USA Today: Obama to propose free community college

Um. OK. Sure.

To me, this feels like a fresh coat of lipstick on a pig.

I can see where this would be a good thing… better educated and trained populous should help the nation. Maybe this could even help to justify raising the minimum wage of a job even higher or at least open more spots for less educated workers, by pushing people further up the chain.

However, I’m somewhat appalled by this because of two basic issues:

a) who is going to pay for this program? I mean no schools are free to run even if they are free to attend; teachers need salaries, classrooms maintenance, and computers power – how is this getting funded?

b) why in the hell are we trying to add on another two years to K-12 when the public school systems are underfunded and in disarray? Wouldn’t the money that will be gathered printed out of thin air be better spent on the foundation of what students need to get to community college? If kids can’t get through K-12 and read on the other side of that, how does K-14 help? There’s a reason why we need a program like TEALS in the US: there’s barely enough funds to outfit computers at most schools and even if they are fully equipped, there’s no resources to train up the everyday teacher for teaching computer science…

Hey Obama – thanks for the out of box thinking, but maybe you should fix the known problems before enabling your inner Peter Pan: take this program, raise funds, and then use them to fix “No Student Left Behind” by enabling teachers to teach (instead of pushing kids through the system) and get rid of Common Core as a principle.

Maybe we’ll re-elect you in 2020.