Stimulus...?

Even with New York's stimulus package from the federal government, I'm still unconvinced. They've more than covered the $1.4 billion budget gap that created this employment crisis for non-tenured educators so why am I uncertain about the future?

Call it a gut feeling. There's a lot of things that can go wrong, even if we're given everything necessary to do the right thing. I guess it's analogous to having all the resources necessary to perform open heart surgery but not a single surgeon in sight.

Most people know that I'm usually not one to panic. I don't worry, I adapt. There are too many things in play that are beyond my control. I can only deal with things when it's laid out in front of me. I have ultimately calculated that to leave my school at the end of this year would be detrimental. There may be some dissenting views among staff, but I can't buy into it. All I can really worry about are whether or not my students are getting anything meaningful out of each day they are in school.

I have learned a lot about the science education that occurs in urban youth. Though I can only hope that my students learn something, I can't guarantee that they are any more prepared to face reality. Science is extraordinarily impractical despite the consumer hypocrisy (we buy and use products of science but we don't contemplate it's origins at the time of purchase). But I digress...

This idea behind a stimulus is a bit confusing. The goal of a stimulus is to generate/preserve jobs, and to somehow initiate an economic turn that will promote global economic recovery during a time of recession. I just find it difficult to see how throwing massive quantities of money fixes the problem. It may temporarily prevent the job loss, it may provide the necessary capital to keep banks from collapsing, but it won't fix the economy.

There's this website run through the Office of the President that tracks the money in the stimulus. It's nice to know that this is only a first step in a long recovery... But what's next? Once this money is circulated where do we turn to next? What's the goal we want to reach by next year?