Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama has a podcast that if you haven't heard of, you should give it a shot even if you don't live in Illinois. (I'm from California.) I would normally quite cynical about politics, but there's something about his podcast that's refreshing.
This week, the issue is education reform. Addressed in the podcast is the idea for 20 innovation districts across the United States to test new innovative ways to improve education and keeping qualified teachers, especially in improverished areas where better qualified teachers often move to wealthier school districts.
He outlines three goals that these innovation districts can look at in teachers recruitment, retaination, training:
1.) Encourage young people to become teachers with opportunities
2.) Matching young teachers with master teachers
3.) Ongoing professional development- more chances for teachers to learn more over the summer
4.) Have teachers earn more money for performing in underperforming schools, their skill levels, their qualifications, etc.
The 20 innovation districts also seems promising. It will be interesting to see what comes of it.
After Bush's State of the Union speech outlining education reform to improve American competitiveness coupled with this, I'm a bit hopeful for a bi-partisan effort to improve education.
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I listened to Barack Obama's speech at the democratic convention for Kerry and thought he was a brilliant speaker. He is not just a great speaker but he is working towards making changes in our society. Towards the end of the podcast he mentioned our fiscal deficit, 8 trillion dollars. Like he said under our current leadership this problem will not be solved.
I have high hopes that in 2012, Mr. Obama will run for president and help our country get back to where we need to be. We need someone like him in office, hopefully the democrats will continue to groom him for office.
He sounds OK - However - I might be sounding cynic here - he's probably not going to be elected as president any time soon. It all has to do with the name - Barack Obama. I have no issue with it, but there are people here that would go crazy, since his name sounds a bit foreign - and there are a lot of people who'd go crazy over it.
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If a society is willing to give freedom for temporary security, they deserve neither.
Oh, yeah. Let's just keep electing people with names like "George Bush". Get over the name. On the plus side - It's a great name for googling, you can go to Google news and type in Obama and read tons of great stuff, whereas if his name were Smith...
Anyhway, he's my senator, I have heard him speak in person - he's the real deal.
I like the sound of his name and how he describes himself as a "skinny kid with a funny name."
And I love how without mentioning anything about being elected president, people's minds go straight towards that. That's pretty powerful, by itself even taking that there will be people biased against him.
If you like Senator Obama's podcast you will also want to check out the podcast from Senator John Edwards. He was the first major politician to do a podcast.
To subscribe to his podcast:
itpc://www.oneamericacommittee.com/podcast.xml
To Visit his site:
http://www.oneamericacommittee.com/
Rob @ podCast411
I have been wondering how he was doing. Thanks!
I did not watch the podcast, sorry, Im not in a postion to do so at the moment, so maybe someone could answer this question for me. Where is the government going to get the money to pay teachers more to work at "underperforming" schools? While educational aid is distributed federally, once it is distributed to each state, it is up to the state legislatures to divide it amoung the public state schools. So I guess the second question is can states afford to give underperforming schools more money? I think it kind of answers itself. No, the risk of the money being wasted is too high. Everyone should receive equal opportunities, but at the same time no one wants to see money wasted.
Its kind of like this: there is a school in my area who you could call underperforming and in the middle of cracktown USA. The state decided to give them aid for more technology so that maybe students would begin to excel. Have they? No. How do I know? My brother goes there, long story...lol. But the point is part of the problem is that the school has not done anything with the technology. This is a problem that is on several different levels. But maybe I just misunderstood your desription on his goals.