Posted on 04/02/2002 8:46:39 AM PST by toenail
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
April 2, 2002
President Announces Early Childhood Initiative
Presidential Action
President Bush today announced a new initiative to improve early childhood education for millions of America's youngest children. The President's initiative will:
Background on Today's Early Childhood Announcement
In his State of the Union Address, President Bush stressed the need to prepare children to read and succeed in school with improved Head Start and early childhood development programs. These themes built upon the First Lady's Summit on Early Childhood Cognitive Development, held in July, 2001.
The early childhood initiative announced by President Bush seeks to improve the state of early childhood education, where too many children come to school unprepared to learn. Because a significant number of young children receive care from people other than their parents (62% of children age 5 or younger), Federal and state governments provide more than $18 billion annually (more than $14 billion in Federal support alone) to help families - particularly low-income families - provide for pre-K care.
Despite these significant resources, not all children are receiving care that is high-quality care because: 1) many states do not fully align what children are doing before they enter school with what is expected of them once they are in school; 2) early childhood programs are seldom evaluated based on how well they prepare students to succeed in school; and 3) there is not enough information for early childhood teachers, parents, and other child care providers on the activities that prepare children to be successful in school.
President Bush's early childhood initiative will help states and local communities to overcome these obstacles and strengthen early learning for young children by:
For more information on the President's initiatives please visit www.whitehouse.gov.
Forget the "liberal" and "conservative" labels, if you can, for just a moment. Look at where the policies come from, and who funds and staffs the organizations promoting them.
IMO, it is naive to think conservative ideals can be implemented through a Federal education bureaucracy founded on very shakey constitutional grounds.
Federal bureaucracies will always have more people who think like Hillary Clinton than George W. Bush.
Most policies come from state and local government. The best mix of ideologies that you will get is the local school board - but they are ill prepared to tackle the local school administrations prof. educators with large staffs of dedicated (you guessed it liberals)If you watch you local access cable you will see local School Bds get bowled over with well prepared reports from the edocracy.
The feds only give about 6-7% of funding to schools and have little impact, which is why I like Bush's limited and focused polices on one particular area - Reading.
They were not mentally defective, but they had been isolated from any input that would cause them to learn. It was very sad..their parents were just plain ignorant of how to do basic child raising.
The type of people this is directed to are the children who are parked in front of cartoons all during their waking hours, children who never see a book, never hear a nursery rhyme, in many cases are never spoken to. If they are not given some help, when they enter school they are doomed to failure from the first grade.
This cuts across racial lines, as many of the Head Start classes in my county are 100% white, children of parents who are CLUELESS.
I would rather the money be spent on this type of program, which has serious benefits and good results, than for the feel-good stuff that comes from some wings of the educational establishment.
The abolishment of the Department of Education is not an option at this time. Perhaps in 10 years, if we can demonstrate that standards and accountability matter to the students.
I mean these will be the people working and voting in liberals due to their low income level or need for welfare later.
You're also right, there are some loser parents out there who have never read a birthday card to their kids let alone a book.
And if our Founding Fathers had seen what we've become, they'd have never bothered revolting. You don't see any problem at all with some nameless, faceless bureaucracy collecting data on Americans from infancy (it'll be in utero soon)?
Do you really believe that government schools will ever be allowed to teach conservative values? Think that statement through. There is no way conservative values will be taught in the liberal machines that are public schools.
Two things you can count on; one is that there is no way to stop that money from being spent, so it might as well be spent the best way WE think it should be; and two, if we don't teach this kids to take care of themselves in the real world and to WANT to better themselves, then your children and my children and my grandchildren are going to have to pay MORE for them and their spawn in the future.
The suggestion that there is no way to stop the money from being spent seems to me you've already bought into the liberal way of life. That is the thinking that creates RINOs, that we cannot resist big government and the best we can do is mold it to fit our worldview. We are already defeated if we buy this reasoning.
The conservative response to the cesspool of the liberal government school system, in my opinion, is to protest the very idea that it is the government's responsibility to raise our children. Vouchers and initiatives that foster home schooling are far better solutions to this problem than merely capitulating and resigning ourselves to faulty ideals of liberalism and trying our best to dress them up in conservative terms.
I'm no fair weather fan when it comes to Bush. I volunteered for the guy during his campaign. But I really fear that his operatives have calculated a turn towards the middle and are more openly embracing liberal strategies.
As conservatives, I believe we are being played for suckers if we constantly claim that this is only a ploy to keep voters in the middle happy and that he will return to conservative roots after the Nov. elections.
I really believe we're seeing something dangerous going on here and I think the Bushies need to know that we're not going to abide by it.
Is that your standard answer to anybody who disagrees with you?
What would you rather have, an ATTEMPT to educate them while Bush is in office, or millions of children roaming the streets, illiterate and poor. Don't answer that.
School to Work is a federally funded program originating and maintained by the libs at The Dept of ED. If you go to the website you will see the program was sunsetted (by Bush) and no longer maintains a website. http://www.stw.ed.gov/
I see them clearly enough already: kids removed from society and from their parents and their parents' values, force-fed mindless pablum, assessed, charted, manipulated, and completely dependent on others to tell them what to do. Howlin's response? MORE! MORE! MORE!
It was not sunsetted; Bush just moved into the enforcement stage ("holding schools accountable"). Here is something you may be interested in. Lynne Cheney was one of the panelists.
The problem is, these programs always grow to include us. Educators will be running it, and the nonsense will flow our way.
One reason I took my daughter out of the public schools was because of all the condescending meddling justified by the educators to solve the problems created by other "bad parents."
That's the same barn door the sex education slipped through. More federaliziation isn't the answer.
No, it's not. It is a response to your curious suggestion that the money is going to be spent no matter what we do.
If you really believe that, why be involved with conservatism at all? Why shouldn't we just trade in our chips now and worship at the throne of big government?
I'll try to review it later, but it is a report critical of the STW program from a conservative think tank - with VP Cheney's wife as a panelist - that would be a good thing - yes?
Here is what it says on the STW website (a program I think is horrible and lowers expectations)"Thank you for your interest in www.stw.ed.gov. Due to the sunset of the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 in October 2001, as of January 3, 2002, a separate School-to-Work website will no longer be available. Relevant content will be integrated into websites maintained by the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration and the Department of Education’s Office of Vocational and Adult Education.
On the state level, the existence of public schools needs to be attacked on grounds other than the Constitution. But FEDERAL involvement in schooling ought to be attacked on Constitutional grounds.
If one is going to argue the government schools are needed for the Common Good, first you have to PROVE that homeschooling and private schooling produce ignorant, violent, immoral people, and that government schools produce learned, peaceful, virtuous people. Start proving!
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