1. Isn't Klein a total failure? Eight years of an experiment on our kids and no progress?
2. Wasn't claiming progress on flawed tests a lie?
Wasn't he promoting and firing teachers on the basis of these flawed tests? And telling parents which schools are good on the basis of these tests? And so if he knew these tests were flawed why did he give all this bad advice and claim progress that didn't happen?
3. Shouldn't he just resign?
Before the 1970s, PCBs, which stands for polychlorinated biphenyls, were added to the caulking material used to cushion window and door frames to make them more elastic, according to the NYLPI. Although they were banned in 1979, products that may still contain the compound include electrical equipment, oil-based paints, floor finishes and caulking — which has recently been found in abundance on many school windows.
PCBs volatize into air and don’t stay in place, Massie said, affecting the quality of air students breathe, as well as the soil around a facility.
Alternately, you can complete a PDF version of the New York State Voter Registration Form on-line by clicking on the link below, typing the necessary information and selecting the appropriate boxes. However, the file size of these forms are substantially larger than the above forms, so it may take quite a while for them to load on computers with slower Internet connections.
Complete English Form On-line (2,370KB) [which means 2.37 MB]
Complete Spanish Form On-Line (596KB)
Once the form is completed, you need to print the form and sign it. Then, mail the form to your county board of elections.
You can register in person at your county board of elections
or at any New York State Agency-Based voter registration center.
You can enter your name directly into our mailing list database to have a New York State Voter Registration Form mailed to you. (NOTE: The same form can be downloaded, using the link below.)
You can call our 1-800-FOR-VOTE begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 1-800-FOR-VOTE end_of_the_skype_highlighting begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 1-800-FOR-VOTE end_of_the_skype_highlighting hotline to request a voter application.
You can download a PDF version of the New York State Voter Registration Form.
Download English Form (69KB)
Download Spanish Form (115KB)
Print the form, complete and sign it, and mail it to your county board of elections.
The larger scandal is that Chicago has basically a two-tiered education system, with a handful of these selective enrollment magnet schools, or boutique schools, that have been set up under Renaissance 2010 in gentrifying and affluent neighborhoods, and then many disinvested neighborhood schools.
NEW YORK CITY – A group of Muslim parents and their supporters gathered Wednesday on the steps of City Hall where they called on Mayor Michael Bloomberg to recognize Islamic holidays on the school calendar.
The coalition of religious, immigrant and labor groups is asking the mayor to honor a City Council resolution calling for two Muslim holy days -- Eid-ul Adha and Eid-ul Fitr -- to be added to the school calendar.
Group Makes Push For Muslim School Holidays
The resolution passed last year, however Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein say there is not room for more time off during the academic year.
The group says the fact they were considering pushing back the first day of school to accommodate Rosh Hashanah indicates that there is flexibility in the system. They also say having no Islamic holidays discriminates against the city's 100,000 Muslim school children.
"Twelve percent of the New York City's 1.1 million school children are Muslim. And our children deserve to have their holiday like everyone else," said City Councilman Robert Jackson.
All across the country, the most pressing need in schools right now is to keep as many teachers, janitors, counselors and librarians as possible. Less important: expanding charter schools and linking teachers' evaluations to their students' test scores.
So we're surprised by the tumult over a school-aid package approved by the House last week as part of a larger appropriations bill. It would provide $10 billion to keep as many school employees as possible in their jobs during the recession, but would do so, in part, by imposing some cuts on the Obama administration's key education initiative. Race to the Top, a $4.3-billion program that provides competitive grants to states that draw up reform programs in keeping with the administration's priorities, would lose $500 million. Two other incentive programs would lose a total of $300 million.
President Obama has threatened to veto the school-aid package unless the cuts to these programs are eliminated. But Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), who inserted the aid package, included those cuts among many others to offset its cost, thus winning support from Republicans and conservative Democrats. Even with the reduction in its budget, Race to the Top would have billions of dollars to hand out. Would the president really undermine desperately needed school funding over a less-than-lethal reduction in the grant program's coffers?
Opponents of the cuts say that more money for schools won't help unless reforms are instituted. But the $10 billion doesn't represent "more" money; it simply makes up for — to a limited extent — devastating budget cuts that schools have suffered in recent years. And reforms will accomplish nothing unless schools can keep teachers in the classroom.
Of course, if Obey had seen Race to the Top as invaluable, he wouldn't have touched its funding. And here we agree with him as well. The concept behind the program is brilliant: Leverage a relatively small amount of money by using competitive grants as an incentive for states to embrace change. Dozens of states have drawn up new legislation and made new pledges in order to align with the administration's goals. But some of those goals are untested and others are too severe. We too believe that teachers' evaluations should have some connection to how their students score on tests, but are dismayed to see states win grants by promising to make those scores account for at least half of a teacher's performance. And though well-run charter schools have brought welcome new practices to public education, the jury is still out on whether charters improve educational outcomes as a whole. Just as important is the question of which charter schools work well; some perform significantly worse than public schools.
It's too bad that Obey's school-aid package doesn't include some reasonable accountability measures of its own, such as a requirement that states not lay off teachers strictly by seniority when doing so would hurt low-income and minority students, or that they begin drawing up plans for thoughtful teacher evaluations. But above all, let's keep teachers.
CHICAGO - Angered by devastating budget cuts, threatened layoffs and school privatization, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) members voted in a new leadership June 10. New president Karen Lewis immediately vowed to fight any attempt by Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to layoff 2,000 teachers and increase class sizes to 35 students to deal with a projected $600 million budget deficit.
Lewis's slate, Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), won nearly 60% of the vote in a runoff against incumbent President Marilyn Stewart and her slate. CORE swept all top officer and vice president slots. After the election both Stewart and Lewis called for a united union.
"I want to congratulate Karen Lewis and her entire CORE team, and want them to know they can count on me for any assistance I can offer as they take on what will be one of the toughest challenges in the 73-year history of the Chicago Teachers Union," Stewart said. "For when all is said and done, this election was never about Karen or me. It was about the 32,000 union members whose futures and well-being are now being threatened by an uncaring and insensitive Chicago Public Schools system."
The unity of the union was tested immediately when CPS Board of Education held an emergency meeting to deal with the mounting budget crisis. Teachers picketed before going inside where they testified against the Board giving authority to school's CEO Ron Huberman's plan to allow class sizes to rise to 35 and impose cuts in other areas. The Board also agreed to a scheduled 4% pay increase, but this was seen as a maneuver to prevent a strike by teachers. Big business interests represented by the Civic Federation are egging Huberman to rescind the wage increase and confront the teachers union.
However, Huberman did demand concessions by the union. He told the Board, "The reality of the situation is that if concessions are not made, we will have to lay off teachers and raise class sizes." Huberman and the Board are trying to back teachers into a corner and pit them against parents and students.
The CTU says it will let teachers decide on the 4% raise, but maintain there are other ways to solve the crisis and demanded CPS open up its books.
In her victory speech Lewis said, "Today marks the beginning of the end of scapegoating educators for all the social ills that our children, families and schools struggle against every day (and) the beginning of a fight for true transparency in our educational policy. This election shows the unity of 30,000 educators standing strong to put business in its place - out of our schools."
Lewis said corporate America sees K-12 public education as a $380 billion trust, which until the last 15 years it hadn't had a sizeable piece of. She blasted Mayor Richard M. Daley's school reform in which scores of schools have been closed and reopened as charter schools, as not an education plan, but a business plan.
Lewis's victory was also a repudiation of President Obama's proposed federal policy for education reform which is based on the Chicago model administered by current Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
Alarmed by the potential for massive loss of jobs of teachers and other public workers, President Obama implored Congress on June 12 to pass emergency aid to the states and cities to prevent layoffs. Obama said already 84,000 public workers had lost their jobs and 300,000 teachers are threatened with layoffs. Legislation has been blocked by Republicans and conservative Democrats that would have provided $50 billion in funding.
Lewis and other speakers at the Board meeting called upon Daley to release hundreds of millions of dollars that has been accumulated by the Tax Increment Financing (TIF) accounts. These entities have siphoned off property tax money destined for public education into a fund distributed by Daley for economic development that often ends up in the pockets of his cronies. Each year $245 million in education funding is lost in this way.
The new CTU leadership is calling for reforming the way education is funded in Illinois. Presently, 60% of funds comes from property taxes and 30% from state funding, which they say should be reversed to provide equitable education for every child.
Posts
All Comments
