Thursday, January 16, 2003

Word. Here's my take.  Eating government cheese sucks, steak is better. Living on welfare sucks, a G-O-B is better.  Public education sucks, paid education is better.  Ummm...no shit right? Vouchers DO NOTHING but refund the education portion of taxes to republicans.  Come on Sparxx..."republican backlash" against a tax refund? I don't know what private education near you guys costs, but summa y'all live in pricier regions than me, and it's 12-18G for the average private schools, and 25+ for the good ones.  How much do you think the public school "voucher" will be for?  3G?  5G?  Do you really think Low-Class-Mom-of-the-Year is thinking "Hmmm...they givin' me 3, and good school cost 15, so I'll put up the other 12"  She MAKES 12...A year. That said.  Private school parents are willing to pay x for education. If they get a 3G voucher, private school tuition just went up to x+3.  And they're willing to pay x+3 to keep "that element" out.  It just moves the reference point.  Don't get all dreamy about inner city kids donning plaid and crested jackets.  Fact is the education they would get free (or for their unreturned tax money) is about a 3G education.  We can argue about how well that 3G is appropriated, and whether the kids come out twice as smart if you spend 6; but there's no denying that most of Amerikkka can't afford more than a "voucher level" education, just like most of Amerikkka can't afford more than social security level retirement. And I like the SS tie in.  Is it sufficient?  Not for me, not for many.  But if my shit goes bad and stays bad, I still got that, and I still got education for my kids.  The cost/value of a safety net is lost on well off people who view their parents as the net, instead of low and middle class people viewing the gov that way. Look, on a personal level...I went to 17 years of private school, and so did my wife.  For all the talk, I'm not willing to throw my kids in the petri dish.  IMO as a parent, if your education bill doesn't hurt you, you *might* not be doing enough.  I wanna open that bill, and same "goddam!" and drop it like it's hot...and then cut the check.  BUT.  If I was asked to voluntarily pay double school taxes, for a service I hope to NEVER use, I do it gladly. Besides improving society, it's cheaper than an alarm system, a shotgun, gun lessons, a barbed wire fence, spotlights, twin dobermans, armed guards, and a house out in the hills.  THAT'S how republicans deal with the fallout from inadequate public education. As for proper appropriation of education funds, I'm not close enough to the pulse to really comment.  I have a feeling that the big gov v. local control argument should be settled in the gray area between.  I kinda look at it like the intellectual interstate highway system.  If Iowa wants to spend their bucks on teaching kids to be farmers, and southerners want to spend their cash teaching kids how to tie noose knots, and the NE wants business education, and the west side values highlighted hair and low-riders...then there's a disconnect, it serves to over-emphasize regional values, and "free-passage" is prevented.  It pigeon-holes kids.  It keeps the poor poor, and the farmers farming, and the bankers in the northeast.  There has to be meta-control over standards, but not the way Bush wants to "fail" programs and then underfund them, thereby perpetuating failure. The bottom line for me is that the education system is too far from the revenue stream to justify its required funding.  You want a car that does 155mph safely and luxuriously, drop the coin on a CLK Hammer.  The government (and the people that vote on referendums and vote-in pols) KNOWS they're buying the Hyundai of education.  It's all about ROI.  Rich folks, educated folks, and enlightened folks all treat education like the good investment that it is.  Everyone gets what they pay for.  You can tweak here or there, zoom in or out on control, and play with numbers...but how can anyone expect to pay so little for something so critical, and expect it to work out?  A 20% (huge) ROI improvement on a 3G education is the equivalent of a $3.6G education...and that stills sucks.  You want to win big...bet big, and by-and-large Amerikkka, though they LOVE to bitch, has the mirror to blame for why we're not bettin' big. -- Sweets 3:59:23 PM    comment []

Yeah, I'ma weigh in here, too, 'cause I've had some experience in this arena as well... First, because I don't think my huge rant on HS - college - NBA ball actually got sent yesterday, I'll sum it up quickly: HS ballers with talent will always try the jump to the L, because there's plenty of players there now who did it and made it (Kobe, T-Mac, Garnett), so GMs will continue to take the chance.  Consolidate the D League, the CBA, the USBL, and European franchises into an NBA minor league, so teams will have a farm system to groom Kwame Browns and Eddy Currys into Jermaine O'Neals.  Leave college ball to HS'ers that need it and can get a college education without four Fr. Als each.  Update the college game (move the 3 pt line, play quarters, shorten the shot clock) so the Jr.s and Sr.s that come out of college are at least used to the NBA format, even if they're not as gifted as the cats in the farm system. On to edumacation... The "No Child Left Behind" provides a good example of a big problem in the education system that few people realize -- there's too many people making up the rules.  In my (albeit brief) time dating an elementary school teacher and hanging with her teacher friends, one thing became quite clear -- the federal government's standards are different from the state's standards are different from the county's / city's standards are different from the school administrator's standards.  And not just in testing, in program of study as well.  Teachers are constantly having someone else come down and say, "They need to know this to pass the 2nd grade". Bush's new plan will force schools to improve in every area every year. Which sounds good, but the penalties for not improving are harsh, and in reality, some performances deemed as "failing" could be explained more by statistical fluctuations rather than an actual failing effort by the school.  What I'm talking about here is an elementary school could be marked "failing" by the federal government if every grade increases by 4 points from last year, but 5th grade is down 1.5 points from last year. Schools marked failing receive help from the government, but it creates a PR nightmare for the school, and I believe the plan enables a voucher-esque type system where children can be transferred from failing schools. I'm a hater, so it's my job to be cynical. A plan with standards this stringent and arbitrary, with penalties as harsh as this one will impose, is nothing more than Bush giving public education a rope to hang themselves with, so he can institute vouchers. We can probably all go on and on about why vouchers suck, but I think a big reason that I also haven't heard widely publicized is because it won't work in reality. If I pull my kid out of public school in the city to go to private school in the burbs (or even across town), ain't no bus coming to pick their ass up.  I have to get them there.  And that's a big problem for a lot of people that would consider vouchers otherwise -- they work long/odd hours, or two jobs, and they can't transport their kids to another school on their own.  I think vouchers are going to leave us with a lot of hard-working, lower-middle class parents that want to take advantage and do better by their kids, but can't make it happen. This is before even mentioning the racism and resentment amongst students, teachers and administrators at the receiving private schools.  I know a lot of teachers at all levels, and I think almost all of them would like the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of underpriveleged youths, even if they teach at prestigious private schools. But let's face it -- this ain't gonna be a fantasy land. Grades and standardized test scores will drop. There will be more discipline problems. Schools reputations will suffer. Now, these are all problems that the faculty at these schools will have to fix -- it's their job. But it's human nature for this type of situation to lead to resentment. What's funny is I can envision a Republican backlash against vouchers in the not-too-distant future, because "there used to be at least good private schools, but now they're full of voucher thugs.  Now where is little Thurston supposed to go to school?" Don't leave public education behind. Fix the standards. Get the federal government out of it as much as possible -- too many chiefs at this pow wow already. People like my mother say you can't throw money at the problem. I say bullshit. I see talented, motivated people all around me that want to become teachers and make a difference -- fortunately, most of them still do, even though they make less than O'Leary after taxes. There's a reason the US has the best doctors in the world, and more lawyers than every other country put together -- they get PAID here. rant rant rant rant -- Sparxxx 3:53:56 PM    comment []

I'll provide my take on Hummergate, and then move on to the big ol' can o' worms that Sweets just opened here... Cuttino Mobley said it best...LeBron should have just chilled for a minute. He can buy all the rides he wants in less than 6 months. Why set off national radar by pushing a $75,000 whip to high school? And how long you think it's gonna take someone to set him up for a 211 and jack that thing? Just stupid. I don't blame the kid for wanting to cash in...it's the example being set by his mom -- the biggest gold-digger since "Princess" Diana -- that galls me. Here's a woman who couldn't even be bothered to care for her son or go to his games four years ago, and now she's riding him all the way to the bank? And she can get a loan four years after she couldn't even hold down an apartment? For a car that costs more than any place she's ever LIVED in? Please. Enough of that. I just hope the state has the balls to pull the trigger and make him ineligible. Sure, it punishes the kids he plays with, but the sooner they pull the trigger, the sooner they'll cut off the money supply to his shameless school and other hangers-on. At least for a second. But it won't happen, and I'm sick of giving a kid who hasn't so much as scored a point above the high school level this much ink. So with further ado, I give you...our nation's fucked up education system. See, LeBron is lucky. He can ball, so he got himself a fairly decent private school "education" for free. Most kids in his situation not only get stuck in a subpar urban public school, but they'd be bouncing from shack to shack with their moms. At least Bron Bron had friends to take him in while his mother turned a deaf ear to his career -- until she found out how good he was. How bad are urban public schools? Let's just say this: in one second grade class at Cook Elementary (on Chicago's South Side), zero percent of the 30 kids in the classroom passed the standardized assessment test. Zero. How does this happen? I know for a fact that their particular teacher is qualified, and she's turned them from about 5% literate to about 50% literate in 4 months. So how do these kids ALL fail -- especially when almost all of them have repeated at LEAST one grade already? (Several kids in this class are already 10 years old.) I know Sweets doesn't agree, but this starts with the parents. Part of it is a system thing -- a race that wasn't allowed fair education 40 years ago doesn't prioritize school -- but a good parent should want a better life for their child, and they should know that the best ticket out of there is an education. This has been overcome by an ingrained sense of hopelessness, though, and so we've got parents encouraging their kids to fight instead of talk out disputes, drinking instead of helping their kid study and generally putting teachers behind the 8-ball before they begin. When that happens, the teachers -- who are already frustrated because city schools pretty much force them to pay out of pocket for anything they plan to use -- get more exasperated because they can't undo all of the bad habits that these kids pick up before they come in. When their efforts to change kids fail, they eventually give up. The second-grade teacher of the class in question doesn't plan on finishing the year out, because she senses that she's not making an impact, and when half the supplies she paid for herself get stolen (by her kids...not sure...the school won't fix the broken lock on her door), that was the last straw. Between a group of kids that's told they're destined to fail from the minute they're born just because their parents did, a school system that's underfunded and spends the money they do have poorly and sticks 30 kids in a classroom, and a government that has done nothing to address the problem, it's a wonder that any teacher would stay a week there unless they aren't qualified enough to get a suburban or private school job. The system is to blame -- but so are the parents. Not that Bush is doing anything to help. He's allegedly earmarked $1 billion for education, but he won't say where that money's going, and I'm willing to bet that Chicago Public Schools don't see a dime. And the "No Child Left Behind" thing is a joke. Sure, it's good NOW for the kids who actually care and want to transfer into a better school, but those better schools will eventually feel the strain of bigger class sizes, and if the shutting down of failing schools becomes a reality, the overflow will force good districts to build more school space, diluting the teacher pool and putting a bigger strain on the budgets of the privileged...who won't be happy that the quality of their education is suffering from dilution. Eventually, you're going to have one giant busing crisis...and the race cauldron will begin bubbling some more. All of this to accomplish basically nothing. The bottom line is this -- poverty breeds hopelessness -- so when you're sticking it to the poor, they're not going to care about school. Those schools will fail, and they'll dilute the quality of the good ones, creating more hatred...which may be what Bush wants in the end. After all, black folk are getting off easy now that everyone is bashing Middle Easterners. So what's the solution? I don't know -- but it's going to take work from both sides. The government needs a better plan, and some of that defense money would come in real handy -- but even the most perfect of plans won't work until the underprivileged start to care about education. They've been led to believe their lives are hopeless -- and until we throw them a bone, it's not going to happen. Honestly, I think a lot of this started when we moved all of our factories out of the cities and into Mexico. Lots of ghetto dwellers lost their jobs, and there aren't many left to get. That, coupled with the nation-long history of racism that never really went away, started the downward spiral. Those at the bottom need to make an attempt to meet the haves halfway for things to work out, but they CAN work. I want to say those that don't try should be left behind, but we need to at least try to lift them up first. We can't expect people to fly if they've never even had the chance to stand up before. We need a solution. We need to do something. Half our nation's population is withering away, and the other half doesn't care. We need to fix that. Where have you gone, Bill Bradley? -- O 3:51:41 AM    comment []

You know, I been giving this some thought...going back to the who benefits and who loses out on this "commercialization of kids" and "robbing childhood" and "remember when sports were innocent and fun" hate-a-thon that you guys weighed in on last month. Bottom line, I agree with the espen guy who says let LeBron have his, everyone is getting large off him, why not. Let me insert an unfinished rough-draft kite that I was working on: ########################################################## AAAAiiight...we all admit there's A problem, let's try to define it and kick some potential fixes. Who's getting' used up here? 1) Major colleges who can't project a roster beyond a year anymore. 2) College athletes who can't earn a dime while in school. 3) Bigtime (that's top 50, not top 5) HS players who diss college but get dissed by the league. First of all, I'm gonna get pretty free market here in my indictments/solutions...and I agree with Rizz that the 3 yr rookie deal was a stop-gap near-sighted solution to the one pressing problem facing owners: obscene coin for non-NBA players...people who can't be expected to make a roster, but you wouldn't know that until after you had to pick and pay them. It morphed into a development period for teams, and a mandatory evil that needs to be dealt with early by a player. I hear stories about a mandatory freshman team in colleges back in the day. This intrigues me, and I wonder what forces motivated the change away from this.  At least a mandatory frosh squad would force a commitment to improvement and a commitment to squash the hype-machine for a year or so. Then again, if I'm watching HS games on the Deuce...I'd be watching the Frosh Ticket on digital cable.  Good, the frosh squad is so NOT free market, I didn't want it work out anyway. The single finest recruiting tool in the land for a college coach is a picture of your 3rd leading scorer from last years team standing in front of his new Bentley.  College coaches walk a FINE line.  Even Coach K has been forced to mumble the mantra "What's best for the kid."  All of the sudden, the college game is strictly about being a springboard.  The coaches, i.e. faculty members, are forced publically support early draft and support selfish play and support changes made to a system to accommodate a freshman scorer.  Otherwise, they shoot themselves in the recruiting foot. ###################################### Anyway, what do you guys think about this plan: Stop letting NBA teams have a bench behind the bench.  The IR tag in the NBA is the funniest and most pathetic roster tool in major sports.  If I had a Sakajewia for everytime I saw Speedy Claxton go on IR for "bursitis", I'd have my own H2.  You would think that the salary cap would force teams to select players who could contribute in the forseeable (read: this year) future.  But the long-ass rookie contract works against that market force. Why not expand the roster to 12, and do away with IR.  That way, if you select a 13 yr old he actually consumes roster space.  Baseball has a similar mechanism with its minor leaguers, where a team can only call a player "up" 3 times before they are "out of options" on a guy.  At that point, he's free to be pursued by any squad, but would likely be traded.  I don't want stop HS ballers from pursuing the dream, I don't think any age limits or education levels should apply, I just want NBA squads to stop reaching on kids who will not do a damn thing for 3-4 years...3-4 years better spent in college or Europe or wherever.  I think this reduces hype on the HS and early college players, it reduces having your NBA team treat half of its players like a developmental team.  I think it settles who can ball and who can't on that level...NOW. Maybe I'm oversimplifying, and no I haven't figured out what a truly injury-decimated team would do to field a team, but... I love Injury Insurance at the college level.  THAT should be expanded. THAT is one way of getting kids to GO to college, STAY in college, and COMPETE in college.  It would certainly help to mitigate the borderline first-rounders that have to get SOME paid so they take a shot. I never blame an agent.  They are bottom-feeders.  Along the same line of...I never blame lawyers.  Blame society, blame judges and juries, but if the system was right, big coin wouldn't be out there for pretenders. I never blame parents.  It's so frickin' convenient to say "good parents stress education", "good parents protect their kids from the corruption of money".  For folks that don't have a dime, a kid that even glimpses talent is like winning the lottery.  Old money can't ever tell new money how to behave.  If I had $2mill, I'd keep my job, and dress like Slick Rick and hire video hoes to be my secretaries, and DARE my boss to can me.  My kid wouldn't get good grades.  We'd be at the pool hall all day if the rain kept us off the golf course.  He'd know exactly how to stay rich, but that's about it.  Yeah cash corrupts, but that's no reason to turn it down when you're 6 to a room in an bad apt. Eagles -- Super Bowl.  Flyers -- First place.  Sixers -- ugh 6 game slide, but still.  Phillies -- Beasts of East Now. Like in 1980, in a 9 month span, we had all 4 teams in the champeenship game. -- Sweets 3:19:58 AM    comment []

The LeBron Saga continues...and the Hummer H2 of Hate rolls on... Yeah, this was dumb, but... What's the effect going to be? some BS investigation that will never be over before the Ohio state playoffs. By that time, "King James" is a state champion, whether or not the H2 was legitimately acquired (and we all know that at some point, there's dirt here). On to the League, and first round pick, and a #23 Cavs jersey, and 5 more H2s parked in a garage bigger than Jermaine Dupri's. And that's just at his Mom's house. But LeBron will get his.  It always happens.  He's talking a gang of shit, and the only refreshing thing about him is that none of it is unfounded. He IS the best prospect ever. He DOES have the whole package. When he's on, there is NO ONE in high school, probably college either, that can stop him. But he'll be on a shit team. Veterans will HATE -- probably more than on any rookie ever. MJ got snubbed in his first all-star game, back when players had much smaller egos than they do today. Imagine what they'll do when fans vote him to start next year -- which they will, just 'cause he's "King James". And it will be especially bad not because some of the L's biggest stars had to pay dues in college, but because they didn't -- they paid them as 18 & 19 year olds on the pine. Look at who'll probably be 1st team All-NBA: Kidd T-Mac Kobe Garnett Shaq A combined, what, 5 years of college between them?  Four?  Three?  I can't remember.  But T-Mac and Kobe know what it was like to be an 18-year-old rookie in this league, Garnett, too, to a lesser extent, and it wasn't pretty for any of them. So, LeBron can talk shit -- right now, he's backing it up better than anyone ever. But he'll get his. Everyone always does. Just ask Desert Whore. hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha -- Sparxxx 3:13:43 AM    comment []

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