SENATE BILL: The Gaining Excellent Teachers (GET) Act (Law'd)

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Deemed to be at risk by whom?

a potential subclause 5:
Each region shall compile a list of at-risk by compiling those institutions whose students perform in the bottom 25% of all public schools in the region and are in the top 25% for students dropping out of school, and then provide said list to the Deptarment of Internal Affairs as part of the process for applying for the funds.

We can make this a non-playable requirement since it would require quite a lot to actually provide this information, if it is even available.

^ What about this then?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Amendment 53:23 is adopted.

I foresee at least two more amendments here. The next one shall be mostly what I included in that response to Simfan, plus a few minor tweaks. That should be ready tonight some time.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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Sponsor: Origination
Status: Senators have 24 hours to object.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Did you pull that out of a list of generic lines to copy and paste into bill threads or something?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Amendment 53:29 has been adopted:

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[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Well, anyone think of any better numbers? Anyone care to review this and see if there are any problems I missed? Should I seek assistance professionally because I am always talking to walls here?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

As a former Senator you should of course know that the answer is yes.


As for the tax code, my preference would be direct pay increases, hence why I shaped Clause 4 like that. The tax code provisions originated with Simfan's original text and I am hessitant to waive through a considerable change to that portion, without his okay. Now if six Senators prefer your idea (and even I do to an extent) irrespecitve of Simfan's wishes, then things will turn out to your satisfaction of course.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Did you pull that out of a list of generic lines to copy and paste into bill threads or something?

Yes, I have it in a notepad file along with "I understand the reasoning behind this bill, but I don't think it's a good idea and won't support it", "No objections", and so on.

So you have a ton of notepad files, too? You ever have it insert triple spacing into stuff you copied and pasted from off the web?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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Sponsor Feedback: Hostile (by request of Simfan)
Status: Vote to commence soon (my hope is this afternoon sometime, it is too soon right now)

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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Sponsor Feedback: Hostile (by request of Simfan)
Status: This amendment is now at vote, please vote Aye, Nay or Abstain.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

It probably isn't worth much now, but I had voted Aye right at the last minute and I got some kind of weird error and couldn't get back on the site until after the time expired.

I would hate to lose this bill after working on it for so long (so long that its original creator is not only departed from our midst as a Senator, but has also departed period...forever! Well, as far as the forum is concerned anyway).


Vote on amendment 53:35

Aye (2): Ben and Napoleon - weird combination
Nay (3): HagridOfTheDeep, Oakvale, and Spamage.
Abstain (2): Averroës Nix and jdb

Didn't Vote (3): Franzl, JulioMadrid and NC Yankee - You people suck you know. (Yes, I do see what I did here, I am not that tired anymore. )

The amendment has not been adopted.   

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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Sponsor Feedback: Hostile (out of respect for Simfan, though I actaully agree with Nix's points and anticipate voting for this).
Status: Vote to commence at the earliest possible opportunity (24 hours from the time offered).

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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Sponsor Feedback: Hostile (out of respect for Simfan, though I actaully agree with Nix's points and anticipate voting for this).
Status: Senators, the above amendment is now at vote, please vote Aye, Nay or Abstain.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

AYE, Because with all due respect to Simfan, some things have to be left to the locals

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Vote on Amendment 53:37:

Aye (: Averroës Nix, Franzl, HagridoftheDeep, Napoleon, NC Yankee, Oakvale, Snowstalker and Spamage
Nay (2): Ben and jdb
Abstain (0):

Didn't Vote (0): Wow yeah, ewwww baby with sugar on it, thats how I like it eww... I can't even believe its truth, its like having every thing I ever wanted....

Since this has enough votes to pass, Duke can close it when he comes on.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Vote on Amendment 53:37:

Aye (: Averroës Nix, Franzl, HagridoftheDeep, Napoleon, NC Yankee, Oakvale, Snowstalker and Spamage
Nay (2): Ben and jdb
Abstain (0):

Didn't Vote (0): Wow yeah, ewwww baby with sugar on it, thats how I like it eww... I can't even believe its truth, its like having every thing I ever wanted....

The amendment has been adopted.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Do we have any idea how this would actually impact teacher quality?  it will only teach education students to excel on tests that simply cannot be formulated in a way that ensures the highest quality teachers do best.

All you're doing here is giving teachers in white suburban school districts a tax break.

Ah what are you talking about? We kind of just stripped the tax provisions and left the bill that does basically that. Are you reading from the OP? Cause that simply doesn't reflect the current text of the bill, which gives a pay raise to those who teach in trouble schools, like rural and inner-city schools.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Ah, Mr. Secretary?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Anyway, I might have one more amendment here to tidy up a few things. Anyone else have anything to add while we are waiting for the Secretary to find his reading glasses?

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

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Sponsor Feedback: Origination
Status: Senators have 24 hours to object.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

The amendment has been adopted.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

Senators,

I think one thing that may be holding us back is that, while necessitated by experience, there is an expected limitation on what a Senator or Senator(s) offers or puts forward in terms of their ideas regarding say this education bill because it is narrowly focused and thus barely related items that address another sub-issue are often ignored. This is problematic because it limits and blocks potential solutions like the idea that I proposed concerning the pay of low performing schools, which has become the only portion of the bill that remains really, as ironic as that is.

The reason we have been hitting this piecemeal is because our experience with gigantic reform efforts is that they often start bad, get worse and take forever to be concluded and may even never get finished. That was the lesson of the Comprehensive Social Security Reform effort back in 2011.

On the flip side, we should refrain from having a comprehensive strategy and the identifying the key aspects and driving them forward through these separate bills. I do have a comprehensive strategy in the back of my mind and that is what drove my support for bills in the past Senate and this bill here. Perhaps it would help if I laid out what my general strategy is, let people look at it and offer there own competing vision. Then we can break it apart sub-issue by sub-issue and while some Senators may hate own thing, they may love another and together we can get a lot of the problems in the system addressed.

Part I: The Situation As I See It:

The problem facing the education system in my view is that it is discriminatory, it is a disappointment, it is destroying our country's economic future as it is destroying the lives of millions of people case by case, individual by individual. We have too many kids who don't even graduate and then amongst those who do, they lack the competence in not only the basic knowledge of reading, writing and math, but also the various skills that the economy needs. Skills that may include something as concrete as knowledge of a certain type of advanced math or science, or is more abstract like critical thinking, analysis and team work that aren't something that can be demonstrated on pen and paper at all, more or less on a standardized test. I find it most ironic (and I live for comedic irony, but here it makes you want to cry because it is destroying our future) is that perhaps the most misguided approach to "fixing education" ever, No Child Left Behind" was driven by mostly business centered interest. And admittedly, they have the most interest in seeing that our system works because they are on the front lines economically and see what is wrong and what it is doing to this country when they can't find the qualified people to fill the skilled posts and thus hundreds or thousands of low skilled jobs that would have come with them end up overseas too because they have the skilled workers. Yet the reform centered around enshrining a nationwide standard for testing that foisted tests on many states and the schools therein that didn't even test for the things that they needed most (this is where you start laughing only to have it give way to crying after a second or two).

We have millions of hard working teachers who go unrewarded for the seemingly miraculous results they manage to achieve working with poor and minority students and somehow manage to breakthrough. At the same time many ineffective teachers who don't work well with most kids or don't possess the necessary level of creativity to break through with even the average student, more or less those who are more challenged remain in the situation and continue to do a disservice to the kids and to the system.

We have many schools that often sold a bill of goods on whatever implement they may be acquiring, but lack the resources to ensure that they are getting what they actually need or want for the particular task. They can't compete with the resources of the corporate education supply chains that often come in town with big promises and even flashier demonstrations of what they can do for them. They most certainly can't oversee these operations and ensure that they aren't using robo-graders to grade these tests, tests which are really of poor quality to begin with and do not measure what matters most as I described above.

We have these rough schools in the inner cities and yes in the rural areas, that we acknowledge aren't up to par for reasons that are obvious. Primarily they lack the funding and thus don't have the resources that they need because the tax base is not there to support it. On the other hand, we have these schools that are in the wealthy and upscale suburban areas that we tend to think are doing well, but really aren't challenging their students and even worse are dumming down the education to make the grades look good so that some politicians can claim it is working and hard working middle and working class people, who don't have the time to police the quality of their kid's education, never realize they too are getting cheated or rather their kids are getting cheated out of their future.

Another problem is that out of a desperation to try and fix the mess, we have seen educational authority become centered Nyman and what is worse the old tried and failed FDR approach of "Try something and see if works" must have been guiding it because most of what has been tried at the Federal level has in fact made the problem worse, much worse. Many states, states like Massachusetts and Connecticut, the places that basically created the public school education system and led the nation in the fight to educate its populace and in the process helped lead the nation into the Industrial Age and beyond, have seen their systems corrupted and dummed down by misguided federal mandates and thus the quality of their systems have been reduced in a (yet more ironic stupidity) a likely attempt to export their success to Texas and Alabama. These states obviously need assistance, but results must guide our policy and the current interventions have not aided them so much as it has damaged the pioneers on this front.