Title:
Obama Signs Spending Bill to Protect Teachers' Jobs
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Education Report.
See text below
Text:
President Obama signed legislation in August to
provide twenty-six billion dollars to the states for
education and healthcare. The measure includes ten
billion dollars for education and sixteen billion
for Medicaid, the joint state-federal government
medical program for the poor. The legislation will
help one hundred sixty thousand teachers and one
hundred fifty thousand police and public service
workers keep their jobs. The House of
Representatives approved the bill August tenth.
House members had already begun a six-week holiday
when the Senate approved the measure. Speaker of the
House Nancy Pelosi took the rare step of calling
House lawmakers back to Washington to vote on the
bill and send it to President Obama without
delay.President Obama has stressed the importance of
education for all Americans. He said this is
necessary for the country to compete among some of
the world's fastest growing economies.Earlier in the
week, the president spoke at the University of
Texas. He talked about the decrease in college
graduation rates in the United States. He said: "In
a single generation, we've fallen from first place
to twelfth place in college graduation rates for
young adults. That is unacceptable, but it is not
irreversible. We can retake the lead." President
Obama said educational success and economic
well-being are linked. His goal is to increase the
percentage of college graduates from forty percent
to sixty percent by the year twenty-twenty.The
president said the federal government has already
reformed the student loan system and increased tax
credits for families struggling to pay college
education costs. Some Republican lawmakers
criticized the new measure. House Republican leader
John Boehner dismissed the emergency jobs measure as
more wasteful spending aimed at pleasing the
Democrats' traditional union allies.Hours before the
vote, President Obama told reporters at the White
House that education and the safety of communities
should not be political issues. He said: "Those
interests are widely shared throughout this country.
A challenge that affects parents, children and
citizens in almost every community in America should
not be a Democratic problem or a Republican problem.
It is an American problem." And that's the VOA
Special English Education Report.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
