed by a third of his classmates. This includes printer and monitor. Easily $1000 or $2000 sans software. Where is a tenament dweller in Queens going to get that kind of cash. Yet kids all over Japan seem to be working on the damn things at an alarming percentage of that country's population. Why, because the government is pouring cash into their children and schools. Why, because the government sees it as a national survival issue, not a political issue to be tossed back and forth like a hot potato. Japan INVESTS in their children with the hopes of a huge return on that investment with the highest stakes possible.

Even an agnostic will admit that there is truth and goodness in the bible when it recommends teaching a man to fish rather than just giving him a free meal. Even an agnostic will admit that is pretty damn astute for a carpenter.

We do have to help the fisherman have a meal or two while he is learning however, and that's where some sort of assistance might be necessary. But today we don't teach (No reflection on Mr. Fabiano, I expect he is an excellent teacher) cuz we don't pay for the best teachers, and don't give them the tools they need.

And we not only give the fisherman a meal, hell we support him for many years while he learns to pick his nose and complain that he isn't getting steak on that free meal ticket.

What Mr. Fabiano is saying is that we aren't giving our kids a chance at living. With so many choices, are we failing to prepare them for life AND a career?

My first grader is learning Spanish and English at the same time. He is no where fluent in either language yet, but we all have hopes. But, the little guy's future is so "maybe" dependent. MAYBE by the time my first grader hits High School, some nice teacher MIGHT inspire him to be a genius of a computer programmer. Then he MIGHT fall into a nice job, that he loves, designing spacecraft to shuttle back and forth between a colony on Mars.

Chance are, though, that the job will be posted in Japan, and not only will my son be at a huge disadvantage in that marketplace, he won't speak the language.

So we are not just in a race to save our children from the pressures of our lives in the U.S., but the worldwide economical pressures which will be in effect when they are adults. Who cares if the average reading level for a ninth grader is at fifth grade level? Sure that is horrid, but that's the wrong yardstick anyway. What is the U.S. math comprehension of the average U.S. ninth grader compared to the equivalent European or Japanese student? How much work ethic does the U.S. high school senior have versus the equivalent Japanese student?

If we lose our kid's interest by the time he is in junior high, or he drops out, then is it Clinton's fault, the Democrats or Republicans? No. It is our fault as teachers and parents. And we pay teachers at nearly poverty income, making them feel like second class citizens and then wonder why our kids feel left out of the system. An inspirational teacher works wonders, and we miss out on hiring them every day.

Who needs inspirational teachers? Well for instance, this web page would not be here...no way, no how, if it weren't for a 11th grade teacher in Hawaii, and by some quirk of fate, an English Comp teacher at American River Junior College in Carmichael (near Sacramento), California. Two people who made a helluva difference and by last count, indirectly touch the minds of better than 2000 people every week through the Writer's Gallery.

My point is this. If we took the money pouring into programs for which the return is hard to calculate let alone justify (and the war on drugs is probably a good candidate), and put it into programs to help schools find and hire the inspirational teachers that will make our kids into contributers rather than drop out in disgust. We need to start investing in the tools the teachers AND the students need in order to learn to compete in the world when they are adults, then we'd buy into the future instead of continuing our decline by buying a lifetime of fish for the fisherman.

This includes things to do when our kids aren't being pumped full of inspirational future know-how. As a child, I wanted to belong to something. There was a teen club with a juke box, a trampoline and a dance floor. I went for awhile to meet girls. When I couldn't get the girls to look twice at me, I broke my ass on the trampoline, and when I got too sore, I thought maybe I'd learn to dance. But when I had no one to teach me how to dance to the music on that juke box, I tried to find someone to teach me how to play guitar. At 45, I'm still trying. If a gym teacher would have had some time to teach the tramp, or a semi-talented rock guitar player had the time to teach a kid some licks on a guitar, or a pretty high school senior had taken pity on some junior high schoolers and hung around to teach them to dance, I might have avoided some rather ugly moments in my own life.

So multiply that whole experience by one or two magnitudes and we see how important little things like something to do after school are. Imagine inner city kids with Carl Lewis teaching them how to use a trampoline, Eddie Van Halen teaching guitar licks, or Cindy Crawford teaching tall skinny or short fat boys how to dance. Self esteem, inspiration, and opportunity are our greatest weapons against drugs, not trying to out maneuver the Colombian Cartels. And we don't have to have stars doing this important work, just some caring and well trained people.

How many well trained people have to settle for a low paying job? Contrast that with talented people who have a choice between a good paying job and a shit paying job. It takes a pretty dedicated person to take the lower paying job, just because they want to help. We are helping the talented teachers make the wrong decision and take the higher paying job, because not only do we pay teacher less, we encourage mediocre performance by setting milestones that are dooming our next generations to failure.

If we trained rocket scientists, wouldn't it be easier to make colonies on Mars? Maybe you don't like my example. If we want our kids to be a useful, contributing member of society, wouldn't it be easier if they started out feeling that was not only possible, but that they are already part of that society? When 16 year olds don't have any idea what they want to do, is it because they don't know or don't care? If you give them some options to look at, let them try a few things out, don't you think it would help them make a decision?

For instance, how many kids are hired by NASA to work on the shuttle? Oh I see it's too important to have a kid tagging around, too dangerous. How many kids are hired by Microsoft to design new user interfaces meant for their peers in a few years? Why do kids have to stop thinking, learning and interacting when school is done? How about half the repetitive learning going on replaced with On the Job Training?

The schools don't have the tools our teachers need to teach the kids to participate in such a program, and industry is rightly reluctant to hire untrained, unskilled, and frankly under-motivated children. Yet there are so many who could, as teenagers, contribute vastly to all our sciences.

We are lacking in teacher talent due to a lack of teacher's rewards. Lacking in motivation to learn due to a lack of teacher talents and tools. Lacking in industry involvement in their future employees due to short-sighted thinking as well as a lack of trained young people. We are not preparing for a competitive world not too distant in our future, but man we have some really cool video of a drug bust over the border.

We can fix this situation. Let's Fix IT! Quit programming aid program recipients to continue along without improving their own situation. Use the war on drugs money for key education initiatives, and add some funding for the best teachers and the best tools to compete with the rest of the world. Quit buying prisons and color TVs for them. Take the weight training rooms in prisons and give them to high schools across the country. Don't buy more weight training for convicts and start having them build cheap computers.

Quit making license plates in prison for Chrissakes. Let's put that prison labor to good use. I'm not saying treat them with disrespect, let's teach them how to make a real contribution, and get something out of it in return, a huge supply of computers for our schools.

If we can afford a Blackhawk helicopter to be diverted from military missions, sell the damn thing and use the money to bring a Cindy Crawford double in to teach inner city kids how to program computers. Instead of giving welfare recipients a make work job, let's have them build computers too! With convicts building computers, welfare folks building em too, and inner city kids programming, we would quadruple the amount of computer literates within months, perhaps getting us a bit closer to our worldwide competitors.

I am not saying computers are the only solution or even a right one. This is just one example of a theme that will help us prepare our kids for their future. Let's think up some others. Or if we can't think of others yet, then let's run with this one until a better idea comes along. It's got to better than what we are doing now.

Let's fix the future for our children by putting money into things that will give them a future, not try to stop the inflow of drugs when we know the cost to really stop the flow is impossible to afford. Hell it would cost so much more to really START to be effective, and that money is certainly well spent elsewhere.