Gathering of loons via Steve took it.

Continuing to open yap and insert ass, the random wingnutty Obama school speech idiocy continues:

After reading the text on Monday, even Jim Greer, the Florida Republican Party chairman who last week accused the president of seeking to use the speech to foist “socialist ideology” on schoolchildren, said he could find nothing to criticize in its text.

"In its current form, it’s fine,” Mr. Greer said in an interview. “But it remains to be seen if it’s the speech he’s going to give.”

Because you can never be too careful about that hide the socialist ideology published in advance speech bait and switch maneuver, now can you? It is to laugh.

The speech?  It’s terrifying stuff alright:

What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country. What you’re learning in school today will determine whether we as a nation can meet our greatest challenges in the future.

You’ll need the knowledge and problem-solving skills you learn in science and math to cure diseases like cancer and AIDS, and to develop new energy technologies and protect our environment. You’ll need the insights and critical thinking skills you gain in history and social studies to fight poverty and homelessness, crime and discrimination, and make our nation more fair and more free. You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.

How dare the President of the United States tell our nation’s children to dream big and dare to solve our most pressing problems. The nerve.

What’s not funny about all of this? The amount of ink and airtime that’s been devoted to a false, ginned-up hissy fit when real, substantial problems for our nation’s children and teachers are sitting out there getting barely any notice. (more…)

Poignant moment via Jake Parrish. Lovely shot.

As a nation, we are failing the most vulnerable members of our society.

The number of homeless schoolchildren, uprooted amidst the financial turmoil of the last few years is rising:

There were 679,000 homeless students reported in 2006-7, a total that surpassed one million by last spring, Ms. Duffield said.

With schools just returning to session, initial reports point to further rises. In San Antonio, for example, the district has enrolled 1,000 homeless students in the first two weeks of school, twice as many as at the same point last year.

Between foreclosures, job losses and catastrophic illness costs, it’s not just the very poor who are feeling the pinch. The middle class is hurting, too, as families who never had to ask for assistance in the past suddenly depend on it just to get by from week to week.

These days? We’re all a paycheck away from disaster, it seems.

And the elderly? New analysis shows that the poverty rate among those over 65 is far worse than previously thought:

Nearly 20% of Americans over 65 would be considered poor if the government updates the way it calculates poverty, which hasn’t considered medical costs, regional variations and other factors since its creation in 1955.

Currently, the poverty rate for that age group is 9.7%, or 3.6 million people. If the government adopts a revised formula by the National Academy of Sciences, that figure would jump to 18.6% — 6.8 million people…

Recently, a United Way group in Illinois tried to give its volunteers a glimpse into life for the "other half." The lessons learned were some hard ones:

Participants were separated into six different low-income family types and assigned a role to play under various situations, including being newly unemployed, a new applicant for government assistance or a part-time employee relying on food stamps.

Families had to keep their home secure, pay their bills, feed their families and keep the utilities on for a month using various income and debt scenarios. Services such as an employment office, pawn shop, banker, food pantry and grocery store were available. To reach them, though, every person had to use a $2 transportation voucher, which grew scarce as money ran low.

If you have never had to face unexpected poverty, or didn’t grow up around it as a child, then these situations might sound dire. For folks who have lived barely scraping by? It sounds like a whole lot of life.

Certainly personal responsibility plays a big role: bad choices make for bad results for a lot of folks. But for young kids who didn’t choose the families into which they were born? Or for the elderly who have seen retirement savings shrink over the past few years while prescription doughnut holes have expanded?

Who wants to tell their grandma the fact she has to choose between her medicine and food is her own damned fault and to stop whining about prescription drug profit margins. (more…)

Michelle Obama, WH chef Sam Kaas, and Bancroft School students.

Michelle Obama helped with spring planting in the White House garden yesterday, along with some of the WH kitchen and grounds staff and students from Bancroft Elementary School in DC.

This is a great teaching moment on nutrition and activity in a nation where childhood obesity has become rampant.  More and more children are taking diabetes and blood pressure medications, and that costs us all.

As Michelle Obama said yesterday (via WH transcript):

This is one of the main reasons we’re doing this, is that what I’ve learned as a mom, in trying to feed my girls, is that it is so important for them to get regular fruits and vegetables in their diets, because it does have nutrients, it does make you strong, it is all brain food. And when you go to school, it is so important for you to have a good breakfast, to make sure in your lunches that you have an apple or an orange or a banana, that you have something green when you eat any meal, lunch or dinner.

And we’re looking to you guys to help educate the country, not just in your own homes, but other people as they think about how to plan their meals for their kids, to think about the importance of making sure that we have enough fruits and vegetables. And doing this garden is a really inexpensive way of making that happen.

This is fantastic and sorely needed.  Kudos to the WH and Michelle Obama for doing it, and for using the WH podium to promote healthy, sustainable gardening.  And, more important, healthier eating for the nation’s children. (more…)

I give you the urgent education action news of the day — the re-name “no child left behind” braintrust: Education Secretary Arne Duncan agrees. “Let’s rebrand it,” he said in an interview. “Give it a new name.” And before Mr. Duncan has had time to float a single name, scores of educators, policy wonks and assorted rabble-rousers have rushed in with an outpouring of proposals.

Go figure.

Researching children’s issues and the stimulus bill yesterday, one thing stuck out loud and clear: economic decisions are made in the abstract, but the results fall disproportionately. Especially on kids who are already trying to survive on the margins as it is. From kids in Northern Virginia and Cincinnati and Las Vegas to all over California, hard luck stories are cropping up.