Congrats on founding the Chatahoochee debate team. I’m sure your family is proud of your accomplishment, but it doesn’t have any bearing on the quality of education in this state, nor my original point about the current governor ignoring the education problem. You also continue to ignore the original point about the governor and the GOP leadership doing nothing about transportation and education. You can’t fix the transportation problem by adopting a policy of no increased spending.

Finally with regard to Civil Rights, if you don’t believe that the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act didn’t cause a major realignment of the parties in the south, you must be on crack. Prior to 1964, John Tower was the only GOP senator from the south. After the passage of the CRA and VRA, the Republican Party became competitive in the south. We can quibble over Dirkson being conservative since he voted with FDR as a Congressman and supported civil rights. Eisenhower on the other hand was far from a conservative. He built the interstate highway system, grew the new deal programs, made HEW into a cabinet level position, appointed Earl Warren and worried about the military industrial complex. That sir is not a conservative record.

Nationally, conservatives have a record that has been wrong about Civil Rights, Viet Nam, the environment, women’s rights, Medicare, health care, worker safety, global warming, Iraq and most recently deregulation. In Georgia the current conservative and also Republican leaders are failing to address education and transportation.

I will throw that assertion right back at you since we’ve seen nearly a half million new Georgia residents move here since the GOP took over as well.

The speaker’s meddling affected competitive sports, but it was the debate team his daughter coached that was the reason for it. As a founder of Chattahoochee High School’s nationally recognized debate team, that was what caught my attention. Also, it was the reasons it was done, one powerful legislator benefitting his own family at the expense of the rest of Georgia.

I would have to say that the issue in 1964 was not liberal versus conservative, but regional. To claim that the 138 out of 172 Republican House members and 27 out of 33 Republican Senators who voted to pass the 1964 Civil Rights Act were somehow in the “liberal” wing of the GOP is at its best revisionist. Never mind it was Eisenhower, a conservative Republican, who sent troops to enforce integration of Little Rock’s Central high School.

Dirksen, who lead the GOP effort in the Senate to get the bill passed, was part of the conservative wing of the GOP.

Republicans have the record, Democrats have the rhetoric. That’s the truth and I challenge you to prove otherwise. And I’ll warn you before hand, trying to say like most Democrats do that because Strom Thurmond switched Parties makes the GOP racist, you’ve already lost. I can negate that easily by saying because Robert Byrd stayed with the Democratic Party makes you all racist.

I think you have trouble seeing the forest for the trees.

1. Like many in Georgia, your interst and concern about education is seen through the prism of competitive sports. The Speaker’s meddling into the high school ranking system was immaterial to education.
2. The significant political dividing line between who was right and who was wrong about civil rights is not party affiliation, but rather conservative versus liberal orthodoxy. Conservatives whether they were southern Democrats or western Republicans were opposed to change and opposed every major civil rights bill. Liberals from both parties supported efforts to end discrimination and segregation and supported the enforcement of civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution. History shows that liberals were on the right side of this issue. One of the great ironies is that LBJ, a southern and liberal Democrat hammered through the legislation.
3. I don’t know why some fanatics insist upon showing their ignorance of grammar and basic facts. The official name of the organization is “The Democratic Party”. The phrase “Democratic Party” is considered a proper noun, and the word “Democratic” is used becuase it is a modifier describing the noun “Party”. At the latest GOP convention, the Republican Party voted down a proposal to use the phrase “Democrat Party”. Hailey Barbour said, “We probably should use what the actual name is.” Well no sh*t. Otherwise the party might sound childish and ignorant. I guess some had the good sense not to incorporate name-calling into the party platform.
4. If the Democratic Party of Georgia did such a terrible job of managing this state, why did millions of people move to Georgia? The place had something going for it, and it was probably the strong economy with growth and lots of opportunity.

Solutions!

We need a new direction in high school education, away from the heavy handed, one-size-fits-all No Child Left Behind system that has failed students and strained tax payers.

We need Governor Perdue and Lieutenant Governor Cagle to step up and lead, instead of rubber-stamping failed gimmick programs like Kathy Cox’s Math 123—we need real solutions.

More Choice, Not Less

Why not coordinate the current university, junior college system, certificate programs, and technical colleges with our high schools? Georgia’s only nationally-ranked high school academic program—the math program used in Cherokee, Cobb, and Fulton counties—currently coordinates its advanced math program with local colleges. Why not expand the concept to all high schools, instead of eliminating it, as Kathy Cox has proposed?

How to Expand

Beginning in the 11th grade, public high schools could coordinate curriculums with local universities, junior colleges, certificate programs, and technical colleges to give kids a chance to pursue job training or advanced academics. This would not only save tax-payer money, it would match students with their best opportunities to become productive tax payers after high school. Also, graduates that earn vocational certificates could still expand their education down the road. For example, a nurse’s aide could train to become a nurse.

University-track students would be eligible to have their junior and senior year course work coordinated with a university system, either on campus or via the internet. This would both challenge Georgia students and give them a leg-up when competing with students from other states. This idea has already been proven effective in Cherokee county’s advanced math program—which is nationally ranked.

http://controlcongress.com/uncategorized/sonny-casey-please-help

You need to first understand the issue before we can get to solutions. Read this article and it may help you.

No Child Not Left Behind!!

MSN-Kids less likely to graduate than parents

Most states doing little to hold schools accountable, says advocacy group

Your child is less likely to graduate from high school than you were, and most states are doing little to hold schools accountable, according to a study by a children’s advocacy group.

More than half the states have graduation goals that don’t make schools get better, the Education Trust says in a report released Thursday.

And dropout rates haven’t budged: One in four kids is dropping out of high school.

“The U.S. is stagnating while other industrialized countries are surpassing us,” said Anna Habash, author of the report by Education Trust, which advocates on behalf of minority and poor children. “And that is going to have a dramatic impact on our ability to compete,” she said.

In fact, the United States is now the only industrialized country where young people are less likely than their parents to earn a diploma, the report said.

High schools are required to meet graduation targets every year as part of the 2002 federal No Child Left Behind law.

But those targets are set by states, not by the federal government. And most states allow schools to graduate low percentages of students by saying that any progress, or even the status quo in some cases, is acceptable.

For example:

http://controlcongress.com/education/no-child-not-left-behind

Pat Swindall wasn’t far behind, but represented one of those suburban districts. By new, 2 decades had passed since 1964 and Tom Murphy was still Speaker.

1992 added Linder (we’d lost Swindall because he lived up to his name) and Kingston. We are now almost 30 years since the CRA and VRA.

In 1994, Georgia went like the rest of the county, hard to the GOP. You can’t pin a national trend on Civil Rights. Why did the GOP do so well in states like NY that year if the 1964 CRA was the reason?

Still, Democrats held onto the Gov. Mansion, State House and Senate. We had a split US Senate delegation. Except for Sam Nunn, no white Democrats served in the US Cong. from GA. It would be 38 years after the CRA for the first Republican Governor to be elected. We got the Senate that year ONLY because several Democrat switched.

On the 40th anniversary of the CRA, the GOP took the House in GA. A 21 year old new voter in 1964 was now 61 and getting ready for retirement at this point. Having been born 10 years after the passage of the VRA, having never gone to a segregated school (I started school in Indiana, hardly a Southern state), in 2004, I was voting in my 6th election. You could in fact, have been born 21 years after the VRA and be voting for the first time to give control of the Georgia House to the Republicans. The CRA and VRA had very little to do with realignment in Georgia.

I still have a copy of Black and Black’s “The Vital South” and Aistrip’s “Southern Strategy Revisited” sitting on a shelf 5 feet from me here in my home office.

They are both 12-13 years old now, but the foundation of the history is still there.

You can use the whole “racist southerns” line in other states, but you can’t in Georgia.

Yes, I studied my political science and, in fact, have a BA in it.

I also got an A- on my paper for Bullock discussing the very issues I mentioned above on why Georgia is different than they other Southern states. I even interviewed James Carville for that paper (along with Linder, Newt, Max Cleland and a few others).

Maybe you should have gone further than the quickie overview of Poly Sci 101.

Oh, so the state’s hands are tied on education because of NCLB??? You must be kidding. Nothing can be done? That’s a lame excuse for inaction. Many states have successful public education systems.

I was expecting for someone to use the phrase “throw money at it” – a hackneyed and reflexive defense for any and every government spending issue that presumes that the spending is wasteful. You also ignored the transportation problem.

You can throw all the money you want at the problem, but unless you fix No Child Left Behind system that incubates failed policy like MATH 123 you are just kidding your self!

You post reminds of the psycho babble debate between Democrats and Republicans on No Child Left Behind.

Democrats think we need to throw more money at a failed idea. And Republicans think all we need to do is pound square pegs harder into round holes!

At the end you seem more interested in the fight than solving the problem.

It’s very easy to do as a Republican.

All due respect, did you miss they day they went over historical political realignment in the South in Political Science 101?