THE PROBLEMS WITH US EDUCATION

Teachers in Wisconsin are on an illegal strike for union rights, higher pay, etc. I won't presume to argue either for or against their case, but I am very concerned about the quality of public education in the United States. Does anyone want to argue that education in the US is OK when the US ranks 30th among nations in math and science knowledge of US students? So what is wrong with US education? Here are the problems that I believe we have:

1. There is a generally an "I don't care" attitude among both teachers and students.  Students don't care about school because they are forced to go and because they are not properly motivated to get an education. Teachers do not teach the most important lesson which is Why People Need to be Educated and what are the great benefits of education as well as the downside if a person is not educated. Teachers are not motivated because they know that no matter how hard they teach and work at educating children, they will still get the same pay. There is no incentive to do their best. There is no merit pay system.

2.  The schools have no competition. The public school systems are total state monopolies so there is no incentive for any one school to provide any better education than any other school. Schools should be operated by private corporations that are chartered to provide the best possible education and their work is monitored to verify that they do, of course. The best run schools that achieve the best results for students receive additional bonuses so that there will be competition and a reward for better results.

3. Education is not valued by students or parents because it is free and actually forced on people. Education should be dear and all students should pay something according to their parents income. This would also provide additional funds for teacher's pay and other benefits.

4. There are too many "goof-off" courses available to students in high schools. I know this is true because I myself went through a public school system and there were always courses available for students to take that were very easy and would allow students to get out of taking more serious math, science, chemistry, and biology courses that the students should have been taking.

5.  The school systems are very rigid with more time wasted on political issues than actual teaching activities. 

6. Students and teachers have too much time off. A long summer vacation, "spring break", "fall break", "teacher days" and short hours. If we are going to have better education for our students we need to spend more time at it.

7. Poor discipline in school buildings, class rooms, and on school grounds. A lot of our students are not safe at school because of a lack of discipline and poor security measures. It is easy for a student to walk right into a school even though he is carrying a weapon of some sort.

The entire US public school system needs a total overhaul if we are interested at all in having better educated students.

NOW IS A CRITICAL TIME FOR THE UNITED STATES

It seems like the politicians in Washington DC do not realize how much trouble the US is in right now and are not going to do anything about it. We have spent our nation into almost impossible debt, that can never be paid- off, spending on worthless entitlement programs and other boondoggle programs of no lasting value. We have spent trillions on so-called bail outs that have done almost nothing and we still have heavy unemployment. Our balance of trade with foreign nations is ridiculous. We import billions of dollars in cheap goods every year wiping out our own industries and building up the economies of countries that are really enemies of our country. Free trade is killing our industries because our own industries can not compete with the practically slave labor rates of foreign nations. To fix this problem we need FAIR trade instead of free trade. This means taxes or tariffs on goods that are priced below our domestically produced goods or are made with much lower labor rates than ours. Because of so-called free trade, we have lost many industries. As just a few examples, we have lost the textile industry, shoes, consumer electronics, household goods, and other important industries. A few US manufactures that are left have either moved their factories overseas, or are in the process of moving them.  Heavy industries such as steel, machine tools, heavy equipment, aircraft, and shipbuilding, are all in serious straits because of the free trade. Now we let our infrastructure decay but don't have any money left to fix it. Our railroads are antiquated, our roads and bridges are falling apart. We are doing almost no new infrastructure construction which is hurting our labor force and our heavy equipment and steel industries. One of the worst situations is in our energy sector where we are almost entirely dependent on the OPEC robber barons for our oil supplies. There is no way this condition should continue! I could go on but I am sure you get the picture and have known these facts all along. The important point is that our government is doing nothing to correct our situation. Please write and call your Congressmen and make sure they understand your concerns.

OBAMA'S SPEECH TO THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

President Obama made a great speech to the Chamber of Commerce today but he left out one important fact that apparently he considers impossible to do anything about. And that is the heavy imbalance between our imports and our exports. We are still importing far more than we export in terms of dollars. The reason is that manufactured goods made overseas are generally much cheaper than what we can manufacture here in the US for the same price. So what could we do? We could raise tariffs or tax imported goods so that there is a level playing field for US manufactures. Doing this would also encourage business people to build plants and hire people in the US to make products domestically. We know that we need jobs here so why can't we fix our trade policies to take care of this trade imbalance problem? The nay-sayers will try to scare us by saying, "Oh, import taxes and tariffs will start a trade war!" Well if it does, so be it! Businesses will eventually learn that they have to deal with it and re-adjust their business practices accordingly.