We Must Do Better
July 16, 2012
Everybody is expressing opinions about the US Supreme Court’s various written opinions regarding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010.
However, my mind goes back to the heated debate the previous year, to a passage about this topic in a July 13, 2009 Businessweek column co-authored by Benjamin E. Sasse, US Secretary of Health and Human Services from 2007 until taking a teaching position at the University of Texas in Austin in 2009, and Kerry N. Weems, an independent consultant who previously served 28 years in federal government, most recently as the head of Medicare and Medicaid.
Sasse and Weems wrote: “. . . passionate certainty that things are broken is not the same as dispassionate clarity about how to fix them.” They were critical of people on both sides of the health care debate who were “still campaigning on the issue when what’s needed is a detailed conversation.”
What bothered Sasse and Weems on July 13, 2009, seven months into President Obama’s first term, has only gotten worse on July 13, 2012, four months prior to the next election. Many are campaigning – on health care, as well as the economy, the environment, education and every other pressing issue of our times and our children’s times – but few are truly leading on those issues.
Borrowing from the title of Bill Bradley’s latest book, which he borrowed from Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, "we can all do better." In fact, we not only can, we must. It’s a matter of will more than it is of wisdom.
Growth Industry
December 26, 2014
We have wondered why Michigan’s high schools would enroll more J-1 visa students than in any other state, as well as more J-1 and F-1 visa students combined than the schools of any other state. It certainly can’t be our weather!
Like schools in many states, Michigan schools are looking to foreign countries to fill classrooms where enrollments have been falling, and they are looking to the tuition dollars of international students to help fill the hole of declining state funding.
And schools across the US are finding a hungry market, especially in Asia where families are willing to pay almost any amount to give their children the kind of educational opportunities their own countries don’t, including a leg up in gaining admission to a US college or university.
One unique contributing factor to our state’s leading totals is the late date when public school classes start in the fall. International students who miss the start of school in states which begin classes two, three or four weeks before Michigan can still try for a placement in Michigan where public high schools cannot begin classes until after Labor Day.
These late, scrambling and sometimes inadequately vetted enrollments are one of the many problems attendant to the increasing numbers of J-1 and F-1 visa students enrolling in Michigan each year. More serious are the “pipelines” that, for example, direct basketball players to some schools and ice hockey players to other schools.
It makes some people feel warm and fuzzy, but a lot more people get hot under the collar, to observe a foreign exchange student become a suddenly successful basketball team’s high scorer and rebounder, and then later be given a Division I university basketball scholarship. Or be the leading scorer on an ice hockey team that posts its best record and deepest MHSAA tournament run in the school’s history.
My wife and I have hosted an international college level student in our home for almost two years. I know the benefits to both parties. And I also know that there is a growing number of problems related to sports and profit that need to be stopped, or at least sent to some other state.