Amerekan Edukashion

The word of the day is domination. Domination is the only way to describe the Detroit Tigers start to the 2006 MLB season. The Tigers thoroughly trounced the Texas Rangers 7-0 yesterday in Arlington, TX thanks to an outstanding pitching performance from rookie Justin Verlander tossed 7 scoreless innnings, and phenom firstbaseman Chris Shelton continue his reign of terror over AL pitching going 3-4 with two triples and 3 RBI's. This makes Detroit's record a perfect 5-0 to start the season, and they haven't even played a game at Comerica Park yet. For sure the first week of the season is by no means enough time for serious judgment, but if the Tigers continue to get dominate starting pitching across the board then Detroit is going to continue to surprise many......

In its current issue, Time Magazine has brought to attention that the national rate of high school drop outs is somewhere between 20-30% in the U.S. This figure may come as shocking to many Americans, but given the status of public education in our country, this figure really isn't all that surprising. Due to mandatory graduation tests, dilipadated school environments, outragoulsy low teacher salaries, and the failure of No Child Left Behind many school districts across the nation are having alarmingly high dropout rates. Many wonder why our schools have been performing so poorly on tests compared to other nations around the world, and the answer is that our country simply does not place a high enough value on education. We spend more money on our military, prison system, and the United States ranks 11th out of 20 in total direct public expenditures for education as a percentage of the gross domestic product. What this boils down to is that we don't place a high enough value on education, and until we start to funnel more resources into our schools, our nation will continue to lag behind Europe and Asia. O well, as long as we can build bigger homes and buy more SUV's we don't really need to vote for levy's, I mean our children aren't even in school anymore..............

On a brighter note, since last month's official agreement to a ceasefire, the French and Spanish have shown more trust of their Basque populations. Arnaldo Otegi was released from custody in Spain after posting 650,000 in bail. Hopefully alliances and peace talks will continue as one of Europe's major terrorist threats is showing a movement away from violence and towards political means of achieving their goals. Hopefully the ETA and IRA can continue down the path of anti-violence and more compromise and debate can be held by all sides.