Dear President Obama,
I gave you my vote in 2008 and I am still 100% glad that I did. I’ve never doubted you in your 14 months so far and I think you’re fabulous. This is a letter commending your triumphs because you are an easy man to criticize; people love to throw stones at the TV screen knowing the President won’t yell back.
As an American, I’m fan of Healthcare reform. So committed, in fact, that I find myself in the minority for the first time in my life. I’m a White, Protestant, Middle-class male with a Master’s degree. I’m from an upper-middle class family and so is my wife.
I’m in the minority for this reason: I’m prepared to pay more taxes for the same health coverage so that medical coverage could be provided to those less fortunate than I am. I’m sure if everybody thought this way, we’d have a bill already, but I’m prepared to wait until we find a bill that people quit complaining about.
(And I’ll tell any Republicans I know to put some of their energy into building bills instead of tearing them down.)
Unrelated to health care, I support several unpopular ideas and I figured that you’d like a voice in the trenches. So here it is from an educator:
Merit Pay is a great idea if properly and concretely implemented. I won’t suggest what that system will be, but I can say from my own experience that teachers who stink are kept in the payroll way too long. Exciting and motivated teachers have little incentive to do a good job when tenured teachers get paid more to sit behind their desk and hand out worksheets. It’s depressing.
NCLB is hated universally among teachers that I know. We all agree that the students in our classes need better skills and that a great way to measure that is test scores, but to claim that all schools reach an API score of 800 by the year 2014 is ridiculous. If you don’t know much about API, then you can trust me on this; it’s ridiculous.
We understand that the White House has bigger fish to fry than No Child Left Behind reform. For now, we teachers are fine to just … not talk about it.
It’s also pretty apparent that you’re not a big fan of people applauding you; I respect that and empathize. I giggled when Michelle motioned for the house to “sit down” during the standing ovation for her obesity plan.
All that to say that I think you’re great and I will support you until you do something crazy, like invade Canada
… and probably even after that. They’ve been asking for it, eh.
~V