The Bush Administration and Children

Source: "United States Has Higher Death Rate Than Most Other Countries"
Excerpted from a report prepared by Save the Children

"Although the under-5 mortality rate in the United States has fallen in recent decades, it is still higher than many other wealthy nations – 2.3 times that of Iceland and more than 75 percent higher than the rate of the Czech Republic, Finland, Italy, Japan, Norway, Slovenia and Sweden."

So why did President Bush veto a bipartisan bill reauthorizing the State Children's Health Insurance Program? According to the WP, 72 percent of Americans supported the bill Bush vetoed.

According to last week's Science magazine:

After U.S. high school students did poorly on TIMSS in 1995, the government has decided not to participate in another version to be given next year.

In 1995, the United States lagged behind most of the world on a test of advanced mathematics and physics taken by graduating high school students from 16 countries. That won't happen again, if the Bush Administration has its way: It has decided not to participate in the next version of the test.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), part of the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES), says it is bowing out of 2008 TIMSSA, an advanced version of the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study given quadrennially to younger students, because it can't fit the $5 million to $10 million price tag into its flat budget.....

But many leaders in the mathematics community believe that the Administration opted out because it feared another poor U.S. performance would reflect badly on its signature education program, the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act.....

Leaders from the U.S. mathematical community, including the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the American Mathematical Society, are up in arms at the department's decision, first reported last month by the newspaper Education Week. They argue that this elite group of students needs to be monitored because they are most likely to major in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields in college and become the next generation of scientists and engineers. "It's inconceivable to me that the government wouldn't fund our participation," says Stanford mathematician R. James Milgram, a member of the IES advisory board that expects to take up the issue at its 30 to 31 October meeting. "The 1995 test was extremely important in showing that a problem exists," he notes. "And the only way to know if we're beginning to turn things around is by looking at new data to see if we've made any progress."

Comment: If the Bush administration gets its way, the cost to the government of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will soon reach $600 billion. How important is the so-called "war on terror" as compared to our children and our future (which depends on those children)? The government will be able to afford to assure medical insurance for all children if it asks for just a little more tax from the rich, and the decision that we can't afford a few million dollars to see how well our kids are doing in school as compared with those in other countries is simply ludicrous! JAD