So Rob Portman voted to confirm Betsy DeVos

[BmorePat87]

(02-09-2017, 09:58 PM)bfine32 Wrote: And as I've said: If you think improving be measuring with our own yardstick, while falling behind in the global measurement is improvement. I can see how someone with the traditional experience is the "qualified" choice.

Not sure as to the source of your confusion as I acknowledged your list of qualifications and pointed to Devos' parallel qualifications; perhaps you are just "downplaying" her qualifications.

I do not fear "being challenged by someone who knows what they're talking about", nor have I presented trick questions. I've simply tried to illustrate there may be other approaches as opposed to the traditional one. 

If you want to discuss education policy and why no one in education is shitting bricks over these PISA results that put us in the 20's, we can do so in the K-12 thread. Not accounting for poverty, we're just as good as the top countries, performing better in some areas than countries like Japan. We differ completely from these top countries, however, in the fact that we do not value or support teachers as well, we do not make the same investments in early childhood learning, we do not fully fund all schools, and we believe in a competition based system where the only measure of a successful school is the results of standardize testing. Long story short, that's completely off base if the proposals of this "change agent". We're not as high as many European and Asian nations and we haven't always been, but we have made drastic improvements over the decades, and downplaying that because the other countries are better makes you guilty of what you accused myself and Benton of doing with data. 

Your responses have been 1) merely asking how well schools have done and 2) suggesting that the only qualifications are being nominated and confirmed. If you want to play games, do so with someone who wants to deal with a round of  "that's not what I said".

Also, organizing the donation of money to politicians is not parallel experience to running 600+ schools with 400k students, 50k staff members, and a $6b budget. LOL, no one is downplaying her "experience". Stick with the "change agent" line, don't try to compare them.

As I said in the K-12 thread, there existed candidates whose sole experience was more than advocacy, candidates that actually ran school systems and  want to change the status quo in terms of how public schools operate. Some fully support public schools and praise the progress we've made while handcuffed by legislation that forces testing on students. Others want to see the federal government remove oversight and promote more charter and private schools, determined that competition will cause schools to perform. Trump met with one who had experience running 100 schools. He went with the person who hasn't run a single school. I guess I'm saying that doing is far more than paying others and asking them to do it. 

Jump into that thread and see some of the suggestions some of us made. They often times are similar to what we see in these European schools you want us to beat, but are very different from what your change agent is advocating for.