Health care reform received a significant boost Wednesday with the release of a Congressional Budget Office analysis concluding that the Senate Finance Committee bill actually would reduce the federal deficit by $81 billion over the next 10 years. It also was aided by former Sen. Bob Dole, who called for passage of health care reform (though he opposes the public option). Dole also said that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told him not to say that he supported reform, and Dole said that the public was the loser when Congress couldn’t agree on reform when President Clinton proposed it (and he took partial blame for that failure).
Columnist Thomas Frank noted the “curious reversal” by Republicans who argue that private insurance companies wouldn’t be able to compete with a “predatory” public option insurance plan that covers all comers, including those private companies won’t insure. Thomas wrote: “Just think of the conservative caricatures that must be inverted for this argument to work: All those soft liberal bureaucrats? Ferocious man-eaters. The welfare state? Law of the jungle. And the actuarial-minded hardliners of the insurance biz, the ones who deny your claim or cancel your policy? A gentle but endangered species that needs our nurturing, sort of like panda bears.”
“Our current cultural politics are organized by the obsolete culture war, which has put secular liberals on one side and religious conservatives on the other,” argued columnist David Brooks. But he contends that the more pressing cultural battle should be restoring economic morality. The goals should be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy, and to return to financial self-restraint, large and small. “A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible,” Brooks wrote. “But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.”
One weakness of many university teacher education programs is that the college students don’t spend much time in the school system. They have to observe some, and they must do student teaching for a semester. But that’s often not enough to prepare them for the rigors of managing a classroom — which is one reason so many new teachers leave the profession within five years. But a $6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education will help transform teacher training at Wichita State University. The five-year grant will establish professional development programs at 18 Wichita public schools. Education majors in the program will spend more time working alongside mentor teachers and will receive in-the-field training from professors. WSU has been an early innovator of such programs, which likely is one reason it received the grant.
