BlackRose

Lewis Black may be a comedian and some of his points are more humor than fact but even these  may cause for some consideration. As an example one of his early lines about one week to education and fifty one weeks to incarceration is a gross exaggeration but at the same note it is pointed out in the film Waiting for Superman a fair portion of students that fail out of particularly bad school systems do wind up in the prison system. He mentions a number of valid issues with the school system and some rather poor “ideas” for improving them. Charter schools and their limited admissions, hundreds of millions spent on improving school grounds rather than spreading the money around to more schools and improving their tools for teaching. While solutions to the issues weren’t offered that was not the point to the sketch. Without quite as much humor Rose attempts to outline the things that he sees as issues with the public education system and some helpful advice that he feels will atleast give more insight rather than offering a “magic bullet.” Both shoot down some ideas that at face value seem like they could be good ones until upon closer inspection they reveal themselves to be incomplete ideas. Black’s being the “volunteer, even if you don’t live in the area or have kids” and Rose’s “replace the bottom 10% with more like the top 10%.” I feel that both do a good job of showing why existing ideas aren’t working and acknowledging that our education system will be a long fix rather than a one-term political stunt.