We Purchased It And Tried It green power Here's What We Identified Out:
Question by chonzo jock: Why do environmentalists feel green energy is trustworthy?
Did all of them forget that solar panels are very pricey and not expense successful, wind and most green power are unreliable and that dams/hydro cause untold environmental damage to it's surroundings?
Do they also think that Earth is operating out of space to put a few barrels underground?
yes, they have turn out to be much more
News Analysis
By TRIP GABRIEL
Representative Michele Bachmann promises to ?turn out the lights? at the federal Education Department. Gov. Rick Perry calls it unconstitutional. Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, would allow it to live but only as a drastically shrunken agency that mainly gathers statistics.
Jessie L. Bonner/Associated Press
Tom Luna, Idaho's schools superintendent, says there needs to be accountability for federal education money sent to states.
The latest on the 2012 election, President Obama, Congress and other news from Washington and around the nation. Join the discussion.
Even Mitt Romney, who in 2008 ran for president defending No Child Left Behind, the federal law that vastly expanded Washington?s role in public schools, now says, ?We need to get the federal government out of education.?
For a generation, there has been loose bipartisan agreement in Washington that the federal government has a necessary role to play in the nation?s 13,600 school districts, primarily by using money to compel states to raise standards.
But the field of Republican presidential candidates has promised to unwind this legacy, arguing that education responsibilities should devolve to states and local districts, which will do a better job than Washington.
It can seem like an eon has passed since George W. Bush aspired to be the ?education president.? Mr. Bush?s prized No Child Left Behind law used billions of dollars of federal aid to compel schools to raise student achievement on standardized tests.
President Obama?s own signature education initiative, Race to the Top, similarly used federal money to leverage change that many Republicans had long endorsed ? charter schools and teacher evaluations that tied effectiveness in the classroom to tenure.
But now, the quest to sharply shrink government that all the Republican candidates embrace, driven by the fervor of the Tea Party, has brought a sweeping anti-federalism to the fore on education, as in many other areas.
The question is whether states and local districts, without Washington?s various carrots and sticks, will continue to raise academic standards and give equal opportunity to traditionally ignored student populations.
?People want government money, they want higher standards, they want greater accountability,? said Chester E. Finn Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative-leaning education policy group, who was an education official in the Reagan administration. ?None of those things in most places comes from local control.?
So far, the candidates have not been specific about what a drastically reduced federal role would look like. Education has not become a major issue, and when candidates do address it, they tend to paint the Education Department with the same broad brush used to criticize Mr. Obama for what they see as government overreach on health care, Wall Street reform and the environment.
Tom Luna, the elected superintendent of schools in Idaho, said Washington?s oversight of education is different from health care or environmental regulations. The Education Department dispenses a large share of its billions of dollars to states and local districts on the condition that they uphold two pillars of national law ? that students who are economically disadvantaged and students who are disabled get extra classroom enrichment.
?If you?re a conservative Republican like I consider myself,? said Mr. Luna, who is also president-elect of the Council of Chief State School Officers, ?there has to be accountability for how those dollars are spent. We can?t send them to schools or states with no accountability.?
The change in Republican perspective is most noticeable with Mr. Romney and Mr. Perry, who earlier in their political careers supported No Child Left Behind. That 2002 law required states to show yearly progress in the number of students who were proficient in English and math, although it allowed states to measure proficiency in their own ways. Mr. Perry participated in a news conference heralding federal officials? approval of the Texas plan for putting the law in place, providing $400 million for the state.
But today he complains of ?unfunded mandates? in federal education laws that require Texas, he says, to spend more to meet the rules than it receives in federal dollars. He was one of four governors who refused to compete in Race to the Top, a grant contest that he called ?a federal takeover of public schools.?
Margaret Spellings, the education secretary in the latter years of the Bush administration, said that before No Child Left Behind, when federal laws had few strings attached, many states showed little progress raising student achievement, especially for poor and minority students. ?We tried that for 40 years,? she said. ?The results were far from stellar.?
| Contract Manufacturing cGMP APIs, Intermediates & BioSimilars |
