“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These inalienable rights have long been dear to our country. But in our contemporary society, rich and privileged as it may be, there are a horrifying number of citizens deprived of these rights. Today, the American dream is on a precipice for millions of Americans. Not because they lack dedication or intelligence, but because illness or injury may drive them to complete destitution.

43 million Americans are uninsured, forced to pay for exorbitant health care costs out of their own all too empty pockets. Millions more are under-insured and vulnerable to profit-driven private insurance companies weaseling out of their side of the bargain. These American citizens are denied what so many in less privileged nations enjoy: a pursuit of happiness, liberty, and sometimes life itself.

I believe that we as a nation are beholden to providing our hard-working citizens with at least a bare-minimum quality of life. We have the means, just not the will.

Those who profit from the parasite that is our current health insurance industry tell horror stories all too eagerly gobbled up by an American populace at best uneasy with the ambiguous concept of socialism. Inefficient government bureaucracy is derided while a similarly leviathanesque private bureaucracy actively denies claims. Images of lines longer than those of the soup kitchens of the 1930s are brandied about, yet anyone with any real knowledge of our neighbor’s socialized health care system knows that this just is not so. The damage done by lines leading to inexpensive care is nowhere near that of lines in American emergency rooms into which the uninsured are forced. These “economic conservatives” clutch their wallets as they rant over taxes and bootstraps, while our infant mortality rate is worse even than Cuba, not to mention the rest of the first world. When three fourths of bankruptcies declared are due to insurers denying coverage, the private insurance industry can be viewed as nothing other than a villain.

The well-being of our citizens is a public good and thus is no place for private interests. A healthy populace lowers costs and ensures equal access for all. The status quo means that millions of Americans are forced to wait until a health problem has become overwhelming before clogging the emergency rooms for expensive surgery over what may have been relatively cheap and painless if they were capable of a simple checkup. By providing these Americans with basic care, we ease their suffering and keep hospital costs down. All benefit.

I urge you to remember the spirit that gripped America during the campaign. We are all part of the political process, and it is up to us to tell our representatives that we want change. In Congress right now, half-measures and ineffectual policies are being put forth by some Democrats, pandering to business interests under the guise of bipartisanship. Rather than a transition to a truly public option, that which is proposed is a horrific collusion of government and business. One need look no further than Obama’s “health czar,” Nancy-Ann DeParle, a director of multiple major private insurers, to see where the priorities of the current administration lie. The government options that are proposed are underpowered, leaving the public option a place for the private insurers to offload the undesirable.

The proposed plans do little to phase out inefficient employer-based plans, and do little to expand coverage to the impoverished and the unemployed. The Congressional Budget Office has predicted that, by 2019, 34 million Americans will still be uninsured if even the strongest bill is put into effect. To continue on this path is to forestall any meaningful reform and entrench the private interests in the system.

After all the numbers are tallied up, the tangible economic pros and cons weighed for each side, it really comes down to a moral issue. We provide our citizens with an education, try to ensure they breath clean air and drink clean water; this is not done on mere economic concerns. We have the means to ensure that accident and illness do not impede any American’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is time we did so.

With the media world going online, Newsweek is taking the reverse: bring online to print.

courtesy of flickr.com user ask curlyRecently, the publication redid their layout, resulting in a magazine reflecting the aesthetic values of a clean website. On the cover, the Newsweek logo is boxed in as a site header, hovering above one cover story without “Inside:_______” stories listed. Looking past the necessary page ads, the contents section is a simplified navigation bar with four sections: Scope, The Take, Features, and Culture. No accompanying pictures are presented.

The Letters [to the editor] section is presented [not extra-traditionally] as a comments section on a website, with the addition of a graph à la “most popular” site polls, and an In Six Words table inspired by sixwordmemoirs.com.

The short essays are more bloggy than ever: direct responses to specific (often new-media driven) events, with one picture, a clean title, and sub-headers for sub-titles and and bylines. They are not columns, and they are not stories, but…  This can best be seen in the Scope section, which had 12 short blurbs about current affairs similar to theatlantic.com daily pieces, or a Kosmoblog piece about the news. They each have one accompanying picture, with captions inlaid as if an image in a slideshow as opposed to underscored as in a newspaper.

The overarching aesthetic is cleanliness. The print is bold and images are either presented as headers or in an in-text fashion with ample margins. White space is amplified, making the landscape easy on the eyes. Graphs and images, too, are cleaned up, and more of the artwork is done with computers, e.g. Photoshop, than with scanned images done by hand, as seen in the June 22 issue with Mark Wagner’s beautiful dollar bill pieces featured in Fareed Zakaria’s feature piece The Capitalist Manifesto.

Each section i.e. Scope, The Take, has its own content navigation that would otherwise be found in a sidebar. In all column-blogs, page turning is avoided. allowing for pieces to be presented on their own, as opposed to as in other print forms that have readers “turn to page (?!) to continue reading,” as a means to allow other content to be featured closer to the beginning of the paper.

And then I came upon a nifty ad the publication ran for itself. There’s a graphic that depicts world concerns being processed into intelligible strands by a meat grinder. Underneath there is a definition: “news-week / verb : 1. To extract meaning from the mayhem. 2. To make sense out of the daily grind. 3. To render the inscrutable…scrutable.”

If not that it were the intellectual blogosphere! Using publications as active verbs is a new media notion creating a distinction from the passive old. In many aspects, this was an online survival tool: Why should I read something on the Kosmo when I could read it in The Atlantic? Slate? The New Yorker? Etc.? Active verbs outrun nouns like the New York Times, old media, beige four-door sedans, and faux-wood linolium. Its a fight in a 100 corner ring where each opponent has his or her stool, and when the bell rings, you better come out swinging your own punch, or else you’ll get knocked in the teeth.

Theoretically, Newsweek print edition is six days behind the world about which they write. New media is not only running a faster race than old media, but a different race all together, leaving past contenders to hang ‘em up back in the locker room. It’s a question of efficiency. People want their information in the most relevant and clean manner possible, without sacrificing quality. Which makes me question why, for all the pluses of the revamped Newsweek print, their website has to be such an unattractive piece of shit.

Via the New Yorker, via the New York Times: a charter school in Washington Heights is planning an experiment: Do a national search for the eight best, most effective teachers, and pay them each $125,000 annually, mix with 120 fifth graders, who according to the article, are mostly neighborhood kids, low-income Hispanics, and underperforming students. See what happens.

It poses the question: Are teachers the cause of students who fail?

Theory I: Money

Consider this: let’s say you have a teacher who makes $40,000/yr for teaching 30 first graders for 180 days. That’s $7.40/student/day. Odds are you pay your babysitter that much an hour, and the babysitter isn’t expected to inspire and equip your child to go to college.

That math, redone for this new charter school (which will have approximately a 30:1 student-teacher ratio), goes up to $23.15/student/day. You’d still be better off as a full-time baby sitter, but you get the point. The point is that the money is NOT the point, because we’re talking about things that transcend monetary value. Children. Learning. Confidence. Future. Options. Development.

The argument is that low public-school teacher salaries (with a national average of around $40,000) drive the smartest, most creative candidates towards more lucrative careers, leaving the talent pool we as a Nation charge with helping to raise our children, depleted.

So we raise taxes, pay teachers on par with engineers, lawyers, etc, and in 50 years we’re producing kids that eagerly await the challenge of College. Wrong. Doctors in our country make a lot of money, and because of this it attracts individuals who you never in your life would want to be your doctor.

Medicine, however, has a systems of checks and balances called “Med School” that works to weed out anyone not 100% committed to their health discipline, a sieve general education lacks. How then, exactly, does one determine who is fit to be a teacher? Perhaps a “Med School Model,” is in order, where the qualifications to become a teacher become much, much more rigorous and elitist, leaving more run-of-the-mill individuals to seek jobs elsewhere. With this, however, the essence of teaching is forgotten.

Theory II: Misguided Professionals

The phrase “a passion for teaching” may be cliche, but it works well. In my personal public school experience, rarely did I have a teacher who didn’t care about the welfare of his or her students, or was a teacher because they had no other options. Teaching is generally a conscious choice made for the right reasons. The two worst teachers I had were quota hires protected by teacher unions. Should a teacher not have a passion for teaching, I would hope they would find alternative employment.

Theory III: The Classes

What is more interesting about the New York experiment is that it is being done with generally low-income urban students with bad grades: the crux of American education. A more scientific study would have been to put these eight “superteachers” in front of a demographic more likely to succeed, like, say, honor students from the suburban middle class, and see if they do even better, thanks to their “better” teachers.

The urban lower-class has so many more variables than relative Control Group that is the suburban middle class. More constrictive housing leads to poorer studying environments, absent fathers leave young boys without their traditional role-models, and overworked mothers juggle several kids and a couple of jobs, leaving little time for one-on-one tutelage. Families are more prone to location moving, as they follow jobs or relatives, and they more than likely lack a history of higher eduction to act as a future model for their children. Not to mention diets lacking nutrients and the presence of lead paint stunt brain development.

In short: they could have placed well-paid, extremely qualified teachers into the relative calm of high-income suburban life, and have an actual possibility of measuring their affect on students, but they chose to throw them into the cyclone that IS the poverty cycle.

The took a stand, a brave one, that they were, at the very least, going to try to make a difference. The fact that lower-income neighborhoods are serviced with lower-funded schools has always astounded me. Every school within a district should have the same per-pupil budget, regardless of a student’s home life.

Theory IV: The Home

A focus on class structure, however, removes us from the essence of learning. School is but a tiny fraction in the education that is life, whose full-time teachers are Mr. Upbringing and Mrs. Personal Drive. Those early years are so so important in a child’s development, that no teacher, no matter how well-paid or with so-few students, has the means or the time to instill the lessons–both formal and moral–that MUST be supplemented by learning outside of school. You don’t take your dog to dog school and then not practice sitting and staying and fetching with it at home, so why send your kids to school if their positive education stops at the final bell?

Those of you familiar with the Woodward School for Technology and Research, or other schools servicing the so-called “lower classes” here in Kalamazoo, are well aware of the frustration involved with teaching children who lack a support system for their education. I hope anyone who enters into public eduction, especially in low-income areas, and especially during those vital K-6 years, understands the venerable burden they bear, that their cause goes beyond financial compensation. It is not a career for the sub-qualified. Should teachers be paid more? Yes. Is it the answer? Far from it.