mina hadley's List: Issues Tracking

• n the wealthy. In the Senate, they could not find enough support for boosting taxes on people making $1 million or more a year, much less on families making $250,000. The pre-2010 House, which had a Democratic majority, barely approved higher rates on investment income.

   
• he Democrats’ addiction to higher taxes, more spending and bigger government represents a defining difference between the two political parties in this election,” said Brian Walsh, communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “In every Sen

• utting spending still matters, polls show, but Americans don’t mind asking wealthier households to pay more — a sentiment Democrats rallied around as a way to fund Obama’s jobs initiatives.

   
• “There’s not a lot of sympathy in this world right now for hedge fund managers,”

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• AUGUSTA -- Maine's elementary and secondary schools are some of the best in the country, but that's not good enough when competing in a global economy.

• her education achievement does not stack up, and that Maine has the lowest percentage of adults with a college degree of any New England state.

   
• In a standards-based system, "we don't care how much seat time you had, we don't care how many courses you took, we care about what you know and what you can do," Breen said during the panel discussion.
• "What they're asking for is a more traditional approach," she said. "So, that's a barrier to the change I believe we do need."
• "Many college admissions programs are enthusiastic about receiving more information about what it is the student is doing and not assuming that an A is an A is an A," she said. "Many standards-based schools explain the standard, and that's part of the transcript.

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• DC, Thursday, asking President Obama both "Do you hate all rich people?" and "Do you hate all poor people?"
• was no -- he just hates some of them.

• The president doesn't really hate all rich people, just those who don't contribute to his campaign," Paul said.
• If you're a crony, if you're a buddy, just stop by the White House," Paul said sarcastically on Thursday.
• "But the president continues to roam the country blaming millionaires and billionaires," Paul said.

• most of whom are working to win the White House and Senate and hold on to the House of Representatives this year.
  
• Asked Paul: "Who will be that next Ronald Reagan?"

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• What is the purpose of state standards on education?
• Kalama Intermediate School science teacher Maggie Prevenas, noted for her enthusiasm and ability to motivate students, illustrated the issue when she observed that California was given an "A" in the Fordham report but California students scored below Hawaii students in a National Assessment of Educational Progress report.
• The issue is not standards but implementation, how well teachers are teaching.
• udents perform after leaving school, not how w
• Business owners and managers who hire young adults with high school degrees can assess whether the employee is adequately prepared.
• The ACT exam last year found that half of the students tested were not up to speed in math and reading for college-level wor
• Educational standards are goals, but applying a goal for 180,000 students in Hawaii public schools is hardly realistic if expectations are that students with varying abilities all can achieve the same result
• olving the matter requires the "government getting out of the way. We need less system, not more
• Core program that Hawaii's Board of Education has adopted. Its broad mandate is that students be prepared for a post-high school career or col
• Through the centuries, communities in the United States paid for schools providing what the communities determined were educational needs.
• There are efforts to bridge the gap, such as the Maui Educational Consortium, which has Maui District teachers and UH-Maui College instructors devising educational goals for students expecting to move on to college.
• Standards and goals are noble ideals. Implementation and achieving goals are what count and that results from the efforts of teachers and students - the ones doing the work.

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• he Discovery Institute advocates for teachers having the right to teach alternatives to evolution in science class, especially “intelligent design,” which says that most or all living things were created by an unspecified intelligence at some time in the past.

   
• “There are non-creationist, skeptical alternatives to Darwinist theory that teachers could bring into their classroom,” Youngkin told the House Education Committee. “We are committed to academic freedom … to critical thinking.”
• “require science teachers to instruct pupils that proper scientific inquire (sic) results from not committing to any one theory or hypothesis, no matter how firmly it appears to be established.”
• regarding
• s titled “regarding instruction in
• opper noted how politicized the topic of evolution has become. He has received various kinds of hate mail since news of his bill came o
• That sort of anger, Hopper said, is why teachers need protection in the form of his bill before they can present alternatives to evolution in class
• He argued that such teaching overlooks “gaps in the fossil record,
• for evolution, and that even simple creatures like an amoeba are too complicated to have arisen “by chance.”
• Youngkin said this was his first time testifying before a legislative committee but that he recently had been in Indiana advising lawmakers there against a bill supporting creationism, an earlier term for the idea that modern species were created. Courts have ruled that creationism has too much of a religious component to be allowed in public schools.
• low the living thing to outcompete other living things and produce more offspring, which spreads the change.
• Intelligent design says that some or all living things had to have been created in their current form, although there is no agreement about how this could have happened, who created them or when – nor is it clear how most of these questions could be scientifically studied.
• Its similarity to the Biblical creation stories has caused opponents to describe it as thinly disguised theology, not science.

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