Senate Bill: Atlasian Education Modernization Act (Rejected)

3-3 tie on the present amendment

Bore, TJ, sbane and Maxy have not voted.

Quote from: Рresident Αverroës on August 06, 2013, 08:29:16 PM

Sadly, I have reached the same conclusion as Senator Polnut. I am no longer confident in the merits of this project. I understand that there's real interest in reforming the federal government's role in education, but I think that we've been taking the wrong approach so far. At this point, there's very little from the original bill that I'd be willing to support, largely because of the conversations that I've had with Atlasians.

I'll be honest - I don't care who's handling education policy as long as it's being done well. But that's not what this bill does and I don't believe that we can fix it. The general feeling among the public seems to be that we're dealing in matters that ought to be handled elsewhere, and I think that we've proven them correct. At this point this bill contains almost nothing that I support at the federal level that isn't covered by existing laws (e.g. health care for students, free school lunches, the right of teachers to unionize). I encourage the Senate to hold a vote and move on.

The GET act should have served to indicate that this was going to be hard, extremely hard to do in this format, considering that was just a small measure really and took three months to hammer out the details. There are a lot of mechanics, in many ways it is like my Mental Health bill, which has also taken three months, perhaps in the end the most shocking thinking of all is that starting from a blank slate for big things is the best way to approach these things (Stimulus, Financial Regulatiosn, Mental Health) compared with this and the Comprehensive Social Security Act (which took nine months, three PPTs and outlasted its sponsor's membership, some left the SEnate and returned whilst it was on the floor), has thus been vindicated. Also vindicated is the piecemeal approach of late last and early this year when we passed three bills each on Immigration, Education and technology/research that were all really good but targetted and simple changes.

I had a fear going in that unless this had high levels of engagement, dedication and cooperation it would fail once you said it would be comprehensive and then once that was followed with the loss of the initial sponsor so early on, I figured that things would eventually end that way.

On education it helps to have a comprehensive strategy to fall back on and provide guidance to the small and target efforts, and I think that laying that out helped provide me the basis upon which to finish the GET act.

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