At the risk of offending my readership, I have a great deal of difficulty understanding the almost rabid opposition some people have to the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.

When I revealed a few weeks back that I had signed up for Obamacare and thanks to federal tax subsidies, my premium will be $1.98 a month, I had people who were accusing me of stealing from them. The fact that I was going to be able to afford health care insurance despite having a much smaller income than I had at this time last year should have been a cause for celebration. The system, though far from ideal, is working.

That was not the way some Turner Report readers saw it. The fact that I was not paying $407 a month to continue my Joplin R-8 Schools insurance or just as much or more for my own health insurance was an insult to these people. I should have to suffer because I make less money.

A few even took shots at my plan at this moment, which is to combine my much-smaller-than-anticipated pension with my blogging to provide me with an income. “I don’t want to pay my taxes so you can do your hobby,” one commented, or something of that nature; his comment is not worth looking up to make sure I have it word for word.

My hope is that with six or seven smaller streams of income, in addition to my pension, that I will make enough that I will eventually be paying more than $1.98 for health insurance.

I might as well rub it in by mentioning that, despite my initial fears, my heart doctor and my regular doctor are both in the network for my insurance company, as is almost every other doctor in this area, whether they are associated with Freeman, Mercy, or someone else.

The people who are crying the loudest about having to pay for Obamacare are not thinking this thing through. If we pay for the people who need health care, including preventative care, they will not be showing up in the emergency rooms for any problem and driving up costs for everyone.

There also is a small number of people (though the media and Obamacare opponents can always find them) who have been affected negatively by Obamacare.

I was amused last week when I posted links to stories about Missouri school districts who are having problems because they have had to cut down the hours of substitute teachers because some work more than 30 hours a week and the law requires that they be paid health insurance benefits. Every news story I read talked about the hardships on the schools. I did not see one story that examined the situation from the other side. Why shouldn’t we pay for benefits for the substitute teachers who are good enough to be hired again and again for one of the most thankless jobs in education or anywhere else?

It is so easy to try to find fault with Obamacare (and it not perfect by any means) that no one seems inclined to examine the societal faults that caused it to be created in the first place.

And news reporters are also neglecting mention that Obamacare was being promoted by many of the same people who oppose it so vehemently now when it was first proposed- by the Republicans- 20 years ago, and when it was successfully implemented by Gov. Mitt Romney in Massachusetts.

It’s not President Obama’s health care plan that should be under attack- just take a look at the plan he and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have in mind for our schools.

But that’s another story, for another time.

[Reprinted, with author’s permission, from The Turner Report]

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At a time when we are spending more and more taxpayers’ money on standardized tests and technology to enable us to take those standardized tests (and using the results of the tests to determine whether teachers are succeeding), the reformers are not letting a major fact stand in their way- the tests are worthless. During my years as a teacher, I saw far too much time devoted to meetings in which administrators had teachers pore over the results of poorly written standardized tests to determine what they were going to teach and how they were going to teach it. It was time that would have been far more productive had it been used to to work with individual students or fine tune lesson plans.

An article in the Washington Post addresses the problem of educational data:

Standardized tests given to K-12 students are not without merit. They can function as clear indicators of basic academic competencies. And they can play an important role as diagnostic tools. But they capture only a fraction of life in schools. Built almost exclusively around multiple-choice questions, such tests tell us nothing about a student’s ability to think or write or persuade, to perform experiments or conduct research, to paint, or to play an instrument. They provide no insight into a school’s social climate, its academic orientation, or its general culture. And, as any teacher can explain, the testing and accountability movement has also been plagued by a number of unintended consequences. The school curriculum has narrowed. Test-prep now takes up an inordinate amount of instructional time. And teacher autonomy has withered.

Missouri is diving even further into data at all costs with the recent decision by the State Board of Education to not only buy standardized tests from McGraw-Hill, but also to buy the company’s practice tests, called Acuity. It guarantees that Missouri children will spend more and more time compiling more and more useless data, at the expense of learning. We are reaching the point where education will no longer hold any joy for teachers or students, and that’s when the game is over.

Reprinted from The Turner Report, by permission of the author.

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