Obama's Speech to Children Next Week

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-24-2009
Obama's Speech to Children Next Week
142
Thu, 09-03-2009 - 12:32am

Is it just me, or is this just nuts??!!


 


http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6599457.html


Some Texas parents are asking school principals to excuse their children from listening to a speech that President Barack Obama will make to schools next week on the grounds that it smacks of political indoctrination.


Obama will deliver an address directly to students on the importance of education beginning at 11 a.m. (CST) Tuesday.


“The president will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan wrote in an Aug. 26 letter to school principals.


Critics of the president are using the Internet to build opposition and encourage parents to request their children not be forced to listen.


“I think it's inappropriate because it smacks of political indoctrination of the worst kind,” said Brett Curtis, a parent of two children attending Pearland ISD schools. “It's not just a speech. It's a specific curriculum to go along with the speech directly from the president of the United States without review.”


Schools are getting a menu of classroom activities for students, according to the education secretary, designed by teachers “to help engage students and stimulate discussion on the importance of education in their lives.”


Curtis said he would instruct his children to boycott the speech as “a general protest. I know that's going on around the country.”


Most Houston-area school districts will let principals and teachers decide whether to show Obama's speech. Some district leaders raised concerns about interrupting already scheduled lessons, while others said students need to hear the president's expected message of personal responsibility for learning.


Some parents have threatened to keep their children home for the day.


“I just don't see how this would be an indoctrination technique,” said Alief school board president Sarah Wink­ler, who also is president-elect of the Texas Association of School Boards. “It sounds to me like these are all things we try to teach our kids. We want them to work hard and pay attention and do the best they can.”


The Alief district, like Lamar Consolidated, plans to record the speech for interested teachers to show later.


Parents can opt out

The Houston Independent School District has directed principals to give parents a heads-up if they are planning lessons around Obama's speech so parents can opt out their children. Other districts said they would excuse students, though not all plan to send home notes in advance.


“We're not stopping instruction for it,” said Clear Creek ISD spokeswoman Elaina Polsen, “but if it's in line with what's being taught either on Sept. 8th or down the road, teachers may use it.”


Pasadena school officials said they are working to ensure that all schools can access the online broadcast of Obama's speech if they want.


In 1989, President George H.W. Bush used a nationally televised speech to schoolchildren to push an anti-drug campaign.


“It is not uncommon for students to watch a presidential speech that is given during the school day,” said Debbie Ratcliffe, spokeswoman for the Texas Education Agency. “This situation is somewhat different in that this speech apparently will be directed to students. But each district can decide how best to handle it for their community.”


Children pulled out of school for the day will cost districts about $35 per child, as state funding for schools is based on daily attendance.


State Board of Education member David Bradley, R-Beaumont, said he objected to the federal Department of Education taking classroom time away from local schools. The speech may be innocuous, Bradley said, “but look at the follow-up activities.”


“Under Texas statute, parents have the right to review all instructional materials. They also have the right to opt out their kids from any program they might object to,” he said, citing sex education as an example.


State Board of Education member Barbara Cargill, R-The Woodlands, said parents have complained to her about the speech taking up valuable classroom instruction time.


One parent told her the president's speech “obligates the youngest children in our public school system to agree with Obama's initiatives or be ostracized by their teachers and classmates,” and does not allow for healthy debate.


‘Wild-eyed paranoia'

President Obama's speech does have its defenders.


“It's hard to imagine anything more ridiculous than attacking the president of the United States for talking to students about the importance of getting a good education and being a good citizen,” said Kathy Miller, president of the Texas Freedom Network, which monitors public education in Texas.


“I wish our elected leaders were responsible enough to denounce this kind of wild-eyed paranoia,” Miller said. “But the problem is too many of them are actually feeding this kind of nonsense — like when the governor flirts with secessionists and State Board of Education members say the president sympathizes with terrorists.”


 


All the kids around here listened to bush's speeches in class.  No one made a peep.  Hmmmmm.


 


 

Pages

Community Leader
Registered: 04-05-2002
Tue, 09-08-2009 - 9:50pm

"Students at the lower end of the socioeconomic strata are used to feeling disrespected - and really don't we all just want a little respect? I think they got that from the president today and they know it."

I never thought about it from that standpoint but you're right. It's nice to see them acknowledged and encouraged, especially by the POTUS, no matter who he is.











iVillage Member
Registered: 08-30-2002
Tue, 09-08-2009 - 10:35pm

***There are so many intelligent Republican women out there, Olympia Snow comes quickly to mind, Condoleeza Rice, Christine Todd Whitman. I wonder how they felt about having Palin lead their party.***


ITA. If McCain had chosen Snowe he would have had my vote. Prior to the Palin debacle I respected McCain. I tend to be a moderate. I found the choice of Palin, and the assumption that we would all relate to her and



iVillage Member
Registered: 03-03-2009
Wed, 09-09-2009 - 12:01am

Palin. Ugh. And she's baaaaaack.


The self-styled "pitbull with lipstick" has an oped in the Wall Street Journal. I think her hero must be Dick Cheney because she uses circular logic like this:


"In an interview with the New York Times in April, the president suggested that such a group, working outside of "normal political channels," should guide decisions regarding that "huge driver of cost . . . the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives . . . ." Given such statements, is it any wonder that many of the sick and elderly are concerned that the Democrats' proposals will ultimately lead to rationing of their health care by—dare I say it—death panels?"


http://tinyurl.com/kr4hq9


First she takes Obama's words out of full context in order to make them sound threatening; then she has the utter gall to act as those it's his words rather than the boogeyman SHE made which played such a large role in scaring "the sick and elderly". BTW, here's the actual interview to act as anodyne to Sly Sarah's Spin:


V. Postreform Health care


You have suggested that health care is now the No. 1 legislative priority. It seems to me this is only a small generalization — to say that the way the medical system works now is, people go to the doctor; the doctor tells them what treatments they need; they get those treatments, regardless of cost or, frankly, regardless of whether they’re effective. I wonder if you could talk to people about how going to the doctor will be different in the future; how they will experience medical care differently on the other side of health care reform.


THE PRESIDENT: First of all, I do think consumers have gotten more active in their own treatments in a way that’s very useful. And I think that should continue to be encouraged, to the extent that we can provide consumers with more information about their own well-being — that, I think, can be helpful.


I have always said, though, that we should not overstate the degree to which consumers rather than doctors are going to be driving treatment, because, I just speak from my own experience, I’m a pretty-well-educated layperson when it comes to medical care; I know how to ask good questions of my doctor. But ultimately, he’s the guy with the medical degree. So, if he tells me, You know what, you’ve got such-and-such and you need to take such-and-such, I don’t go around arguing with him or go online to see if I can find a better opinion than his.


And so, in that sense, there’s always going to be an asymmetry of information between patient and provider. And part of what I think government can do effectively is to be an honest broker in assessing and evaluating treatment options. And certainly that’s true when it comes to Medicare and Medicaid, where the taxpayers are footing the bill and we have an obligation to get those costs under control.


And right now we’re footing the bill for a lot of things that don’t make people healthier.


THE PRESIDENT: That don’t make people healthier. So when Peter Orszag and I talk about the importance of using comparative-effectiveness studies (9) as a way of reining in costs, that’s not an attempt to micromanage the doctor-patient relationship. It is an attempt to say to patients, you know what, we’ve looked at some objective studies out here, people who know about this stuff, concluding that the blue pill, which costs half as much as the red pill, is just as effective, and you might want to go ahead and get the blue one. And if a provider is pushing the red one on you, then you should at least ask some important questions.


Won’t that be hard, because of the trust that people put in their doctors, just as you said? Won’t people say, Wait a second, my doctor is telling me to take the red pill, and the government is saving money by saying take the blue —


THE PRESIDENT: Let me put it this way: I actually think that most doctors want to do right by their patients. And if they’ve got good information, I think they will act on that good information.


Now, there are distortions in the system, everything from the drug salesmen and junkets to how reimbursements occur. Some of those things government has control over; some of those things are just more embedded in our medical culture. But the doctors I know — both ones who treat me as well as friends of mine — I think take their job very seriously and are thinking in terms of what���s best for the patient. They operate within particular incentive structures, like anybody else, and particular habits, like anybody else.


And so if it turns out that doctors in Florida are spending 25 percent more on treating their patients as doctors in Minnesota, and the doctors in Minnesota are getting outcomes that are just as good — then us going down to Florida and pointing out that this is how folks in Minnesota are doing it and they seem to be getting pretty good outcomes, and are there particular reasons why you’re doing what you’re doing? — I think that conversation will ultimately yield some significant savings and some significant benefits.


Now, I actually think that the tougher issue around medical care — it’s a related one — is what you do around things like end-of-life care —


Yes, where it’s $20,000 for an extra week of life.


THE PRESIDENT: Exactly. And I just recently went through this. I mean, I’ve told this story, maybe not publicly, but when my grandmother got very ill during the campaign, she got cancer; it was determined to be terminal. And about two or three weeks after her diagnosis she fell, broke her hip. It was determined that she might have had a mild stroke, which is what had precipitated the fall.


So now she’s in the hospital, and the doctor says, Look, you’ve got about — maybe you have three months, maybe you have six months, maybe you have nine months to live. Because of the weakness of your heart, if you have an operation on your hip there are certain risks that — you know, your heart can’t take it. On the other hand, if you just sit there with your hip like this, you’re just going to waste away and your quality of life will be terrible.


And she elected to get the hip replacement and was fine for about two weeks after the hip replacement, and then suddenly just — you know, things fell apart.


I don’t know how much that hip replacement cost. I would have paid out of pocket for that hip replacement just because she’s my grandmother. Whether, sort of in the aggregate, society making those decisions to give my grandmother, or everybody else’s aging grandparents or parents, a hip replacement when they’re terminally ill is a sustainable model, is a very difficult question. If somebody told me that my grandmother couldn’t have a hip replacement and she had to lie there in misery in the waning days of her life — that would be pretty upsetting.


And it’s going to be hard for people who don’t have the option of paying for it.


THE PRESIDENT: So that’s where I think you just get into some very difficult moral issues. But that’s also a huge driver of cost, right?


I mean, the chronically ill and those toward the end of their lives are accounting for potentially 80 percent of the total health care bill out here.


So how do you — how do we deal with it?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think that there is going to have to be a conversation that is guided by doctors, scientists, ethicists. And then there is going to have to be a very difficult democratic conversation that takes place. It is very difficult to imagine the country making those decisions just through the normal political channels. And that’s part of why you have to have some independent group that can give you guidance. It’s not determinative, but I think has to be able to give you some guidance. And that’s part of what I suspect you’ll see emerging out of the various health care conversations that are taking place on the Hill right now.

Jabberwocka

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-02-2009
Wed, 09-09-2009 - 6:00am
I agree, but please lets leave rabid animals out of it - we are still under quarantine here as our dog DID get attacked by a rabid animal last week!
Community Leader
Registered: 04-05-2002
Wed, 09-09-2009 - 7:40am
I do wonder if he might have won, had he chosen someone like Olympia Snowe instead. Condoleeze Rice would have completely changed the discussion of the election. I'm not even sure if she did anything noteworthy but she didn't do anything embarrassing which says a lot these days. I know quite a few people who have only voted GOP their whole lives who stopped supporting McCain after he picked Palin (well, not right after but after she made those disastrous interviews and didn't even seem to realize that she didn't do well). She energized the base but he lost the whole center moderates. I had liked McCain, too, until he lost it in the election. I don't know that Obama won as much as McCain lost.










iVillage Member
Registered: 03-26-2003
Wed, 09-09-2009 - 11:24am
Oh my gosh, I am sorry to hear this.
 
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-03-2009
Wed, 09-09-2009 - 11:33am

Yes, I know that you have quarantine woes. But Palin is dangerous and reeks to high heaven, in terms of integrity and truthfulness.

Her ability to scare and deceive should not be minimized, just because she doesn't LOOK particularly vicious.

Hope your quarantine ends well and soon!

Jabberwocka

Community Leader
Registered: 04-05-2002
Wed, 09-09-2009 - 1:41pm

Kathleen Parker on this whole situation. There are many times when I don't agree with her but I also think sometimes she hits it out of the ballpark. She's so much more rational and intelligent than Ann Coulter. Too bad Ann Coulter gets the attention.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/08/AR2009090802961.html

An A in Overreaction
By Kathleen Parker
Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Just when you thought things couldn't get any stupider, schools across the nation decided to censor President Obama's speech urging kids to work hard because "being successful is hard."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, was the terribly scary bit of propaganda that prompted certain Americans to cry "socialism" and "indoctrination" and force some schools to opt out of hearing the president's message Tuesday.

When and how did we become so ridiculous?

As it turns out, we've been this way for a while. Such protests -- a review of which follows shortly -- aren't new. The difference is that now the masses are technologically enabled, amplified by a twillion tweets. Everybody's got a megaphone, bless democracy's heart.

But when a protest of one (or a few) can instantly morph into a babble of thousands, rabble-rousing becomes a hobby -- and rational debate becomes an oxymoron.

Granting a super-sized benefit of the doubt to protesters, Obama's speech originally included classroom instructional materials from the Education Department that asked students to express how they were inspired by the president and how they might help him.

Too political, critics said. Indoctrination, charged Florida Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer.

"As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama's socialist ideology," Greer said.

Some conservative radio and television hosts latched onto the specter of youth camps past and encouraged parents to keep their children home from school in protest.

Okay, benefit-of-the-doubt rescinded. Even asking kids to help the president improve the nation doesn't justify charges of socialist indoctrination. John F. Kennedy's famous "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country" is hardly considered a bugle call to summer camp in the Urals.

Essentially, Obama's speech, which aired live, focused on encouraging students to evaluate how they might contribute to making America better. "What problems are you going to solve? What discoveries will you make?"

Anyone who heard or read the address will have found little to criticize, except perhaps that it was a tad boring, too long -- and certifiably schmaltzy. Then again, he was talking to kids, some of them as young as 5. Even former first lady Laura Bush and former House speaker Newt Gingrich approved of the president's talk.

Presidential speeches to students aren't new. The St. Petersburg Times's indispensable PolitiFact.com "Truth-O-Meter" notes that both Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush gave such addresses while president. And, yes, Democrats protested. Reagan's speech was, in fact, political, as he went beyond stressing the importance of education to discuss nuclear disarmament, defense funding and even taxes. Talk about a snooze.

Gingrich, who at the time of Bush's address was House Republican whip, defended the president's right to speak directly to students. But Richard Gephardt, then the House Democratic leader, said the Education Department shouldn't be producing "paid political advertising for the president. . . . And the president should be doing more about education than saying, 'Lights, camera, action.' "

And round and round we go. The hysterics, it would seem, have reached a detente. Or, one hopes, canceled each other out. Compared to previous presidential addresses, Obama's was strictly apolitical. It was also quintessential Obama -- aimed at healing, at soothing the afflicted and making things all better. The speech was so brimming with pathos, it seemed to have been concocted around a campfire where kids recalled their worst day in school.

Addressing all ages of students, from kindergartners to 12th-graders, presents challenges, but Obama managed to hit every group's vulnerabilities and insecurities -- from being bullied, to not fitting in, to having a divided family. Hey, he's been there!

And now he's president. You can be, too, was the subtext. What's so wrong with that?

One might have wished Obama's remarks cut by half. It also would have been nice if he had thrown in an Ashley or a Jonah among the students he featured -- Jazmin, Andoni and Shantell. But overall, the president's message was a conservative hymn, a GOP platform for kiddies: Take personal responsibility, don't blame others for your failures, listen to your parents and your teachers, work hard.

"Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future."

The only thing missing from this orgy of conservative orthodoxy was . . . a Republican president. And that is the lesson of the day.











iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Wed, 09-09-2009 - 2:31pm
LOL Good article.
Photobucket

 


Photobucket&nbs

iVillage Member
Registered: 09-02-2009
Wed, 09-09-2009 - 4:56pm
I don't technically live in a 'rural' area but I guess I do live near the edge of town, there is a farm down the road from me but then city going the other way, so... The raccoon attacked my dog shortly after she went onto the deck before we even saw it or had time to react - it was horrible! I was pretty sure it was rabid, as was Animal Control when they came out and captured the thing, but today the Health Department called and confirmed that it was rabid. Our dog was bit pretty badly but her shots were current, she got a booster shot and is on antibiotics. We are under a 45 day quarantine, but she is acting a bit friskier so I think she will be OK. Thanks!

Pages