Dirt Simple

I have to admit, I listened to last night’s debate intently, half wishing for another train wreck a-la Katie Couric interview. Alas, it failed to materialize. While I am still not convinced that Palin has the necessary qualifications to be Vice President, and God forbid, President, I’ll concede that she did a better job last night than I expected she would.

So, in the interest of fairness, I want to point out that I did find one issue where Sarah Palin and I are in complete agreement, and that is, the importance of education. I think she sums it up pretty well:

PALIN: Say it ain’t so, Joe, there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced [I think she meant 'prefaced' since, strictly speaking, 'preferenced' is not a word, but let's not pick nits.] your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and god bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right? I say, too, with education, America needs to be putting a lot more focus on that and our schools have got to be really ramped up in terms of the funding that they are deserving. Teachers needed to be paid more. I come from a house full of school teachers. My grandma was, my dad who is in the audience today, he’s a schoolteacher, had been for many years. My brother, who I think is the best schoolteacher in the year, and here’s a shout-out to all those third graders at Gladys Wood Elementary School, you get extra credit for watching the debate.

Education credit in American has been in some sense in some of our states just accepted to be a little bit lax and we have got to increase the standards. No Child Left Behind was implemented. It’s not doing the job though. We need flexibility in No Child Left Behind. We need to put more of an emphasis on the profession of teaching. We need to make sure that education in either one of our agendas, I think, absolute top of the line. My kids as public school participants right now, it’s near and dear to my heart. I’m very, very concerned about where we’re going with education and we have got to ramp it up and put more attention in that arena. [Link to full transcript]

You said it sister! Education good. Smart people important. More of them, we should have.