We hope that the elected officials will respond positively to a ground swell of letters, phone calls, e-mails and visits from parents. The law clearly states that the responsibility for giving a sound basic education to our children lies with New York State.
We can do it better, more consistently, and in the end, it will cost us less because the students that we produce will be superior to those without technology experience.
In preparation for it, we need to have folks who are trained, we need facilities, equipment and supplies, that are going to be built into our society, and we are going to spend a lot of money on it.
I think some combined pressure could go a long way, could establish the fact that this legislation did pass and we mean business by it. We mean to have it enforced, we mean to have it become effective.
He testified that when you looked at it through the eyes of ‘let’s do it’, the costs were very small. They were less than they’d had to spend to host a convention of transportation executives. The cost was not that great.
There’s a whole set of values, spawned by the vocal and highly visible Republicans, that appeal to the worst in people. Our society is moving in that direction.
I would like to spend my next two years showing how the aim of making technology available to every young person can be built into the effort to make our nation more secure. That is my latest concern and what I will be pushing over the next two years.
It is very difficult to get legislation passed. But then the danger always is that you have no power at all if you do not exercise constant power.
The kind of society which we still have is maybe, in some cases, getting worse. Competition is becoming a virtue. Intense competition drives people to go more and more into self-interest. Even to see other folks as competition.
We can not wait until we have enough trained people willing to work at a teacher’s salary and under conditions imposed upon teachers in order to improve what happens in the classroom.
Therefore, you are not training young people for the world of today and the world of tomorrow unless you are doing proven technology training. That is one of the reasons I’m so concerned.
Technology tools such as laptops are the kind of help that we need. A program that provides laptops for all youngsters would close a gap that most of us are not aware of, or will not admit to, which is a tremendous gap in the poor communities.