Month: October 2004

Don’t get me wrong.

I will be terribly upset if Bush loses. I don’t like the trend on Tradesports. I’d like to see Bush looking stronger. All kinds of awful things can happen.

But I have decided that I am doing myself no favors obsessing about it, which I have been doing.

I already voted. Work prevents me from volunteering. I’ve done all I can.

I am going stop looking at the Internet completely until this is over, after I post this. I don’t have a TV or a radio accessible where I am, which is helpful.

I am going to total electronic silence until election night, as of right now.

I’m going to leave the office and take a walk. It looks like it is a pleasant evening in our nation’s capital. I am going pray the Rosary. I am going to ask Our Lady to watch over this country and ask God Almighty to grant what I am asking, if that is His will for us.

I’ll be back with something on the blog sometime after the election.

God bless my fellow ChicagoBoyz and Grrls, and all of our readers, friends and enemies.

And God bless America.

The French Foreign Minister sends a nice Hallmark get well to Arafat. It’s very touching, especially,

“I wish to express my most sincere wishes for your recovery, hoping that you can return rapidly to your place to lead the Palestinian Authority”

And Wretchard writes a fine article on the current state of Palestinian affairs.

Sir Winston’s quote: “The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.”

Jay Nordlinger writes a very good column further illuminating this idea. Take the time to page down, and catch the individual antecdotes about New York city and political button-wearing. Here’s my favorite:

“I used to wear a “Vietnamese-American Against Kerry” button until someone on St. Mark’s stopped me and delivered a monologue on the Bush police state. When I brought up the real police state that my family lived in (including the re-education camps), he brushed that off and blathered on about Bush and the sorry state of the U.S. I decided to stop wearing the button because I couldn’t take the blind idiocy.”

I really like the idea of a voucher based funded school system. I think that long term it offers the best chance of providing high quality education to an increasingly diverse population.

However, transitioning from the current governmental management to private management is a major hurdle. Voucher schools must be able to offer all the same opportunities as the currently established schools immediately even though they are new and untried institutions. This vastly increases the upfront cost and risk of financing such schools.

We need a transitional form of voucher schools that can function as an auxiliary to government schools, while they build themselves up into full-fledged institutions.

The Japanese have an extensive system of private after-hour tutoring schools called juku (for younger students) and yobiko (for high school students). These tutoring schools, often called “Cram Schools” in English, exist to prepare students for Japan’s rigorous entrance exams for high school and college.

Perhaps we could create a similar system here, using vouchers to provide extra instruction after hours. We could start by targeting at-risk students in poor schools and then expand. Such a program would direct resources to motivated students who could really benefit from additional instruction. It could provide another source of income to teachers. The tutoring schools could start out small, perhaps with just one student, and could use private homes, churches, public meeting places or after-hour school buildings. If successful, the tutoring schools could evolve over time into full-fledged, stand-alone educational institutions.

Politically, tutoring schools would be an easier sell. It would be easier to convince parents, teachers and education unions to support a minor change to the system, which would cause more money to flow to students’ education than a major structural change in the entire system.