A person who comments on this blog keeps saying that NYC schools deserve to be in the shape they are in because New York City residents don't pay the same taxes as Long Island residents. This person seems to think our kids should be packed into rooms with upwards of 40 kids. So what if their are no chairs? What is wrong with sitting on the floor? It doesn't matter if the roof leaks on them either. The money their parents are saving on taxes could be used to buy waterproof clothing. They don't deserve classes that are on the right level for them. Big deal, so they get a program change three weeks into the term. They don't pay taxes, it doesn't matter if they missed all that work. They can take math B without passing Math A if Math B is the only class with an available seat.They should never get new books. I bet this commenter wouldn't mind if there was no heat in the winter either (unless, of course it was a room that person was teaching in.)
The things I want for my students are not frivolous, they are basic rights. A quality education is something that everyone should be entitled to, no matter what their economic status is. I'm tired of people thinking our kids deserve less than their suburban counterparts.
6 comments:
You are absolutely right: Kids everywhere deserve a quality education. That nonsense of "separate but equal" was tossed out by the Supreme Court years ago. If my school in the desert doesn't have adequate supplies, but the school in suburbia-near-the-desert does, then something is wrong and the wrong should be righted. My desert kids are no less deserving of a chair to sit on than the suburban kids are.
We got a NCLB kid this year who everybody has already decided is "trouble". So far, I haven't seen it. She sits quietly in my class, is slowly getting the courage to ask questions, and asked me to help her repeatedly the past few days. She was glad to take my e-mail address when I offered it to her. Maybe nobody ever gave this girl a chance to learn. Maybe other teachers in the past wrote her off as "trouble". I'm not going to do that. Every kid deserves a chance. I could be wrong about this girl, but I don't think so. I think she's GLAD somebody actually gives a damn if she learns something.
I never bought into the explanations given for not building new schools when there was obviously a growing need for more classrooms at all levels, especially high school. It has and always will be a matter of priorities; if mayor after mayor truly cared about the future of New York, classes would be no more than 25 and we'd have toilet paper in the kids' and women's bathrooms in the school. Instead, we have the same old make do with what we have mentality. Bloomberg and Klein are so astoundingly fraudulent in their "caring" about NYC kids. I just witnessed that meiskite sniveling weasel Klein state on the "Colbert Report" that we "have to do something about all those kids who are dropping out". One of the things KleinBloomGarten are doing is closing schools and stuffing the "better" schools with kids from the closed schools. It's not the kids' fault that they are not a priority. It's funny how in middle class areas of the city there were never the problems that other less endowed neighborhoods experienced in their schools. KleinBloomGarten deny that socioeconomic and local cultural values affect our kids. Not being educators, they know nothing about the difference when a kid comes from a supportive home and when a kid is from a dysfunctional background, perhaps with a history of drug use on either the parent's or the kid's part. All they care about is measurement and statistics. These Long Island people don't have layer after layer of bureaucracy and bs with $80 million dollar data collection systems. There is waste; a prime example of course is the money embezzled from the Roslyn school district and the corruption occurring in the Lawrence school district. Somehow, with all that money missing, the kids still got everything they needed, especially lower class sizes and a pleasant school learning environment. Go figure, Long Island!!!??
Whether they are urban students in NY or rural students in Colorado, as long as they have no choice but to attend delapidated schools that are lacking in basic care, many of them will have trouble finding value in furthering their own educations.
All children deserve to be educated in dignified schools, regardless of their parents' income.
Basic rights, eh? Trial by jury is a basic right. Perhaps teachers should be paid what jurors are paid.
Too many people sling around terms such as "basic rights" and "deserve" without thinking critically about what those terms really entail.
Maybe jurors should be paid better.
I don't understand your comment. What does one thing have to do with the other?
Post a Comment