Working with high schools

On Saturday at my school we had an event to help women get involved in politics. At the end the people who attended pretended to run for different positions and I pretended to run as legislative liaison, to represent my school at the state capital and push for funding for education to make my state even more amazing. Since I was pretending to run, I needed to have ideas! Some people attending thought running as a minority candidate would be enough, but actually no, Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain both ran for President, and Geraldine Ferraro ran for Vice President in 1984 so just being a woman, an African American, or an African American woman isn't enough to win an election. Obama won the 2008 election not because he is African American but because when it come to policy positions he was 1. Made fewer mistakes than Hillary Clinton in the primary (with her claims about when she went to Kosovo and was being "shot at" which turned out to be not true) and John McCain who selected Sarah Palin as Vice President, 2. his book Audacity of Hope clearly laid out what he wanted to do as President, and 3. he had absolutely no scandals or mistakes in the primary. The same lesson is apparent in the 2012 election in both the Republican primary election and general election. Ideas and the ability to articulate them are clearly the major currency of politics.

Enough of philosophy, here are the two ideas I thought of while running as legislative liaison:

Idea number one: hire college students at local schools to be tutors. It solves two problems, schools need tutors to help students, who may need help routinely or only occasionally, and college students need work. This will help students get the help they need when they are struggling and by having a younger role model to help struggling students understand concepts will hopefully make it so that more students can go to college and get skilled occupations.

Idea number two: There should be more communication between colleges and high schools to make certain that students who are advanced can take the classes they are ready for at the college, and provide opportunities for students who are advanced beyond their peers to take classes at local colleges more than we already do. This should be done on a nationwide basis because it makes sure that students can get as far as they can in knowledge, and there is nothing wrong with being smart. People should be able to be as smart as they can be because it furthers human knowledge and grows our economy, by opening up doors for everyone.

The third idea was simply increasing funding for higher education, which is an old but effective idea.