Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’ campaign debuted a new TV ad today attacking Republican Jesse Kelly’s promises to reduce support for federal education funding if elected in November. Kelly has said he opposed the stimulus package, which provided money to the state of Arizona for K-12 eduction and university funding. He also opposed more recent legislation that provided additional federal funding for school districts and health-care programs.
“Arizona schools have been cut too much already,” says Anne Hilby, spokeswoman for the Giffords campaign. “Under Jesse Kelly’s plan to cut a billion dollars from our schools, either you’d have to pay more in local taxes or more teachers would get fired. The Kelly education plan is bad for kids, but it’s good for politicians who like to suck up to right-wing talk radio hosts.”
Kelly responded via e-mail: “The choices for our schools should be made by the community and parents because top-down dictates from Washington have been proven not to work. Just having the Federal Government borrow more money from China will not improve education.”
This article appears in Oct 7-13, 2010.
Kelly hit the nail on the head. Borrowing more money from China is not going to improve our schools. As we can see, it’s not doing so hot as it stands now. We have got to take more local responsibility for our schools. With direct local accountability for success and failures without the scapegoat of the federal government, perhaps TUSD and the like will brush the dirt off and say, “well, that didn’t work, guess we should handle this our way…”
Unfortunately, China is graduating 6 times the number of graduate students than the US. The technical vitality that graduate bring to the US is key to our competitiveness in the global economy. China has a major foothold in manufacturing capacity, while the US has fallen way behind. The US is falling behind on the educational knowledge that drives the technology engine. The fact that Arizona is now ranked at the bottom, below Mississippi, greatly reduces the ability to attract high paying technology sector jobs to the state.
Arizona needs to aim higher to be able to attract the employers and their employees. Arizona can barely attract call centers, better educated English speaking people exist in India. Brewer is not a great poster child for Arizona’s education & language skills to help attract companies.
Giffords is Lying again by editing Kelly’s words and running rediculous attacks on Kelly. Her record speaks for itself and she knows it. That’s why she has NOT ran one ad talking about her accomplishments becasue all she could talk about was how she voted straight party lines on 90% of the issues put before her since being elected. Her record quite frankly STINKS for us here in CD-8. In my opinion, Giffords is finished on Nov 2. RIP Giffords Campaign lol. Time to step aside and let a new leader have a crack at solving our problems in Washington for southern Arizona.