Education Week 11/3 Reflection

I thought the article about federal funds being given to more high school and middle schools to lessen dropout rates was a great article.  I really appreciate the message behind it.  It's great to see schools working hard to get students who drop out back into school so that they can finish out and get their diploma.  Even better they are looking into spending a lot of the money on prevention.  As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  There were a few things I thought was a little disturbing.  This program that just received 50 million dollars in this fiscal year received no money in the last 3 fiscal years.  Which means that for over a year that Barack Obama was in office this program received no funding.  I would have thought that he would have gotten the ball rolling on something like this a lot sooner.  Even worse, for the last three years of the Bush administration, the entire program only got 5 million dollars.  So much for Bush's legacy being education reform.  Guess he figured No Child Left Behind was enough...  Also, I was really pleased with the fact that the teachers in one of the districts that received the money were sticking around after hours to help out.  I hope they get paid, and I'm sure with schedules like that it is very difficult to avoid being burnt out, but to be honest I think that is the only way they are going to be able to do things.  Why would you bring in people the kids don't know?  Realistically, if it is going to be successful, the staff are the ones who are going to have to put in the hours.  Otherwise, I don't think that the kids would care very much if it were someone besides their teachers.
The Obama Plays Cheerleader for STEM article was pretty pathetic; not that focus of the article, but rather the writing.  The article uses the STEM acronym multiple times in the beginning of the article.  As they get to the middle of the article, it becomes STEN.  WHAT?  How on earth does this happen in an article in this publication?  Don't they have people double-checking this stuff?  Not only that, after STEN had been used multiple times, near the end of the article it became STEM again.  It seems like this was a case of little to no help in the editing process.  In terms of the actual article, I found it interesting that people were expressing their frustration that the funding hadnt been increased for a particular program.  One program was more or less absorbed and instead of 180million dollars being spent on it, 300 million was scheduled to be spent on it.  Last I checked, that was over a 50% increase in funding...