SENATE BILL: The Duke-Scott Educating The People Reform (Debating)

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The President and the Emperor are obviously better at advocating this reform, but I sponsored this bill for I believe it has the potential to address several issues in Education that might be ignored. Section I is mostly common sense to me, I see no reason to charge students for those services which schools can and should provide free of charge. Sections II and III remind me of Duke's earlier Health Care reform which sought to address the technological problem, and (in a personal level) as a college student who constantly uses WiFi in college, I can't tell you how helpful it is. Section IV is also fine with me, I've always been supportive of a certain level of freedom in Education, and since I am not a fan of creationism, I don't mind forbidding textbooks related to that.

The bill is bound to face some discussion focused on (I think) Sections IV, V and the potential expense, but I found it to be a rather solid proposal.

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Most of TNF's amendment looks fine to me, with the exception of Section V. But, given that is a minor concern, I would consider it friendly. What do the President and the Emperor think?

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Aye.

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I was confused at first in regards to Edmund Burke (although I was familiar with the mentioned quote on good and evil), but Shua explanation convinced me. It does look like a detail too specific, but sacrificing accuracy is not something we should ignore in regards to an educational reform. Perhaps expanding it to avoid other common mistakes and misquotes is something we could do as well.

Amendment friendly.

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Aye.

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I defer (once again) to Scott and President Duke on this, but with Sections I to III modified by TNF's amendment, I believe the main focus of discussion should remain on Sections IV and V (and my guess is that the only possible change in Section V would be to regulate recess in some way) in order to keep advancing on this. I am of the opinion that it would be better if we could retain some of regulations for the texts, but we seems to fall in something resembling mandate in most cases. Any ideas as to how to improve the language here?

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What is the point of the amendment offered? Schools must offer those things and if they cannot afford it, they can apply for grants so they can afford it. Why do we need to change the wording? So we will set a limit? Do we even know how much money these needy schools will need?

It's not enough to say you must do something and you can apply for grants. What if the grants are denied for some reason, or they aren't given enough, or the grant office takes its sweet time?  In that case the schools are required by law to do something they don't have the money for.

Besides that, there are those of us who believe education ought to be pretty much a regional and local matter.  Nothing in the Constitution gives the federal government the authority to micromanage schools, as much as we seem to like to.

I would argue the last argument seems more of a legal vacuum to me, it doesn't specify that regional governments have the authority as well, that can only be assumed. What will happen if 3 billion are not enough? (and I'm really inclinded to think it won't be enough) Are we going to negate those services just because of concerns over whether the government should or should not be directly involved in Education?

I also don't get the changes in Section III (the wording sounds bad here, but that could be me) and Section V (which I believe was changed already by TNF's amendment).

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Nay.

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Nay.

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Amendment friendly, as the President pointed out.

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The number seems reasonable to me in light of the potential expenses, but I'd like to see some opinions before declaring it friendly, just to make sure the support is there.

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This article gives a figure of $736K per school for LA (!), but says they don't expect much upkeep costs.

With about a 100.000 public schools in America and even if the expense was much lower, it seems that while we could reduce the upkeep sum, the actual costs are going to be much higher than 5 billion.

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Can't we just use Yankee's proposal with a framework of three to five years? We don't really need to spend the money right away as long as we don't take too much time, and the cost would be lowered to an acceptable sum for the entire Senate. I would vote for the 45 billion if needed be, but I think the GM should give us his take on this as well.

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Amendment friendly, I still tend to forget that being specific is the best thing when it comes to these bills.

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$11 billion should be easier to stomach compared to $45 billion.

Certainly, I'm for it as well. The case can be made that High Schools are the ones that use internet in a more extensive way, and so deserve the prority. Since the cost of that would be only $11 billion, we might as well include public libraries on this.

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Friendly! As the President indicated, it's probably time to reach a final vote as soon as possible (specially as the administration has other educational proposals in mind).

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I'm honestly at a loss to calculate the expenses of the rest of the sections (with the services Schools will now offer). I'm not familiar with OTL American legislation in education, but does anybody know similar laws that we could use as a base to calculate the full cost?

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I would like to request a simple explanation before declaring it friendly, why the change from the district education board to the principal?

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In light of the President's words, I declare it as hostile.

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In light of the President's words, I declare it as hostile.

Does that make sense to anyone else? I just am fearful that a rogue principal is a more likely occurrence than a rogue school board.

It makes sense to me, certainly. At the beginning I considered that reducing bureaucracy in this process might speed it up, but at the risks that Bore mentioned, which are too big to ignore.

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Nay.

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We still don't really have much of an idea how much this will cost, do we?

As it stands, I doubt we will get to know without the assistance of the GM, so I guess a final vote would be the best for this bill right now.

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Very well then, should we replace "adequate technology" with a specific year, like technology updated as of 2012, 2013 or 2014?

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Windows XP 2001-2014


It ain't dead yet as far as I am concerned.

I believe the same, and since my guess is that some schools are already updated to more advanced operative systems it might save a good amount of money as well.

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I'm not offering a formal amendment yet, I want to see reactions. I kinda butchered Section III with this, but I feel we should vote on this as soon as we can.