Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” law blames the schools for the shortcomings of their students. The invaluable Michael Winerip of The New York Times knows better. Along the way, he comes up with yet another reason for Americans to feel proud about ourselves:
Another way to support parents of young children is paid leave when a child is born, which is routine in most of the world, but not in the United States.
According to Dr. Jody Heymann, director of the Institute of Health and Social Policy at McGill University, 172 of the 176 countries she surveyed this year offer guaranteed paid leave to women who have just had babies. The four that do not? Liberia, Papua New Guinea, Swaziland and the United States.
On the other hand, we have friends with a young child who will be living temporarily in Germany. They were appalled to discover that in the mid-sized city where they'll live, day care for children below preschool age is extremely difficult to find because it is locally presumed that mothers will work in their homes as unpaid caretakers for the first few years of each child's life.
Posted by: Martha Bridegam on December 9, 2007 2:10 PMPreschool day care for children was highly developed in the former GDR. But of course we did away with this kind of socialist rubbish ...
Posted by: Peter on December 10, 2007 4:34 AM