| First, he visited Columbus School in Bridgeport to get a few photo-ops in a Total Learning kindergarten class. The first expensively trained teacher left for higher pay in a suburban district, so another had to be trained.
Here are some quotes from Senator Magnanimous:
"We are losing all these children every day," he said "I feel we're at a point where we have to be bold. We have to experiment. They have to learn."
Lieberman said he hopes to get $500,000 allocated by an Appropriations Subcommittee, but noted that so-called "earmarks" - money set aside for particular projects - are harder to come by these days.
"There's talk of reducing earmarks by 50 percent, he said.
Our Joe will fight for every penny to help those needy inner-city children be all they can be.
Well, maybe he isn't the soul of generosity after all:
Lieberman is also a friend of Charles Tisdale, executive director of ABCD, the anti-poverty agency that is the driving force behind the Total Learning experiment.
Tisdale hopes to piece together up to $3 million from federal, state and private sources to finance the experiment.
That's a lot of Tinker Toys and sandboxes for his close friend.
After his My Pet Goat moment at Columbus, Joe meandered on over to the Trumbull Marriot, where he lunched with some supporters/businessmen/Republicans, and discussed No Child Left Behind. Somehow his story line changed when he crossed over from Bridgeport's city line into the suburbs.
"A lot of people would like to get rid of this law, but that would be tragic," he said. "For too long, we argued over whether there were enough dollars going toward education programs without ever asking what we were getting."
The law adopted a principle from the business community that there has to be performance standards and accountability for school systems that do not measure up.
Joe, how do you assess a kindergartener?
During discussion on the bill's re-authorization, Lieberman said he intends to advocate new standards for judging teacher quality and new models for testing students. For under-performing schools, he said he would advocate giving students scholarships to private or religious schools.
Get ready, Fairfield Country Day - here we come!
"That happened in Washington, D.C.," he said. "We told parents, 'While we're fixing the schools, why should you sacrifice your children's future?'"
Lieberman said the resulting program, which allowed parents to choose another school for their children, was a success.
"It was wildly popular with parents, and wildly unpopular with the teacher unions," he said.
Actually, it's been a complete failure, because there are no openings in our other schools. Every class in the city is stuffed to the gills, with some in violation of the contractual limit. Those lucky few are call 'controlled transfers', but if the student exhibits behavioral issues, his or her teacher will race to the office to get them send back to their home school. Gone! Fortunately for Joe, his supporters don't know this because they rarely visit us.
"We should expand the program, and start closing schools that under-perform for five straight years and reopening them as charter schools."
How about just giving us public school teachers some money for those little things, like books?
But back at his desk in Washington, Joe probably missed this,
via the
Dept. of Homeland Security Daily Infrastructure Report
also linked to Boston Now
Three nuclear research reactors operated by Massachusetts colleges and universities could be easy targets for terrorist attacks because they lack the stringent security required of larger commercial nuclear power plants, critics and nuclear security experts charge.
"These things are just a disaster. They should all be shut down," said Peter Stockton, an expert on reactor security with the Project on Government Oversight, a government watchdog organization.
The reactors, all located in densely populated areas at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and Worcester Polytech in Worcester, are exempt from many of the more stringent requirements imposed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on other larger facilities, notes Matthew Bunn, a senior research associate with the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.
"They are not required to have armed guards, not required to defend against any basic threat and they are not required to have fences with intrusion detection devices around the building," he said. "They really aren't treated like sites for potential nuclear bomb material."
Neither MIT, Worcester Polytech nor UMass Lowell responded to numerous inquiries for interviews about reactor security, but both MIT and Worcester Polytech, which will begin moving to de-commission its reactor next month, said in statements they are in compliance with the new FBI employee screening guidelines.
"Safe operation of the MITR is our highest priority and these new NRC requirements are fully consistent with that objective," Dr. David Moncton, director of MIT's Nuclear Reactor Laboratory, said in a statement.
It's not enough, critics like Stockton and Bunn said, however. Security at research reactors is so lax throughout the country, they maintain, it would be difficult to stop an armed team of terrorists from taking over a facility.
"There's virtually no security at college reactors," notes Stockton. "You're lucky you have a guard walking around every hour with a pistol."
Although my son lives in Boston, I'm not really worried. He's completed his education - and that's Joe's first priority. |
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