National

Recent articles triggered by a recent study of educational progress by elementary and middle-school students, such as this one in the New York Times, has motivated us to revisit the subject of our education system: where is it succeeding, where is it falling short, and what can be done about it?

We’ll be joined on Monday by Marc Tucker, former President and CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy and now a resident of Brooksville. Needless to say, he should be well positioned to provide some experience-based content (and context) to our musings about how education can be improved.

Marc prepared a PowerPoint presentation, attached, to get us started. Please review it before Monday…we’ll probably start with this as a focus for discussion.

See you Monday!

Tomorrow’s Beyond Labels discussion will have no predetermined topic, so we can be as freewheeling as the participants would like.

Next week’s discussion will be about education in the U.S., in particular, the recent declines in math and reading scores amongst eighth-graders (the age at which, I guess, we do comprehensive testing).

More to come on that subject in the next few days.

• What do we make of the debt limit negotiations?
  • Should debt limit increases be automatic?
    • If not, what subjects are (or are not) “fair game” for discussion?
• Bigger picture, how should the US think about its use of debt to fund government programs?
  • Should we aim to
    • repay over time?
    • maintain a constant level relative to GDP? (At what target level?)
    • Something else?
  • How does our use of debt compare to our peers?
• What does all of the above mean for our annual budgets?
  • To use the terms from today’s WaPo “Budget Game,” are you a
    • Diligent Deficit Hawk?
    • Big Tax and Spender?
    • Money-printing Maverick?