I posted this in the other thread:
I saw some would be contradictions in some of the ideas proposed. He was talking about the No Child Left Behind Act. He followed that with talking about setting higher standards for schools. So what the hell happens when you have kids who can't meet the standards? Just because you focus on these kids more supposedly doesn't mean they'll be able to meet new high standards. And plans to send private sector teachers to teach part time in the public schools. I can never see that happening. He proceeded to talk about drug testing working in school. But when you test positive for drugs at school... you usually get some form of expulsion or suspension possibly and then you get rehab. This is also a distraction from school time. I don't necessarily have a solution, and I'm pretty much a moderate conservative, but these plans just sound very idealistic.
I didn't know if I agreed with his plans on prisoner release program. So we have to spend more money to house prisoners half way while they get job training. Why can't we give them job training while they are in prison and try to cut some of those tax dollars and time in half? Are there statistics that show that these programs bear a high enough success rate that the money spent on this program would not be in a net excess, if the percentage of prisoners going back to prison were too high?
I know the state of the union speech is very general, but I was struggling with some things.