Stop the Insanity – Change Our Minds

Does anyone remember School #34, Congress Ave., Superintendent Rivera. The school needed too much work, it had to be closed for renovation. The school was closed. Students and staff were moved to a leased building across town, breaking up the makeup of the student body and the community. It was unsafe and unfit so it was closed and district staff was moved into the building with no significant repairs made. Once everything quieted down and, still without significant renovation, School #34 became School #10, Dr. Walter Cooper academy.

We moved the existing school out, leased another building for years, renovated that building, and then moved another school into the exact same location. Now, we are repeating the same madness with School #16.

This district continues to make the same bad decisions over and over and the children schooled by this district continue to fail over and over again. Unfortunately, we continue to vote for the same Board Members over and over again.

How long will Rochester’s citizens continue to allow our children to be placed in and schooled by a system of education that can only guarantee a less than 50% success rate?

How long will Rochester’s citizens allow the Board of Education and our superintendent’s to continue to waste our hard earned tax dollars creating post failure programs, aimed at correcting our failures instead of insuring our success?

How long will the citizens continue to allow, those for whom we voted, to ignore our voice, while throwing us crumbs from our table, telling us to be satisfied and content while they repeat their mistakes?

Our educational leaders are not making the right decisions. They will be busing more students not fewer. They will be moving to a K-8 system though it’s costly and hasn’t proven to be successful. They refuse to lower class sizes at the Pre-K through 3rd Grade level.

It is not their fault our children are failing, it is our choice to continue to elect the same leaders year after year believing that things will change.

We can’t change their minds so we must change our leaders!

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It’s Now or Never

The New NY Education Reform Commission is a twenty-five-member Commission charged with examining the current structure of the state’s education system through the lens of what is in the best interest of students. This is one in a series of public hearings that the New NY Education Reform Commission is holding to gather input from local stakeholders as well as the public on actionable solutions to improve New York’s public education system in order to better meet the needs of its students while also respecting the taxpayer.

On July 18, 2012, Governor Cuomo’s newly formed Education Commission will be “specifically looking for solution-oriented input on:
The Structure of New York’s Public Education System –The Commission aims to examine the structure of New York’s education system and propose improvements to better meet the needs of our students while respecting the taxpayer; Teacher and Principal Quality and District Leadership – The Commission aims to examine factors in preparing, recruiting, training, and retaining high quality teachers and principals, and factors in developing district leadership to improve student learning and raise student achievement; and Student achievement and family engagement – The Commission aims to examine factors in raising student achievement from prekindergarten through high school including parental involvement and support systems to put students on tract to graduate high school and be college/career ready. . .”

When: Wednesday, July 18 from 1pm – 4pm
Where: PS 99 Stanley Makowski Early Childhood Center Buffalo Public School District, Imagination Room, Rm 217C, 1095 Jefferson Avenue, Buffalo, 14208

This is an opportunity for every group to be heard. If this is seen as merely another game, then let’s register to play and then plan to win. They’ve already shared the ground rules, “Space is limited; please RSVP by sending an e-mail to NYEducationReformCommission@exec.ny.gov” and they’ve told us what they want to hear. (See Above and read more specific information on the website) now it’s time to act.

Each group concerned with the education of our children should be caravaning to Buffalo to support their group’s speaker. The RTA should be sponsoring several buses for teachers and parents to take.

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One Giant Step For Man’s Kind

A father, teaching his child to cross the street safely. “Now if you see a little light flashing, that means the car is turning the corner, you can go.”

“But what if the car doesn’t turn, then the child is in danger.”

“That’s right, son, don’t cross the street until all the cars are gone.”

Recently the Rochester City School District announced a new initiative that will invite men to participate in the educational lives of their children.

As reported by the D&C, “School 4 has a Fathers of Four group that brings dads together to talk about issues and take on projects around the building. Each year the school also hosts a Father-Daughter dance. . . School 57 has a monthly fellowship night where dads get together for dinner, basketball and to swap parenting stories. The school even offers child care so fathers can attend. Now, the district wants to see those kinds of programs replicated in every school. For the first time this year, every school will have a parent orientation before class resumes in September.”

This is an excellent move forward. This is a move that can be followed by revamping the Young Mothers program, changing it into the Young Parents program. The program should involve both young women and men, not necessarily couples, who are or are going to be parents.

The Young Parents program should have flexible hours like All Cit High. The curriculum should provide life skills training, household budgeting, nutrition, citizenry, discipline of self and children, and, most importantly, educational support. These tenets could easily be edited to adhere to State common core standards for whatever grade level is required by the student. The class should be taught by successful veteran teachers who have an understanding and first hand knowledge of the obstacles one faces as a teen parent.

The district has taken a giant step towards changing its culture by working with the community. The community must make sure this is the first of many steps.

Every step forward is a positive move toward properly educating our children.

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Yes We Can – But We Don’t

” Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity ” ~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

We live in a very dangerous world today. We live in a world where people will fight against injustice by signing a bill into law that says bullying is wrong and if you get caught something, we don’t know what, will be done about it.

We live in a very dangerous world where an entire city allows a school district to get away with bullying a young girl for exercising her First Amendment rights. A city that passively stands by while the child is punished and the bullying adults are protected.

We live in such a dangerous world, at least twenty meetings by as many groups are held each month to talk about how truly dangerous the world is.

We live in a very dangerous world where sincerely concerned people are blinded by the shiny gold object of their desire while children are starving for attention, education, love, and caring as they play their X-Box and PS i,ii, or iii, getting their sights hooked on the shiny gold object, becoming blinded by the light.

These are very dangerous times we live in when people who are determined to fight the good fight, fight each other because the only good they can find is within themselves.

We are conscious of how dangerous the world has become. We blog about it, text about it, tweet about it, and facebook it. We read about it, listen to it, discuss it, and make plans to change it. And then it’s time to go home, until we meet again.

We live in a very dangerous world where ignorance reigns supreme and stupidity is the goal for the common man. A world where money is home plate, the goal post, the light at the end of the tunnel.

This world was created for us, to teach us the true meaning of life. We have the ability, strength, and power to change its direction. Finding the courage is the key.

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You’ll Wonder Where The Failure Went If You Make Them Accountable For How It’s Spent

Poverty: The state or condition of having little or no money, goods, or means of support; condition of being poor. Deficiency of necessary or desirable ingredients, qualities. Scantiness; insufficiency.

When teaching dictionary skills it is necessary to understand the context in which a word is being used in order to discern which definition best conveys the meaning of the user. There is no doubt that poverty plays a crucial role in education, however the defined meaning of that poverty is certainly questionable.

In looking at the first definition, it can be said, quite accurately, that there is an economic disparity between the money spent to educate poor urban youth than their suburban counterparts. In fact, more money is spent on educating poor urban youth.

For the 2011-2012 school year, $58 Billion dollars was spent to educate 3,090,000 elementary and secondary education, K-12, in New York State. Averaged out, that is approximately $19,000 per student.

In the Rochester City School District average spending per pupil is approximately $10,000 per pupil. However, since 51% of our population is failing, special programs for these failing students must be implemented. The All City High “program” adds $10,000 per pupil to the $10,000 already being spent bringing the total cost per pupil for those students to $20,000, $1,000 higher than the average.

According to the NYSED report card, Rochester spends approximately $4,400 more than its “big five” counterparts on its Special Education population and approximately $1,000 more than the average of any other district in the state.

With nearly 18% of our students having Special Education classifications, another 11% ELL, and another unknown percentage receiving services without classification status, the RCSD receives and spends more than its fair share to fail to educate our children.

Yes, equity in spending is crucial in providing the education services our children deserve however, the way we are spending the educational dollars we receive is ineffective and inefficient. We fail our children so we can claim more money only to fail our children to claim we need more money.

Before we receive more money we must be held accountable for the money we already receive.

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To Have And To Hold From This Day Forward

“Millions of dollars in funding for our District, and hundreds of teaching positions for our colleagues, hinged on our ability to come to an agreement on this ill-conceived mandate.” This quote by union president, Adam Urbanski explains why the relationship between the district and the union must be dissolved.

To say that teachers have bought into stupidity for the millions of dollars it will bring to a district that constantly fails to educate its students confirms every contrary thing union opponents have been saying about them for the last few years.

To have the voice of the teachers, their union, say that they are more concerned with teaching jobs than they are with fighting for authentic measures of evaluation that promote the educational success of our children is a slap in the face to every teacher who is working their heart out trying to fight the “ill-conceived” system of education that fails our children.

To have the teacher’s union president state publicly, as the voice of Rochester teachers, that teachers have elected to go along to get along is a travesty to the very profession of teaching.

This profession, teaching, is supposed to educate the masses to the concepts of freedom and justice and a government of the people, for the people, by the people. Teachers are supposed to inflame, within each new citizen, the passion and strength to stand against “ill-conceived” ideas offering common sense, critically thought out, imaginative, sustainable, solutions to the problems we face, not only in education, but throughout the world.

For teachers to accept a monetary remittance to deny the very heart and soul of their profession is tantamount to the thirty pieces of silver Judas accepted for the betrayal of Christ.

The teacher’s union, working with the district, to bring in millions, is a marriage of convenience. The children of this “ill-conceived” union are neglected and wanting because their parents will not work together, with the community, to change the system of education for their benefit, but choose to accept educational failure for their own benefits.

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All You Need Is Love – Love Is All You Need

1 Timothy 6:10 – For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil . . .

At some point in our nation’s history, love of self and others was replaced with love of money. Kindness was replaced with cruelty and righteousness became an obsolete concept for all but the religious fanatic.

The respect, kindness, brotherhood, and peace so avidly advocated for in the sixties has been replaced with disrespect, cruelty, selfishness, and hate. There are all kinds of evil out there and they are being taught and perpetuated in every school and in every classroom across America.

Lao Tzu – Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

Day by day we give our children their basic needs forcing them to return each day for a new supply. They are not being taught to feed themselves but to be dependent on a system that gets richer and richer as they become needier and needier.

Our children no longer thrive or even survive, but merely exist from day to day waiting in line for someone to give them an answer, a grade, a diploma so that they can play the game of strife in an attempt to acquire the things they are told they want and need in order to be seen as successful.

Our children are dying because they haven’t been taught the meaning of life. They haven’t learned that things don’t matter, people matter. They don’t understand that possessions don’t make you a better person, caring about yourself and others makes you a better person.

Our children are growing up in a world that has placed a dollar sign on their head, one that is willing to sell them to the highest bidder whether it be public, private, or charter school, not to be educated but trained to do the bidding of the ultra rich.

We have forgotten how to love ourselves and we have neglected to teach our children how to love themselves.

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Why To K-8

STEP – System for Tracking Education Performance allows the New York State Department of Education to “track the performance of cohorts of students who enter high school at the same time, regardless of whether they meet the criteria for membership in the school accountability cohort. This tracking will provide more accurate information about student progress in meeting the new graduation requirements and will allow the Department to report performance by date of entry into ninth grade rather than by average grade enrollment.

Also; Schools with grade 7 or higher who do not grant diplomas are responsible for ensuring that students completing their program enroll in a diploma-granting school to complete their secondary education. They must report as dropouts students who complete their program and who do not enroll in and attend a diploma-granting secondary school.”

While superintendents and Board members cite inconclusive data stating students who stay elementary school through eighth grade are more successful academically due to the relationships between and among school staff and peers, actual research by Vaughan Byrnes & Allen Ruby Center for Social Organization of Schools states, “after controlling for school transition and average grade size, there were no discernible differences between K-8 schools and Middle Schools in terms of academic achievement.”

With the emphasis on graduation rates instead of children, the primary reason for reorganizing our schools to fit the K-8 model is for State reporting purposes only.

If students, who are bound to fail, leave or drop out before reaching ninth grade, the dropout data for that student is attributed to the elementary school level and that student is not counted among the ninth grade graduation cohort thus artificially increasing the graduation rate for the district.

Reorganizing to K-8 is not the way to increase graduation rates. The research of Russell Rumberger and Sun Ah Lim shows that “high quality preschool programs and small classes in early elementary school have proven to improve high school graduation rates. Such programs are also cost-effective—they generate two to four dollars in economic benefits for every dollar invested.”

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Rationale VS Reality

Police Chief Jim Sheppard announced that the Rochester Police Department will increase its efforts to “crackdown” on violence in the city.

Unfortunately, they are beginning at the end, waiting until the violence hits the streets rather than stopping the violence when and where it begins, in schools.

Sheppard is well aware of the violence occurring in schools. As the former Director of Security for the district, there were more student arrests under his command than ever before or since his appointment.

However, school violence doesn’t begin with the children. It initiates with the bullying of principals who are warned not to report incidents of violence to the state because it makes the district look bad. Principals then use the same tactics of intimidation on teachers who experience student violence in the classroom.

Though not confirmed, Tim Mains, principal of School #50 was beaten and hospitalized by a student. The same happened to a third grade student at School #5. These incidents are no longer exceptions, they have become the rule in our district.

No one explained to the female student at Charlotte High that a lady does not disrespect an adult by giving him the finger. “He put his hands in my face first, then I took his hand out of my face,” said Allyson Henderson. The student has no idea that she prompted the violent situation. She felt within her rights to become physical with the aid and believed the aid had no right to defend himself.

Students who are rude, disrespectful, and violent toward classmates, aids, and teachers are given a “time out” in the in school suspension room. Here they are given special treatment and do little work, reinforcing their abhorrent behavior. They are returned to class having received no relevant consequence for their actions. Extremely violent offenders are simply sent to another school for an extended period of time and then returned to their home school without consequence.

The rationale is students must be in school to learn. The reality is our children are learning to be violent.

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How Many More Must Die

“. . . An increase in educational attainment significantly reduces subsequent violent and property crime yielding sizable social benefits. Schooling has small positive effects on white collar crime. School attendance reduces contemporaneous property crime but increases contemporaneous violent crime among juveniles. Incarceration during late adolescence appears to reduce educational attainment.”
Education and Crime – Lance Lochner, University of Western Ontario December 13, 2007

Another life has been lost to the violence that permeates the culture of the inner city. Angry young men, killing each other, because they know no other way to settle their differences. They have not been taught to communicate positively and effectively, using reasoning instead of a gun. They have not been taught the sanctity of life, how wonderful they are and how much they have to offer this world.

We can say that it is up to their parents to teach them these things but sadly, their parents weren’t taught and neither were their parents. We have been failing to properly educate our children for generations and we see the effect of our failure with each violent death reported.

We cannot ignore the fact that the last young man to die was sixteen years old and in the eighth grade, three years behind in his educational career.

We are ignoring the educational failure of our children and our children are failing to thrive because of our neglect. We have yet to stand together, in unity, and demand that the Board of Education, the Superintendent, the district, work with the community to create widespread, fundamental, sustainable change in our system of education that will ensure educational success for all of our children.

Many members of this community have worked diligently to research and formulate comprehensive solutions to the problems that plague our district. The district continues to ignore the intellectual property that we offer. How many more of our children must die before we stand together and fight back against the decades of failure that our educational leaders have forced us to accept.

If our leaders won’t listen we must elect new leaders.

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