Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Cult of Mac - Michigan Democrats Look to iPods As Learning Tools. It's Not What You Think (Edited)

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Read Leander Kahney's latest commentary about Apple and Mac News in Wired.com's Cult of Mac Blog, including Mac, Mac Pro, MacBook, iMac, iBook, Mac mini, iPod video, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, iTunes, iPhoto, iPhone, Apple TV, OSX, Steve Jobs, and Macworld.
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  • Michigan Democrats Look to iPods As Learning Tools. It's Not What You Think (Edited)
    Lawmakers are out of touch and corrupt. Democrats in my home state, Michigan, appear to have reinforced this image by proposing $38 million be spent on iPods for every student in the public schools to use as learning tools. As...

    Lawmakers are out of touch and corrupt. Democrats in my home state, Michigan, appear to have reinforced this image by proposing $38 million be spent on iPods for every student in the public schools to use as learning tools.

    As you might expect, this proposal has drawn guffaws and outrage from armchair analysts across the land. Newspapers and bloggers alike have gone out of their way to highlight the spending bill as reflecting a worldview that can't fix things. Don't believe it. This story has a lot more to it than iPods. At the heart of the matter is a state that seems dead set on dying. Read on to learn what you aren't hearing.

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    The coverage of this story generally leaves out this simple fact: The Republicans control Michigan's legislature Senate, so the Democrats' plan is far from assured of success. And also that the only reason the Michigan government is facing an astounding budget crisis is that the formerly ruling Republican legislators have repealed the state's single-business tax last session -- or as they called it, the "Small Business Tax." As of the end of the year, the state loses $1.9 billion with the end of the tax. All of which seems to have been a deliberate move to force the Democrats into aggressive spending cuts. This "irresponsible" bill by the Democrats is just a sad response to the plan for more cuts that the Republicans will bring out in the next few days.

    Do they really expect to give iPods to kids across the state? Of course not. They're just trying to articulate a vision where Michigan invests in capital infrastructure instead of ending tax after tax while the unemployment rate goes higher. And this particular bill doesn't succeed in that regard -- it makes Democrats look more like the party of no ideas than ever. But there was no way it would have succeeded in the first place. That was never the point.

    Ironically, the only reason the state would be making a proposal for technology in the schools in the first place is that Gov. John Engler Debbie Stabenow, before she was a U.S. Senator pushed through a proposal to revamped the state school system to remove local control in the early 1990s. It's a matter of scale. One school that wants to buy a set of 30 iPods to use as a classroom set looks visionary. A state looking to buy a few million makes it look like the inmates are running the asylum.

    Via CNET.



    Pete Mortensen




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