Reply With QuoteEliminate Tenure and implement school vouchers & school choice
1- Mandatory random drug testing for all employees in the system. Cost of testing to be funded by the employees. First offense will revoke tenure, require mandatory treatment (teachers expense) and place employee on probation for 3 years. Second offense is automatic dismissal.
2- Mandatory testing for teachers of all coursework to allow certification every 5 years. A 10th grade math teacher should be able to pass a 10th grade history exam. If they can not, tenure should be revoked.
Eliminate Tenure and implement school vouchers & school choice
It's been noted Nationally that Buffalo is amongst the most racially divided cities in the nation, therefore to make any tenable changes is to allow student access to other schools, and start to integrate the population much more. This is nothing for WNY to be proud of, it's rather shameful and shines on the truth that WNY is amongst the most rasict part of the country, and amongst the worst in the civilized world.
....
Nm
Originally Posted by a-new-voice
Curious as to what you will claim as the effects of this racial divide....
When you suggest students to access other schools, what schools are you speaking of? Do you want a kid in the city to be able to go to Amherst or Williamsville South? Yes these schools offer a better education, and every kids deserves a GREAT education. But access has to be a two way road. Are you suggesting that parents in Amherst send their kids to a city school? How is this fair.
There is plenty of resources available for kids to be provided a GREAT education in the city of Buffalo. The challenge is how these resources are spent.
The government ALLOCATES close to 13k per student in New York. This is the second most in the US. Regardless of if this money comes from taxes or aid, it is still there. The sad truth is there is a lot of waste in the Buffalo Public Schools. There are contracts in place that prevent money being spent on the kids. Yes teacher deserve to make a good living. Hell they deserve a great living. But it should not be at the kids expense.
The only solution I can see is a giant "mulligan" and implementing charter schools. Charter schools work! This is why the teachers union made the state put a cap of 100, for the ENTIRE STATE. If you can not beat your competition you simply create rules to prevent your competition from competing.
In regards to racial injustice, 37% of Buffalo is black. That is a large voting block. The median household income in Buffalo is $24,536. The fact that HALF of the city makes less then 25k is sad. What is worse is that same half that makes less then 25k can VOTE in change. That HALF of Black, Brown and White can VOTE in leaders to change the city. But this never happens. Elections in Buffalo are one by landslides. Voters in Buffalo are so predictable that you can set a clock to them.
At the end of the day, the city is what it is. If it is racially divided, it is because it wants to be. If you think that blacks get a bad check or no opportunity, show me voting trends that blacks want change.
Do you know your who represents you in the common council? Do you know who represents you in the State Assembly? Do you know who sits on the Buffalo School board? WNY have very little turnover in politics. Even less on agenda. Most cases it is a different person with the same agenda and providing the same results. ZERO.
If you do not like the police dept ask yourself what have you done to change who runs the police dept. What have you done to make your area safer?
As for you saying "WNY is amongst the most racist part of the country, and amongst the worst in the civilized world." Remember that what you are referencing is a civilization and a society that YOU are a member of. So why have you allowed your civilization and a society to become racist and what are YOU doing to correct it.
More bandaid solutions that do not address the cause of poor education. The cause is lack of choice and competition. People need to stop praying at the sainted altar of government and regain the ability to control their own lives.
The path is clear
Though no eyes can see
The course laid down long before.
And so with gods and men
The sheep remain inside their pen,
Though many times they've seen the way to leave.
Isn't this a rather old issue?
Buffalo consists of 40.6 square miles.well, here, you look at it:
BUFFALO NY US
POPULATION
Number Number Number
Total population 292,648
Square miles (land) 40.61
Population per square mile 7,205.79 401.93 79.56
GENDER
Number Pct Pct Pct
Male 137,443 47.0 48.2 49.1
Female 155,205 53.0 51.8 50.9
AGE
Number Pct Pct Pct
15 or younger 65,007 22.2 20.7 21.4
16-24 44,979 15.4 13.3 13.9
25-44 85,891 29.3 30.7 30.2
45-64 57,444 19.6 22.3 22.0
65+ 39,327 13.4 12.9 12.4
Number Number Number
Average age (years) 35.73 36.80 36.22
RACE AND ETHNICITY
Number Pct Pct Pct
White 159,300 54.4 67.9 75.1
Black or African American 108,951 37.2 15.9 12.3
American Indian and Alaska native 2,250 0.8 0.4 0.9
Asian 4,093 1.4 5.5 3.6
Native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander 120 0.0 0.0 0.1
Some other race 10,755 3.7 7.1 5.5
Two or more races 7,179 2.5 3.1 2.4
Hispanic or Latino 22,076 7.5 15.1 12.5
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, 2000 Census;
Note: Hispanic ethnicity is a separate data category from race. This number should not be added to race totals.
True, the east side of Buffalo is predominately black, most who live there probably are there because they want to be. Some don't want to be there, but see little advantage to moving to another part of the city, which isn't all that far away. As to living outside of the city, that's another question but from my observations that seems to be loosening up, slowly, but surely.
here's the link http://www.epodunk.com/cgi-bin/popInfo.php?locIndex=299
This is patently untrue:
A U.S. Department of Education analysis blew a hole in the argument of charter school proponents that students in the charter schools performed better than those in the public schools.
The federal analysis revealed that youngsters in charter schools did not perform as well on exams as those in public schools. The results of this review confirmed an earlier report by the American Federation of Teachers.
The test scores showed that the longer a school had been operating as a charter, the greater was the decline in test scores. Of particular interest in Buffalo is the finding that schools chartered by a school district tended to do better than those over which the school districts had no oversight.
This from a website which endorses charter schools.
This is especially damning to charter schools when you factor in the obvious component that a parent who is interested enough to send their child to charter school will be more active in the child's education overall. And we all know that the more parental involvement, the better the student acheivement, across the board.
Even where Charter schools are doing the best, they're overseen by Public Schools.
In summary, charter schools on average get worse results than public schools. The longer charter schools are in existence, the worse they get. And even the most popular charter schools are overseen by public school systems.
Ringing endorsement there, eh?
~WnyresidentBut your being a dick
First....Provide a link.
Second.....For every source you provide saying no, I can provide saying yes. As far as the US Dept of Ed. If they were to say charters were good, essentially they would be claiming that the departments policies on education have led the US to WASTE TRILLIONS on education when a privatised system could have fixed it.
Our aim in this book is to synthesize as comprehensively as possible all available evidence on the average effectiveness of charter schools relative to regular public schools. We conclude in Chapter 5 that, based on 19 studies, conducted in 11 states and the District of Columbia, there is no evidence that, on average, charter schools out-perform regular public schools. In fact, there is evidence that the average impact of charter schools is negative. This evidence of a negative effect comes particularly from those studies that use the strongest methodologies to discover causal effects, although the evidence of a negative effect is somewhat localized to specific states.
In pursuing this aim, it was essential that we first set standards for methodological quality. Children are not assigned at random to attend charter schools, so some attempt must be made to identify subsets of children attending charter and regular public schools who are as similar as possible in their prior characteristics, including academic achievement. Fairly clear standards for this kind of work have emerged in social science, and we describe these in Chapter 4. We also ask whether studies adhering more or less well to these standards produce similar or different results. With few exceptions, the general outlines of the story are similar: charter schools are no more effective than regular public schools on average and may, in fact, be less effective.
But do charter schools serve more disadvantaged students than those served by regular public schools? The answer to this question is somewhat complex. In many states, the fraction of charter school students who are black is somewhat higher than the fraction of regular public school students who are black. However, the black students attending charter schools in these states tend to be disproportionately better off socioeconomically than black students attending regular public schools.
The best studies of charter school effectiveness simultaneously remove the effects not only of race and socioeconomic factors but also of prior achievement and even a host of other, often unobservable differences (such as the educational levels of parents) between children attending the two types of schools. In these highest-quality studies in particular, the average effects of attending a charter school are null or negative. In Chapter 4 we compare, in detail, the kinds of students served by charter and regular public schools nationally and in studies done in 12 states and the District of Columbia.
Beyond synthesizing current evidence, our inquiry also explores a few of the policy implications of our findings about relative average charter school performance, and this requires us to re-evaluate some of the common rationales for supporting charter schools.
One argument is that charter schools liberate educators from bureaucratic regulations and union contracts that stifle creative educational improvements. We speculate that, while deregulation helps some educators devise good schools, it also enables others to devise bad and even corruptly managed schools. For example, while some charter schools can use freedom from normal certification requirements to hire unusually talented and dedicated teachers, other charter schools use this freedom to hire teachers who may be less qualified than teachers in regular public schools. We conclude that the evidence about average charter school performance is consistent with this wide range in the effects of deregulation. That charter schools are not substantially more effective, on average, than other public schools calls into question the view that bureaucracy and union contracts are major impediments to school improvement. It seems, based on the evidence, that deregulation and deunionization do not yield any bonanzas of learning, on average. If bonanzas are realized in some places, they are apparently offset by catastrophes in others.
A second argument is that charter schools are more accountable than regular public schools for their outcomes. This theory takes two forms. Some advocates of charter schools argue that, unlike regular public schools, charter schools will be closed by public authorities if their academic performance is inadequate. We show that evidence about actual charter school accountability processes does not support this assertion. Other advocates of charter schools argue that parental choice (the freedom of parents to choose better charter schools and to remove their children from low-performing ones) provides strong accountability. We suggest that to the extent charter schools rely on this mechanism of accountability, it should not be surprising that their average academic performance does not surpass that of regular public schools, for two reasons. First, parents may choose charter schools for other than academic reasons. Second, given how complex it is to assess academic performance (leading even experts to dispute the effectiveness of charter schools so vigorously), it is not surprising that parents would not always be able to discern a charter school that was more academically effective.
A third argument is that charter schools foster experimentation to see if novel educational approaches can produce good results. We do not deny that this is an important rationale for charter schools. But we note that, in any field, a spirit of experimentation is likely to produce many failures before (if ever) identifying successes. Researchers devise strategies for widespread experimentation to discover effective practices, not to produce average gains in outcomes -- those may come later, when the policies identified as effective are implemented on a large scale. Charter schools might be successful in generating innovations that should be imitated, even if average charter school test scores are at or below those of regular public schools. This implies different criteria for evaluating the merits of charter schools than the claim -- that average charter school test scores surely must be superior -- advanced by those zealous charter school advocates who were most vociferous in attacking the AFT report.
Finally, a fourth argument is that competition from charter schools improves outcomes in regular public schools because educators in regular public schools are motivated to be more effective in order to avoid losing students to charter schools. This argument for charter schools, even if valid, would not require average charter school performance to be superior to that of regular public schools. Nonetheless, we find no evidence to support the claim of a positive competition effect of charter schools, although research in this area is not yet extensive.
You can read the entire summary of the book at:
http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/book_charter_school
Your right to buy a military weapon without hindrance, delay or training cannot trump Daniel Barden’s right to see his eighth birthday. -- Jim Himes
Get truant officers who have some stones to take the parents to task.
I know personally of several kids who just don't go to school. That's it. They just don't go - ever. What's that about???
I know in my kid's school district, if I didn't send her to school, I'd be in BIG BIG trouble.
Linda,
I will agree that charter schools are not perfect BUT I will strongly agree that if a TRUE charter system were in place in the US, Charter Schools are better then Public Schools.
The American way is to take something and make it American. Take Pizza for example, what we eat is not what is served in Italy but we say it is "AUTHENTIC". This is the problem.
In regards to your source I wanted to point out a couple of things.
When was EPI established, and why?
EPI was established in 1986 to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers. Today, with global competition expanding, wage inequality rising, and the methods and nature of work changing in fundamental ways, it is as crucial as ever that people who work for a living have a voice in the economic debate.
Who supports EPI?
EPI is a 501(c)(3) corporation. A majority of its funding (about 60% in 2001) was received through grants from foundations. EPI also receives support from individuals, corporations, labor unions, government agencies, and other organizations.
I would hint that there is some BIAS from this Institute based simply on its mission statement and funding.
In my opinion a Charter system has to be an ALL or NOTHING to work. You are correct that there are challenges in the US version of the system. This is because we have taken a system that works in other places, modified it to keep people happy, and stamped it with the charter label.
When I speak of Charter systems, it is not a % of schools in a system. It is EVERY school in the system. Based on a couple of principles.
1- The funding for the child follows the child 100%. This creates competition for that funding. Competition delivers a better product, in this case an education.
2- Each school operates for the most part as an isolated business. If the school is highly regarded, it has a wait list for students and controls its destiny. If a school is under performing, students AND FUNDING leave. This either causes the school to change or close.
3- Teachers are paid and employed on performance. Rewarded with bonuses when they go above and beyond. They also face pressure if they under perform, up to loosing their job.
4- Administrators are paid and employed on performance. Just as a CEO, they are running a business. If they run a good school, bonuses and job security are there. If they run an under performing school, job security is not.
I know you are a teacher, even if you are not teaching you will always be a teacher. I feel that teachers should be highly compensated. I feel that schools should have all of the extras of music and sports. I also feel that the funding is there TODAY for this to happen. The challenge is how this funding is spent. There are years of decisions that have been made which in turn tie the hands of anyone who wants to change today.
Just based on personal opinion. How do you see a school where:
ALL of the programs are offered.
Sufficient space is provided
Teachers are compensated as high end business professionals
Students are provided a safe atmosphere
Parents are given the choice of where to send students
Under performing schools are closed not fixed
Under performing administrators are fired not coasting to retirement
Underperforming teachers are fired not coasting to retirement
PERFROMING SCHOOLS ARE DUPLICATED
PERFORMING TEACHERS GET BONUSES
PERFORMING ADMINISTRATORS GET BONUSES
STUDENTS ARE THE #1 PIORITY because they hold the funding.
HOW DOES A SCHOOL LIKE THIS FAIL????
I find it completely ironic that many people oppose school choice. School choice would be most beneficial to the poor and disadvantaged. The very students that are cited to oppose school choice are, in fact, the students who would have the most to gain.
The U.S. Dept of Education completed a study that shows Charter Schools have a higher proportion of minority and poor students than traditional public schools.
The path is clear
Though no eyes can see
The course laid down long before.
And so with gods and men
The sheep remain inside their pen,
Though many times they've seen the way to leave.
Obviously, you didn't read the quote I inserted above, so here's the relative part:
http://www.epinet.org/content.cfm/book_charter_schoolIn many states, the fraction of charter school students who are black is somewhat higher than the fraction of regular public school students who are black. However, the black students attending charter schools in these states tend to be disproportionately better off socioeconomically than black students attending regular public schools.
Of course, don't let facts get in the way of your ideology.
Your right to buy a military weapon without hindrance, delay or training cannot trump Daniel Barden’s right to see his eighth birthday. -- Jim Himes
The facts didn't get in the way. I cited a U.S. Department of Education study that supports exactly what I said.
Speaking of "facts," you are a hoot! You quote a study from the Economic Policy Institute to support government public schools. The EPI appears to be a socialist think tank. The graphic on their home page says it all.
The board of directors of the EPI is comprised largely of labor union officials. Could you find a more biased group of people to support public schools?It seems to me the you have the ideology problem, the union ideology.
The path is clear
Though no eyes can see
The course laid down long before.
And so with gods and men
The sheep remain inside their pen,
Though many times they've seen the way to leave.
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