Is Bi-partisanship a Realistic Goal for President Obama?

President Obama has shown great effort in his efforts to fullfill campaign promises, including striving to gain more bi-partisan participation in legislative decision-making. However, it's obvious that there is a movement to thwart this as well as other endeavors of his presidency. Is President Obama being too idealistic in his hope to seek bi-partisanship? Is there hope for a "meeting of the minds"? Will continuing on this path lead to failure? Is it possible to slay this Republican demagogical dragon? Where do we go from here?
Looking at it from another's viewpoint...The following letter speaks to what may be the key reason for the roadblocks the new president is facing.

An Open Letter to President Obama from Frank Schaeffer:
Dear President Obama: I know that from time to time you read the Huffington Post because you've written for it. As a Huffington Post reader you'll know that no one has more faithfully supported your candidacy and now your presidency than me. As a former lifelong Republican, son of a co-founder of the Religious Right; my late evangelical leader father, Francis Schaeffer, I'm in a unique position to tell you a few things about the Republicans from inside perspective. (As you know I left that movement in the mid 1980s.) The lack of cooperation you're getting from the Republican Party will continue.. You were right to indulge in a little bit of tokenism when you had Pastor Rick Warren pray at your inauguration. But if you think that the Republicans in Congress and the Senate are going to do more than their utmost to obstruct everything you are and what you stand for you're dreaming. As someone who appeared numerous times on the 700 Club with Pat Robertson, as someone for whom Jerry Falwell used to send his private jet to bring me to speak at his college, as an author who had James Dobson giveaway 150,000 copies of one of my fundamentalist books allow me to explain something: the Republican Party is controlled by two ideological groups. First, is the Religious Right. Second, are the neoconservatives. Both groups share one thing in common: they are driven by fear and paranoia. Between them there is no Republican "center" for you to appeal to, just two versions of hate-filled extremes. The Religious Right supply the kind of people who at McCain and Palin rallies were yelling things such as "kill him" about you. That's the constituency to which your hand was extended when looking for compromise on your financial bailout bill. There's only one thing that makes sense for you now. Mr. President, you need to forget a bipartisan approach and get on with the business of governing by winning each battle. You will never be able to work with the Republicans because they hate you. Believe me, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are the norm not the exception. James Dobson and the rest are praying for you to fail. The neoconservatives are gnashing their teeth and waiting for you to "sell out Israel" or "show weakness" in Afghanistan, whatever, so they can declare you a traitor. The problem is that when you deal with the Republican Party you're talking to the polished characters in Washington. I wish you could see the hate e-mails that I have received over the last two years because I supported you, letters calling for God to kill me, telling me that I hate God because I supported you and that I am "an abortionist" and worse a "fag lover" because I've written that I believe that you will be a great president. What those senators and congressmen are telling you is not what their rabid core constituents are telling them. Their loyalty is to a fundamentalist Christian ideology on the one hand and American exceptionalism of perpetual warfare and hatred and fear of the "other" on the other hand. Between the neoconservatives and evangelical Religious Right Republicans you have no friends. The good news is that most Americans support you. And if you will just get in the face of the Republican Party and call their bluff you'll be surprised how many individual ordinary Republicans will support you, not to mention the rest of us. America is sick of the Republicans. The Democratic Party won for a reason: the Republicans failed and have taken us all down with them! You're doing your presidency and America no favor by extending an open hand to the perpetually knotted fist of what has become the embittered lunatic fringe of our country. They would rather go down in flames than "compromise" their ideology. As you showed us again at your press conference of Feb 9, you are a brilliant, articulate and decent man. Your Republican opponents are not decent people but ideologues bent on destroying you. To quote the biblical adage sir, don't cast your pearls before swine.
Frank Schaeffer is the author of CRAZY FOR GOD-How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back.

New York Post Must Be Held Accountable

Not a Joke
Hold the New York Post accountable
The New York Post recently published the political cartoon shown here, depicting two white police officers standing over the carcass of a bullet-riddled chimpanzee, with the animal representing the author of the stimulus package.
The decision to run this cartoon was irresponsible at best, and hurtful and malicious at worst. It seems unthinkable that an editor of a newspaper would not understand the history of Black folks being depicted as monkeys and apes or the recent spate of death threats against President Obama. Worse, when confronted, Post editor Col Allan dismissed people's concerns as baseless.

Please join me and other ColorOfChange.org members in demanding that the Post apologize publicly and fire the editor who allowed this cartoon to go to print: http://www.colorofchange.org/nypost/?id=1552-873115

Economic Stimulus Bill

President Obama's stimulus bill has met with lots of controversy and dissention, especially in the Senate. The latest is that Republicans along with conservative Democrats have added changes including tax cuts for the wealthy.
Is Washington still stuck on stupid? Does the stimulus bill need overhaul before it is passed? Are legislators wasting precious time?
What do you think?

Send Your Ideas to Washington

Here's your chance to send your ideas about improving our schools directly to the new President!

There is a new feature on Change.gov which lets you send your ideas directly to the President. It's called the Citizen's Briefing Book. It's an online forum where you can share your ideas, and rate or offer comments on the ideas of others. The best-rated ideas will rise to the top, and after the Inauguration, they will be printed and gathered into a binder. If selected, your idea could be included in the Citizen's Briefing Book to be delivered to President Obama.

"No Child Left Behind" - Help or Hinderance?

In his first term of office, George W. Bush created federal legislation that was suppose to bring accountability to public schools. This legislation, "No Child Left Behind," was enacted in 2001 with the goal of making sure that ALL students across the nation would learn academic skills as determined by each state. Sounds good, but...
Children are being left behind. Some say they’re being left behind at a greater rate than before the act was passed. Why?

• One of the problems with the act is that it assumes that administrators and teachers in schools that are failing aren’t doing their jobs. This act is designed to show that teachers are not educating the children properly, and they will be shamed into doing their jobs better lest they want to be branded as a failure again and again.
• This legislation made no provisions for students with special learning needs or IQ differences. Hence, a special education student with an IQ of 56 is required to pass the same achievement test as a regular student with and IQ of 100+.
• It doesn't actually measure students' performance from year to year; progress is compared from one grade's performance to the same grade's performance a year later. So if a school's fourth graders reach the 50th percentile in English, the next year's class of fourth graders would have to do better for the school to progress, even though different students are being tested.
• There are 37 criteria that have to be met for adequate yearly progress. If a school meets 36 of the 37 criteria, it's deemed as much a failure as the school that got zero of the 37. Even if students are growing academically, they may not be growing at a fast enough pace to avoid failure. For instance, if the goal is the 65th percentile in English, and you bring a group of kids from the 35th up to the 60th , you've still failed.
• Those schools that received Title I funding from the government were the only schools monitored and held accountable during the first three years of the new legislation. These are the schools with the most at-risk populations and the highest percentage of special education students. Any of these schools that did not show the required level of academic achievement growth over a continuous 2-year period received the label "failing schools" and faced sanctions that included being reported in the newspaper and allowing parents to move their children to another school. After 3 years, the schools face more severe sanctions that include dismantling the entire staff, closure, and take over.
• In order to pass the most students, states have set the bar at the proficiency level. With the focus set on "proficiency" (minimal basic skills), this will not “maximize the capacity” of every student. No only will special education students suffer, but academically gifted students will not be challenged as they should.

Additionally, the federal government did not fully fund this new legislation. So, there is inadequate money and other resources available to support this federal mandate. Each state is left to its own means and standards to determine the curriculum, assessment, funding sources, etc. that would be established for measuring school accountability. Revisions were made in the 2004 version of NCLB, but much of what was wrong with the original legislation remains intact.

No Child Left Behind - consistent with most of the George W. Bush policies? This Blogger thinks so. Agree? Disagree? Share your thoughts, questions, experiences.

Links:

http://www.publiceducation.org/2006_NCLB/main/index.asp

http://www.fairtest.org/presidentelect-barack-obama-no-child-left-behind

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2001918661_raspberry04.html

http://www.rethinkingschools.org/special_reports/bushplan/test191.shtml

http://www.novoteleftbehind.net/getedu_archive/nochild.php

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=No_Child_Left_Behind_Act

http://www.edweek.org/rc/issues/no-child-left-behind/

http://www.edexcellence.net/doc/NCLBreport.pdf

Failing Schools - Chicken or Egg? Theory

The reputation of public schools has taken a beating. Is it the chicken or egg theory? Which came first... media hype? political agendas? failure of schools to educate?

Would you send your child to puclic school?

There has been much flack about our failing public school systems across the country. Even the Obamas have decided that the D.C. public school system cannot meet the educational expectations they have for their daughters. What do you believe about our public schools? Is it media hype or real concern that today's public schools are inferior? Would you send your children to public school if you had the choice between public and private?