I was talking about the country, not the land.
An obvious distinction.
Obvious, and ethnocentrically presumptive. In any case, the two are inseparable, as even the founding fathers acknowledged. Pretending nothing of importance occurred in "the land" before the U.S. was established denies a significant part of our history.
Whats keeping that from happening is the lack of robust economic growth, which last time I checked you had no plan for.
Last time I checked, "trickle-down economics" didn't work for anyone except the few on top. It's not my personal job to create economic growth for the nation. If you, however, (or anyone else) want people to take conservative ideas on how to fix welfare and medicare seriously, the burden of proof is on them (you) to show how they will actually correct the problems without creating worse ones.
Those recalcitrant folks get should get nothing. A system that doesn't pursue welfare fraud against such folks implicitly sanction's their actions.
We should at least put them in jail. Then they can have rudimentary shelter, food, and medical care. Perhaps some counseling and job training, too.
You have a sufficiently vested interest in protecting teachers regardless of the outcome, which was made readily apparent in the thread regarding the Chicago Teachers strike.
Your time is coming once we get to education, which given the state of our public schools should be soon.
Not sure what this last is supposed to mean, but I actually have no more vested an interest in protecting teachers than anyone else. As a school volunteer for many years, though, I see firsthand the constraints on teachers, students, and parents that tie everyone's hands, preventing them from using their creativity to help kids learn in ways that translate directly to success as an adult. The stupidity of many of the things schools and everyone in them are required to do is mind-boggling. What we need to get rid of is red tape/bureaucracy, arbitrary standards, overemphasis on standardized testing, and archaic schedules. If you really want to reform teaching as a profession, we need to get rid of the ridiculous licensing and education requirements that keep too many talented people out of the field to begin with, and force those who do go in to focus too much time and effort on useless classes at the expense of subject area knowledge. I see the effects of this firsthand also, in the limited ability of far too many teachers in STEM fields (and resulting poor preparation in high school graduates).
As for your linked article,
Students in Finland, which is often held up as a model education system for its teacher preparation and its relative absence of high-stakes testing, outperformed American students on all the exams. But students in countries with intense testing cultures also exceeded American students. “Some of the high-performing math and science countries have extremely rigorous testing regimes,†Mr. Buckley said.
It doesn't specify whether the Finnish students outperformed those in the "rigorous testing" nations. In some years, the Finns came out first, at least in certain grades. In any case, it seems like the Finnish model would be cheaper to implement, since rigorous standardized testing is expensive, especially if one expects the test actually to mean something.