Spitzer on states being fucked
This is obviously troubling-
For those who were worried that Wall Street had perhaps lost its creative juices after its recent spasm of busts and bailouts, fear no more. At the beginning of the month, California ran out of cash and began issuing funny-money IOUs to its creditors. As soon as that happened, the smart guys on Wall Street created a whole new market trading the IOUs. No doubt the IOUs will soon be bundled into more exotic financial instruments, which will be cut up into tranches, graded lazily by the ratings industry, and sold off to unsuspecting investors in Abu Dhabi and Helsinki.
He addresses 3 areas that need to be fixed that may or may not help out:
1. Healthcare, duh
2. Public Pensions need to be restructured to lower guarantees, sorry but it has to happen
3. Education- this is where I disagree with Spitzer. “In education, we have already lived through the period of mandates without funding: the No Child Left Behind experiment. If we are finally serious about addressing our educational failings with standards set in Washington, the capital must also begin to fund the incremental costs of those improvements. The state reservoir is dry.”
I think if we’re serious about education reform, we should probably keep the fed out of it. His point is unclear-Now the NCLB should be funded, is that what he’s saying? We don’t even know if the goddamned thing works, and we sure as hell know there’s a lot of problems with it- AND he said the federal standards system has failed. Where is he going with this. OR is he saying- washington needs to throw money to states to offset the damage done? Either way he’s wrong.
There is no panacea to educational reform (APX excluded)- vouchers, charters, national standards- the verdict still aint in- we should give states more creative freedom to experiment with reform rather than having the morons in washington mandating and funding shit.