This is an education plan I could get behind.
One additional requirement, besides diverting reasonable amounts of money into education: demand improvements in quality. Not this misbegotten accountability of No Child Left Behind, but shakeups in how school boards manage budgets; remove the elected officials from the business of dictating pedagogy and content, and let the qualified professionals design curricula that actually works. I listened to the video and just felt a sense of dread at the thought of the Texas Board of Education suddenly flush with new money and deciding to buy Bibles for every child, or something similarly absurd.
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As a product of the "gifted" program, I feel that critical thinking should be taught to everyone.
That's in addition to everything mentioned above, obviously.
(Probably should not be commenting on blogs at 1 in the morning if my goal is clear and concise communication.)
What the fuck is this "human capital... is uniquely American" bullshit? Does he want everyone to hate America or what?
@mothwentbad
I think he means that American "Human Capital" cannot be raised from outside sources.
I've been thinking this ever since I've been in school. Education is what separates the first world from the third. If I were ruler of the world, our military would get our current education budget, our health care our current military budget, and our educational system would get our current health care budget.
Education is the only thing that can enable the "American dream". If you can't get educated, no amount of "stick-to-it-ivieness" will get your kids high paying reliable jobs.
Why such a wussed out plan? In Australia we provide free public education in well funded schools till university and then only ask for less than 25% of the cost of a degree (many of us think this is too high). We allow students to take out low interest loans from the government which are only paid back as a small percentage of wages once they reach a certain threshold (4% starting at $43 000 a year, bit less than the median wage). We fund it by not spending ludicrous amounts of money on useless military hardware.
Why does the American government hate poor people so much? I just don't get it.
I`d thing there are studies regularly done on different education systems, how to teach maths, science, ... ( for example PISA @ OECD ).
Wouldn`t it make sense to have national curriculum used all over the US decided by a national body made of science/maths/english/... teachers rather than locals ? And to try to apply the best international standards for it ?
And when a method introduces problems, try to fix it and think a new method ? (thinking of reading methods introduced 30 years ago and the apparent increase in dyslexia issues)
Or more than national standards, it is the culture we have in schools, that need to be changed ? ( "learning is bad", "highly educated people are too be seen with suspicion", "excellence is to be avoided, ..." )?
As a teacher, what would you recommend / what programs do you think will have the best effects ?
A national curriculum isn't really politically viable. States jealousy guard control over their schools, and you can imagine what the response of Texas would be to guvment intafeerance.
You can just throw money at schools. Smaller class sizes are helpful, but it's been demonstrated that they aren't the be-all, end-all solution. I'd like to see a national upheaval in education, like the one being spearheaded by Michelle Rhee in DC. Her methods might be controversial in some quarters, but I think we need some heavy-hitters willing to punch through calcified education establishments (and that includes an intransigent teachers union).
We need merit pay, student assessment of teachers, easier hiring and firing, better incentives for low income and minority students, leaner and meaner administrative apparatuses, more funding for school supplies instead of athletic events and astroturf, later school start times for teenagers, radical altering of state-level funding mechanisms so that every school gets the same dollar amount regardless of the income level in the district. We need higher teacher pay to attract the best and brightest to teach our children, more technical and science courses to train the next generation of engineers and researchers, a rigorous humanities requirement that creates more complete human beings instead of more adept test-takers. We need to regard environmental stewardship as a necessary prerequisite for a responsibly body politic, not just a luxury. We need guarantees of school funding to prevent anti-tax crusaders from crippling schools in rural areas, and college scholarships for low-income students so that they know their hard work will be rewarded, more after-school enrichment programs to fosters students unique talents, more magnet and vocational schools to support those students who don't feel comfortable in the traditional university/CC track. We need free or nearly-free childcare for every child in America, so parents mever have to choose between raising a child and keeping a roof over that child's head. We need schools to be more than places where children go to learn; we need schools that create good, informed citizens of this country, and of the world.
Naturally, a lot of those things would be a hard sell, especially to parts of the country that look backward for examples of what a school ought to be, and to teach. But it's either that, or we continue to see the gaps between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, enlightened and ignorant, continue to tear this country apart.
Can it be that American (in particular GOP) leaders fear a well educated public where nearly everybody can think for themselves?
The American Idiot is easy to control, has little understanding and knowledge of the greater picture, is easily contained in religious or ideological groups, and satisfied with bread and circus.
Uh, and not uniquely American; been tried and tested by religious institutions for hundreds of years.
PZ, unfortunately the solutions you propose have been tried in the UK and haven't worked. In fact, the interference from (presumably) well-meaning experts has screwed over childhood education so thoroughly that the political swing is in exactly the opposite direction here.
We had political chicanery at a local level with our education system back in the 70's. It wasn't too serious but it was there. In the 80's national government introduced a National Curriculum. It was introduced with the best will in the world to block this politics. Of course that didn't work. If you hand politicians the reins they will take more and more control. Over the 90's the National Curriculum became a mechanism for complete control. British education was ruined. I compare the education my nephew is supposed to be getting (assuming perfect facilities, teachers and compliance with the Curriculum) with the education I got in the 70's and I weep.
We have little or no mathematics in our sciences. We have precious little science.
The independent schools are abandoning the government approved examinations as fast as they can because they know they are a debased currency. They are getting formal warnings from the education inspectors because they deviate from the one true path.
And this is all because central government took control.
Be careful what you wish for.
- Bob Dowling
Bob Dowling @9 doesn't tell the full story: he omits to mention the baleful influence in the UK of the what are called round here "liberals" (i.e. left-wing ideologues). Their policy has been to deliberately hold back bright kids in pursuit of an egalitarian agenda. In reality, there is bound to be a bell-curve in academic performance, and any system which doesn't take account of this is going to be ineffective. To be fair, and we're seeing this in Germany now, articulate middle-class parents, whose kids don't make the grade can be just as effective in undermining a good education system.
While we're on Marx, whenever one sees a post like this from PZ or his minions, bear in mind that most of them probably depend on public money, and are inevitably going to be in favour of anything leading to more public spending.
Honestly I wish the Texas SBOE would buy Bibles for kids. It's the best book for deconversion out there.
Why does the American government hate poor people so much? I just don't get it.
Because Americans hate poor people.
Don't forget increased parental accountability.
We have similar issues here in France, with curriculum deteriorating over time in attempts to raise success rates at exams not by improving the teaching, but by lowering the bar.
The content of the curriculum is a difficult issue, and while as a maths teacher I have strong, thoughtful opinions about that, I am modest enough to see how complex the issue is.
However, one point in that video caught my attention: the fact that class headcount is going up. The underlying assumption seems to be that high class headcount is a cause of poor education level.
And I disagree with that.
While correlation doesn't make causation, causation *does* make correlation, and all international studies [that I have seen] about correlation between class headcount and education level show little, if any, such correlation.
On the other hand, class headcount is inversely proportional to education cost. And while good education is priceless, it does have a cost. So blindly multiplying classes and teachers for the sake of reducing class headcount is likely to be an investment with very poor education level return on the dollar.
My contention is that the most probable causal factor of poor education level is class heterogeneity, not class headcount. And while increasing class headcount *does* often increase heterogeneity, there are better ways, more focused ways, to reduce class heterogeneity than blindly reducing headcount.
In some cases, classes of 40 or more are just fine, when the class is very homogeneous. In other cases, classes of 10 might be too many already, if the students are very heterogeneous (or necessitate special attention for whatever reason).
Voilà,
That was just a very small point from a French maths teacher.
Regards from Paris.
@5 It's not that they hate poor people.
When lots of poor kids aren't able to climb the social ladder, there will be more niche space available for the rich kids.. Government is ruled by multinationals or whomever has the biggest cake, and is as thus owned by rich people who naturally attempt to ensure the position of their children (or fitness if you will).
It might even be kind of an evolutionary (cultural, not strictly genetic!) arms race in which a bias towards social behaviour is exploited by a few social parasites. And as long as they prosper, it will get worse.
What a concept! Invest the money of ordinary people in ordinary people; instead of bonuses for the wealthy or armaments for misbegotten wars!
Nah. It'll never work. Sounds too socialist. Like public libraries and fire departments.
like Clausentum for example, obviously his daddy has the green
Unfortunately the education system is infested with useless bureaucrats and they're often the ones making decisions - so good luck routing them.
It isn't the money. It's the method.
Neil Postman wrote Teaching as a Subversive Activity decades ago. This does not require large budgets, just avoiding looking for easy answers.
Our schools fail because they do not focus on understanding. They focus on memorization, because standardized tests do not assess understanding well.
HELL no. Firing bad teachers should be easier, yes. But it should rest with the principals, school board, and parents. Not the little snowflake who got a D and thinks his or her teacher should be fired because they grade harshly. And merit pay is a joke. What merit? Grades and passing rate? Then every student will magically pass, you'll find (they won't learn anything, of course; teachers will just write in the passing grade). Standardized testing? That has a boatload of problems on its own--e.g. you can predict a student's SAT score extremely well based on their parents' income.
Also, a national curriculum is the exact opposite of the direction we need to go. The whole reason Texas is a problem is that it's too much power in one place over curricula. A national curriculum might sound like a good idea when Obama's in office, but would you like the idea so much under Bush, and would you be confident enough that nobody that conservative could ever make it to the White House again?
@tortorific#921e1 (#5)
"We fund it by not spending ludicrous amounts of money on useless military hardware."
Hmm. I thought Australia is still buying equipment that we discard; do you still have any General Dynamics F-111s? We got rid of them over a decade ago. Since you last spent a fortune on a submarine that has a hard time resurfacing after submerging, I hear you're planning to spend even more on warships - I'm betting that they don't float or don't move and use technology that the Chinese would laugh at - or some brilliant accountant decides that a ship can be made cheaper by leaving out the middle section to make it shorter. Australia wastes an awful lot on military hardware. At least you're not starting big expensive wars.
It's about money when you can't afford to hire teachers. Our school system is replacing some of them with online courses next year. I can't imagine that going well.
RijkswaanVijanD @17
You have missed the point, presumably deliberately.
Anyway, If by that you mean he was rich: no completely wrong!
People complain about the lowering of standards, but our modern philosophy is that ALL children must get an education - moving up through the system to graduate from high school. We are pushing through children who would have dropped out to work in farms or factories 50 years ago. So, yes, the standards have to be diluted to pass everyone.
If resources are tight, we should be focusing extra help on those students who are struggling just to keep up - to be blunt, the good students will do well with whatever system is in place and the bright ones will rise above it.
The critical years for learning are grades 3-4, when children transition from oral learning to learning from reading & writing. If a child starts to fail then, they fall hopelessly behind and usually never catch up. Remedial teaching in the basics should start in grades 3-5; not wait until a kid is in middle school - or even worse high school. It is too late by then...
Americans hate poor people for the simple reason that Jesus demonstrates his favor by making people rich. Ergo, if you’re poor, it must be because you’ve done something to make Jesus hate you.
And if Jesus hates you, you really must be one sorry SOB.
As for the topic at hand…sure, throwing money at schools in and of itself isn’t going to fix the problem. But the problems simply won’t be fixed without throwing lots of money at them — for the simple reason that their budgets have been raped, slashed, and burned since about the time that I was in grade school. California, I’m afraid to admit, started the trend with Prop 13.
Simply put, people are too damned fucking selfish and seriously shortsighted. They’d much rather not pay an extra few bucks a month in property (and other) taxes than live in a wealthy, healthy civil society. They’ve forgotten that living in a prosperous industrialized nation isn’t cheap, and so they’ve mortgaged the future in a selfish attempt to be able to buy a 54″ plasma TV instead of the 52″ model.
Cheers,
b&
--
EAC Memographer
BAAWA Knight of Blasphemy
``All but God can prove this sentence true.''
This is what the prosperity gospel movement is when you boil it down to its essence.
A 0.5% tax on financial transactions? *facepalm*
We (Sweden) have already tried that, the result was that the tax income from the capital gains tax was reduced by about as much as the gain from the transaction tax, the equity trading moved to London (they will happily take your business too) and our bonds and futures markets went virtually extinct.
This idea is a good way to harm the market with an exceptionally small, if any, upside. Just increase the income and capital gains tax if you must raise new funds rather than diverting them from other expenses.
Seems every country is having problems with its education system these days.
Here (Quebec), with our "State" standard for education, a lot of people are complaining about drop-out rates and parents not understanding the way their kids are evaluated. As a high school math tutor, I understand their frustration.
The problem is that they seem to focus on non-solutions - like reducing class headcount, or introducing sports as a way to keep children from dropping out. Well, even if you keep them inside the building 'till they're 16, there are just 15 of them per class and they're all athletic won't give them the help they need.
Children who have learning disabilities do exist. Children who are a little slower than others do exist. What they need is targetted specialized help - that which has been cut, leaving parents to buy support from people like me, if they can afford it. And if they can face the fact that little Bobbie just isn't as fast as the other kids.
And conversely, as a gifted student, I have seen how many teachers just don't know what to do with children who are faster than others. I have also seen some of them drop out, out of sheer boredom.
What most problematic education systems in developped countries have in common is that they seem to be in denial that yes, some kids don't learn as fast as others. And as most parents are also in denial, there is no political pressure to spend the money in the correct direction.
Need more charter schools. I'm well aware that markets aren't the most popular thing on this particular website. But in areas with really poor public K-12 schools, kids who used their vouchers to attend private school have a higher graduation rate for less money. Grades are the same or better.
And on that same note, teachers unions need to be abolished. Pay is based on seniority, not performance. Firing lousy teachers is absurdly difficult.
Someone writes, ...you can predict a student's SAT score extremely well based on their parents' income.
How is this an argument against standardized testing? With a batch of similar kids, a difference in performance between teachers would be pretty clear. Unless you're claiming that SAT scores are almost entirely predetermined, in which case there is no point in having *any* standards. I think most people will reject that.
I forgot to mention that there are a number of regulations on higher education that cripple "human capital". A good example would be certain legal schools taught part-time by actual lawyers. Studies have shown that many do as well as Harvard law students, and do so for very little cost. Yet they remain un-credited for inane reasons.
That being said, I think anyone should be able to get a free higher education, provided their grades are good. That is a powerful incentive - if your GPA stays above 3.5, the government will pay for your education in full. For every .1 it drops, you must to pay 5% of your tuition. This is a better idea than giving scholarships and whatnot to high school students, who do not face the immediate financial incentive to maintain high grades. (Besides, it's much more reasonable to expect responsible behavior from a 20 year old than a 15 year old.)
And while we're at it, let's think about school's priorities as well.
Well, we're trying that. And it's not working very well. Our latest education reform has introduced "competency" testing.
In maths, for example, kids just learning their algebra are given complex (stepwise) problems to solve on their own. The gifted kids sail through it, the average ones, not so much.
They have just learned a new technical skill, algebra. They have not mastered it yet - they still make mistakes on very basic manipulations. Of course complex problems confuse them.
And memorization has its place in learning - think of things like language for example. More and more it's becoming a lost skill. For many of my students, the greatest help I can give is a mnemonic to end confusion between concepts. Why aren't they taught those in school ? In fact they should be taught how to make mnemonics of their own - it's not a difficult technique to learn.
I think of school as the place you should get mental tools. How to write without mistakes. Algebra. Logic. A second language. And things that are not taught by teachers - social skills. I don't think you can realistically expect all students to make brilliant use of these tools. So the role of a school should be to make sure a student has filled his/her toolbox with operational tools first, not to try to make each one of them a little Einstein.
This is not a very well thought out position Mr. Reich. ALL government institutions are suffering during the poor economy, not just schools. Funding for ALL government functions is at risk. While I am in full agreement that spending $700 billion to bail out Wall Street was wrong, I don't see how having done so justifies spending more money on public schools -- at least not yet.
Mr. Reich hints that the problems our schools face can be solved with more money. No study I'm aware of has shown that spending more money improves student performance. Besides, it seems to me before we spend money to fix the 'problems' we should know what is causing them.
One of the primary reasons we are having such a hard time determining the cause of the problems with our schools is the arguments on both sides are becoming more and more based on politics rather than facts. Getting more Federal tax dollars inevitably means more involvement at the local level by the Federal government. That means further politicizing an issue that already suffers from excessive politicization.
#29 William
Comparing schools that can exclude students to ones that cannot muddles the statistics. Private schools can deny entry to low academic achievers, and the mentally and physically handicapped. Public schools must accept & educate everyone. If the private institutions accepted everyone, don't you realize that they would eventually sink down to the same level as public schools?
It is an example of the elitism that is such a hallmark of the American ethos. We focus on the shining successes but forget all the "losers" don't dry up & blow away. The average or worse students grow up, get married, need jobs, buy houses & raise families.
The problem isn't how we educate our "best & brightest" - it is how we educate the "average & lower".
Hmmm . . .
Well, I'd be interested in any study you can show where improvements came about without spending more money.
One of the biggest indicators of student success in any school is parental involvement. Those parents involved enough to send their kids to private schools will work at home to see that they succeed.
Add to that the selectivity of the private schools, and the ability to not take the handicapped and would be gang-bangers that the public schools have to teach by law, and it isn't surprising that private schools appear better than the public schools. But its comparing apples and oranges, since they aren't directly comparable. Which is why those who promote "competition" avoid the fact that it isn't a level playing field.
50 years ago there were farms and factories...
However, irony aside, I agree that a considerable amount of money is being wasted trying to provide a single educational product for all students, regardless of feasibility or utility. In California students must pass Algebra in order to graduate from high school; I've seen students who don't know how to add fractions "pass" Algebra (and you folks don't believe in divine intervention!) We provide our children intellectual pabulum and wonder why we are becoming a nation of dolts.
gr8hands@35, given the state of our economy and our nearly $13 trillion in federal (federal only, not state and local) debt, shouldn't the default position be to not spend unless data shows it necessary and beneficial?
Meh, I stopped watching 15 seconds in, because anyone who compares the $700 billion bailout to a $700 billion expenditure doesn't really understand how the bailout works. While not defending or condoning the bailout per se, it's important to point out that this is a LOAN, not a GIFT. And while some have argued about the in-practice likelihood of the gov't actually getting paid back, a similar experience in Japan suggests that it just might work out that way.
Not to say I wouldn't like to see more money funneled towards education, but a loan vs. an expenditure are not an apples-to-apples comparison.
I think there needs to be something better than standardized testing of kids to assess teachers, because this system, as I see it, pushes teachers to teach kids how to take standardized tests rather than teaching them the subject matter, or how to think for that matter - which I feel is part of the problem - not completely sure what the answer is - peer review perhaps? Or regular classroom audits from an external assessor- probably a more expensive option, but if it works (and it may not) surely better than a system essentially designed (albeit accidentally) to drill kids in test taking.
Ideally, the best form of assessment in many classes would be an application of principles. More simply put, we'd get rid of multiple choice and other forms of selected response. English tests would be 100% essays and sentence answers, science tests would be lab experiments, math would be long-form answers with full work shown and partial credit available, foreign language tests would have a written and oral component, etc.
Science teaching is what I do, so I'm most familiar with it and I'll use it as the example here: if you assess the teacher by whether or not their students can actually perform the lab experiment and, say, arrange a circuit to get three bulbs to light, measure the resistance of each one, measure the equivalent resistance of the circuit, and correctly show how well their results do or don't match up to the theoretical values expected via Ohm's Law, then that, to me, is a fair assessment that can be directly tied to the teacher's ability to teach them the subject material.
Of course, you'd still have to control the results for parent income level, whether the course is advanced or on-level or remedial, etc. But it would make a lot more sense than our current standardized tests do.
Private schools can deny entry to low academic achievers, and the mentally and physically handicapped. Public schools must accept & educate everyone.
Full-blown private schools, yes, but charter schools are still subject to some regulation. Many charters schools use a lottery system for admissions. The point is, if these schools want to be eligible for vouchers, admissions standards can be, and often are, inclusive.
Well, I'd be interested in any study you can show where improvements came about without spending more money.
http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/83314577.html Better graduation rates for lower cost (though on average, scores are the same.) The same can be shown for parts of Arkansas. The current K-12 public systems have incredibly poor incentive structures and very wasteful teachers unions. Is it really valid to demand more money for schools if the school system itself is quite wasteful?
Ewan R, good ideas! There is probably *some* practical way of judging teacher performance, and it should be a high priority of those working in education to devise one. People should not accept that bad teachers get a pass, and often are paid more based simply on seniority (from a job that is nearly impossible to lose.)
We won't have qualified experts organizing our educational system until we have qualified experts appointing them.
Imagine a congress full of political scientists, hashing out proper governance rather than a bunch of retired lawyers, business executives, and scum-fuckers scrambling for their cut.
@ NOR #36
This is a very good point. I do notice that a greater invovlement by parents usually translates into more success. And, there are a few bad teachers out there so I would put a greater importance on the parents when a child comes across this scenario. My 9th grade English teacher had to be one of the worst teachers ever, so my father read the books the class required with me and talked to me about them rather than let this schlepp fill my head with shit.
Also, I have noticed that there seems to be a lack of enforcable punishment given to teachers for poor performance. Teachers are watering down the material because if it stays at higher levels then more students will fail and continue to be in the system wasting taxpayer money. I had several teachers tell me that their job was to make sure the kids are where they are supposed to be on time, and if they happen to learn something then it's a bonus. And when I asked them about workload they said that if they offered students time to do the work in class rather than take it home and do it then the students were more likely to actually do the owrk. It was like 20% would do the homework but 80% would do it at the end of class if they were given 15 minutes. I think this is also related to parental apathy.
Actually, this is very frequent. I've had to teach how to add fractions to almost every kid I coach in maths. And you'd be very surprised at the number of them who absolutely can't do any mental calculation at all - who don't know their addition and multiplication tables.
I don't think it means they are dolts - rather, I think it's because the calculator was put to early in their hands. They can do algebra just as well as we did, except they use decimal numbers.
No. I believe that teachers should be held to high, high standards in their training and in their work but I do not believe that they should receive more money for merit for the simple reason of difficulty in grading teachers.
Teachers should, however, be paid well and the job of teaching/education should be considered a high-status job-- separate from the teacher being high and mighty, this is knowledge/education that is important, not individual teachers. Teachers should be at various stages of life (e.g. not all old). At the moment in Ontario, we have a total overload of teachers, which is bad for teachers trying to get a job but I think probably pretty good for students.
Schools need to work as a whole. I've been in quite a lot of schools and the schools that are the best, the most welcoming, are the ones where there is a lot going on. The principal is right there, leading the charge to get more parent involvement, a better selection in the library and a good involved librarian, strategies for literacy and mathematics, teachers in grade groups working together and sharing ideas and school-wide endeavours. The school's feeling should be one of "all teachers do their best" rather than "everybody for herself/himself."
Teachers should have smaller groups of students in largish classrooms. They should have a solid budget for supplies for that classroom (all teachers buy stuff for their own classroom).
There should be funds for more focused remedial work early on. We have something in Ontario called Reading Recovery, which is where students in grades 1-3 read one-on-one with a Special Education teacher or an Educational Assistant.
Ideally, the curriculum should be reasonably flexible and intuitive. I think it's okay to have a curriculum, but I think too many standardized tests are the worst thing to happen to schooling. Every teacher I talk to says, "I drop everything to prepare them for X standardized test." Meaning, the teachers stop teaching in order to prepare for tests. That's silly. Standardized tests often have political motives ("This year we got more As!")... and we want to avoid that.
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Don't be ridiculous. That'd be socialism!
They have to buy their own bibles and bring them to class, silly.
The problem with standardized tests is that they score very high on 'reliability' (the situation where the same answer gets the same score, no matter who wrote it or who marked it) but very low on 'validity' (the degree to which the test result tells you something about the real world).
"What's the atomic number of sodium?" is thus a question that provides you with a very reliable answer (in this specialist sense of the word).
"What's the best way to store sodium in the lab?" is a much more valid question, but it doesn't lend itself to standardized answers. The famous Niels Bohr joke shows why:
Niels Bohr Joke
Politicians love standardized tests, though, since they give the illusion of measurability and accountability.
They often lead to 'merit pay' too, which would be a great idea if only we could all agree on what 'merit' is!
That tax he's proposing sounds a lot like the Robin Hood Tax proposed for the UK. It's a really good idea. Which means, of course, that the government will never allow it...
@MadScientist we also bought a whole bunch of navy helicopters that couldn't fly over water, I never claimed the Australian government was not full of idiots.
Our defence budget is as a proportion of GDP half what America spends but almost all of that is on people. No one is fighting traditional wars any more we don't need tanks and planes so much as we need education and man power to fight the kind of counter-terrorism/counter-insurgency wars that are all the rage now-a-days.
The old F-111's are still our main aerial strike force (though we have some F-18s so that we can actually fight in the dark), they were obsolete 10 years ago but we don't want to admit that. There is a lot of talk at the moment of buying a whole bunch of useless planes, something about a gap in the capabilities of the air force we don't use but hopefully that won't happen.