President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Kamala Harris
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) V. Archuleta
98%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Marshall Dawson
95%
5%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
50%
50%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(D) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank
(D) River Gassen
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) John Fabbricatore
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen
(R) Sergei Matveyuk
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
70%↑
30%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
September 02, 2011 09:54 PM UTC
18 Comments
and it does clarify his very vague ideas about education. Even though I was one of the loudest, most ardent Bennet supporters and heard him speak dozens of times, I still never really understood what his educational policy was. Others tried to tell me he wanted to undercut unions, but I have always given him the benefit of the doubt; his own mother is a teacher and he has stated often he thinks teachers should be paid much better than they are now.
I applaud Senator Bennet when he says we need to invest more money in education.
Still, I have to disagree somewhat with the idea that “women today can choose from an array of lucrative professions”. Sure, they can choose them in make-believe land, but the reality is that unless they grow up in upper-middle class and above families, they probably do not have the resources to get the educations they need to get jobs in those lucrative professions. (Female dominated) Liberal arts majors haven’t been able to get jobs in this economy. In order to get good-paying jobs, one must go into male-dominated fields like engineering, or get a graduate degree, which is very expensive.
Sexism is still a major factor in predicting which jobs women will go into, particularly in the less-progressive suburbs and rural areas. High school teachers are still telling girl students what they told me 30 years ago, “You don’t have to know math and science, really. You’re a girl.”
The hard reality is, it has become more difficult all the time for people to get loans to go to college, and on to graduate school. Tuition prices have skyrocketed out-of-control. Families real incomes have gone down, and saving for college, let alone graduate school, is a luxury few families can afford. Without parental financial support, getting a professional degree is a pipe dream for most girls.
Access to college also depends on access to health care and family planning. The more we cut services to families in these areas, the more we have girls becoming pregnant in high school or in their early adult years, making college even less likely. Paying for college is hurdle enough — paying for child care on top of it is next to impossible for most people.
For Senator Bennet’s and President Obama’s beautiful and smart daughters, their future is wide open. Their families have the resources, the connection to higher education, and the social support to get them anywhere they want to go. So do the families of most of the staffers and other politicians who surround them — the people who create their articial bubble of reality. For many American girls, it is not only the incentives that are lacking, it is the social support, the finances, and the role models they need to get them to consider non-traditional jobs (something other than teaching and nursing).
It is true every American has the right to dream. It is not true every American has the financial resources and social support to achieve those dreams. We need to make loans for college and graduate school more available. We need to make it easier for girls to become doctors and lawyers and chemists and pilots and professors, before we pull the rug out from under them in the jobs they can realistically attain with a bachelor’s degree.
What Bennet says about more opportunities for women today is very valid. There was a day when women saw teaching as a fall back in case they didn’t get married by the time they were finished with college. It was a genteel profession and young ladies who wouldn’t consider it proper to work for more money on, say, an assembly line, accepted the low salary because it was an acceptable white collar job.
It’s also true that fields dominated by women tend to remain lower paying and teaching remains dominated by women. Even so, the men in teaching were paid more, the thinking being that men had families to support while women were either supporting only themselves or bringing in extra income if married. The same went for nursing though nursing now pays much better than in those days and also attracts more men.
Still, While women may not yet be earning just as much as men in similar jobs, college educated women most certainly do have many, many more options among higher paying jobs than they did in those times. As always, being born into privilege still helps both men and women.
So let’s not get distracted from Bennet’s main message here. If education is really a high priority, as people insist they believe it to be, then we need to make teaching a respected and well paid profession for women and for men.
My youngest daughter had amazing scholarship offers from Colleges because she is in Engineering (she’s now a sophomore at Mudd) and did well enough in school to qualify for the top schools.
The top engineering schools are doing everything they can to bring in more female students and support them once they are in. And that includes a boatload of financial aid.
it makes boatloads of sense to hire women because you can pay them 3/4 of what you’d have to pay a man.
I got a huge raise when I pointed my boss to this strategy. We get all the work done for the department by only used 80% of the budget (well, we gave ourselves some nice bonuses for our money saving idea).
<./sick joke>
That’s awesome! Glad to hear things are starting to change. Getting them to college is the trick — so many girls are thoughtlessly and subtley guided into non-STEM interests as early as first grade. There was a study recently that showed girls deliberately dumb-down their science and math abilities to be attractive to boys despite being just as intelligent in those areas.
http://jobs.aol.com/articles/2…
http://www.usnews.com/science/…
Are the least heeded.
I was beginning to suffer Merida withdrawal after not seeing her referenced for 10 minutes here. Maybe I should eat some, heh heh, fast food. Get it? Caloric intake, giggle. Cuz she’s not skinny.
The only reference to Andrea Merida on this page is your comment.
Oh, never mind, now there are two.
I wasn’t aware that any positive mention of Bennet’s record at DPS was somehow restarting a Merida (that’s three) flamewar. If you really think so, perhaps you are the one with the problem.
Apparently not. Look it up and we can discuss it then.
Ok, you’ve got me. It was even the damn title. Shows what happens when I don’t pay attention.
So accept my apologies, and on with the flamewar.
If that is the main message, I agree completely. My concern is corporate America taking over raising our kids, and until I see some specifics about the rest of the plan, I will be leery. If the message becomes we should incentivize men entering the field over women through programs that minimalize the importance of an education degree, I won’t support it. Just because someone is competent in business, it is irrelevant to their ability to teach. Teaching is a bona fide field of study and field of expertise, and degrees in education should be a minimum. Personality also plays a huge role as well; if a person is not naturally patient, they make lousy teachers. (My husband, an accomplished engineer/scientist would be the first to tell you he’d be terrible at it.)
If so then I’ll agree with you. But the few studies I have seen show that there is no correlation with either that or any other advanced study and being a better teacher.
I do think we need to pay teachers better. I also think we should get quality teachers from any source available. A superb teacher is worth their weight in gold and so we don’t want to turn down any.
The vast majority of people, well educated though they may be, simply do not possess the knowledge or skills that would maximize their effectiveness as teachers of our children. They might decent at it without training (or with minimal training), but they would be more effective with a full formal education program.
Would you hire an accounting major to program your accounting software if they didn’t also have a computer science background of some sort? They obviously have subject matter knowledge. But they’re largely not C++, Java or C# experts; if they only knew how to communicate effectively with the computer, they’d be excellent hires.
The same goes for teaching, and we shouldn’t need a study to tell us this. If anything, what we might want to study is just how well our education degree programs are teaching effective methods.
When I hire for programming positions I like first for intelligence. If they also have the specific skills we need great. But it’s not essential as they can learn those skills quickly if they’re smart.
All the PHP programming for our new affiliate websites? Written by an intern who’s total programming experience was 1 semester of Python. It took her a couple of days.
I agree effective training will generally improve someones skills. But the key word is effective. And you are also dependent on the ability of the person being trained.
So yes lets provide the most effective training we can for teachers. But lets structure it to give us the best results, not to create a rigid one size fits all series of hoops to jump through.
First, I won’t address beyond this sentence the fact that you’re trying to use an intern to compare effectiveness when I’m talking about the equivalent job of an intermediate to senior programmer.
But would you agree that if your programmer had received formal training and certification from an accredited and reviewed program – or at least an equivalence exam to that certification – that you could pretty much count on them to be a good programmer, rather than hoping that someone’s perceived intelligence was sufficient to the task?
Understanding and reviewing education certification programs is not brain surgery. Real world application may be, for some stingy citizens.
where they tried rigorous professional training specifically in education and got good results! And if only it started with an F and was somewhere in northern Europe! Oh but I guess there will never be any real data on education so we’ll have to just rely on our gut instincts and the occasional study we select because it supports our preconceived notions. Oh alas!
Finland works well. But slapping the same titles on what we do here is unlikely to get the same results.
“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”
I’m of the cynical opinion that most of the pension problems that are being wrestled with today are nothing more than promises once made that were never intended to be kept.
The problem is that now there are quite a few folks who have depended upon those promises, and now want them kept, and the right considers these folks some new form of criminal. (And, it doesn’t help any that these criminals are living longer than they used to — a real conspiritist could see opposition to health care as a necessary corollary.)
It’s no wonder that the economic topic of the day is retirement and pension “reform” ( – or – how do we now screw these fools that were idiot enough to believe us).