fasteddie wrote:
Quote:

shortsell wrote:
I know this question is going to make me sound like a ditz, but is the bus company NJtransit or mta?

WHAT? MTA? For Christ Sake!. MTA? Do you know where you are? MTA is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. It is a NYC agency. When you cross the river going west, you are in NJ. There is no MTA here. Here's a helpful tip. You see the NJ in front of NJTransit? That's a hint. It means New Jersey. Get it?

fat-ass-bike wrote:
The thing that annoys me the most is parents that smoke in their cars with their kids are in the back seat - I call that neglect and endangering children. The fines should be in the $1000's.

heights wrote:
Quote:

xplanted wrote:
I love Jersey City in the few months I've been here. But the level of apathy among the government (and many of the people is shocking). I have no idea what to do, but speaking from experience, block meeting don't do anything. But I'd don't see the point in wearing goofy berets and baseball jackets.

I want to nip this crap (like people saying drug dealers hang on their stoop or the local parks) in the ass, but there seems no way to do it, and if the cops are as bad as they everyone says they are (which I don't exactly buy...) I don't know where to start.

Thanks for all the feedback!

There seems to be a lot of surprise reactions from the wide-eyed new residents of Jersey City. Perhaps they should have done their homework prior to setting up camp here. On the surface J.C. looks like a paradise, what drew these new residents here in the first place? Bret Schundler a complete opposite of what J.C. resembled at the time of his first election put J.C. on the map. But with mixed income neighborhoods it's going to be tough to live side by side with the haves & have nots.

K-Lo wrote:
My son, a junior at McNair, said the owner remembered each time the way my son liked his sandwiches.

Hurtle wrote:
Quote:

greenville wrote:
There's a freaking police station 4 or 5 buildings from this, unbelievable!

I think they have a supect.

fasteddie wrote:
70?! I'm not running a friggin nursing home here! Can't I just supply the tenents with THESE and keep the heat at 55??

West wrote:
Do they still make the kids stand in a square that's taped on the floor as a punishment?

One victim, a 16-year-old, told police that on New Year's Eve he was going to a store with his cousin when a man approached them at Ocean and Bidwell avenues and pointed a handgun at them saying ,"Y'all wanna die right here?" reports said.

NNJR wrote:
Quote:

Wilson has been arrested 18 times in New Jersey and has been convicted on charges including robbery, burglary, receiving stolen property, theft and five counts of drug possession, police said.

So this could make 19. Does the 20th victim get a door prize?

How about some stronger sentences for violent repeat offenders?

K-Lo wrote:
The principal at Learning Community Charter School explained it to me -- but I am not an educator or statistician. This excerpt from "Small is Volatile" by Wayne Au does a good job of it.

* * * * *

Big Trouble for Little Schools

"High-stakes standardized tests like the ones Bush is proposing can only mean big trouble for small schools. All other arguments about testing aside, small schools are extremely "volatile" when it comes to measuring their progress statistically through standardized test scores. To be volatile in a statistical sense means that you may be subject to wild swings in test scores from year-to-year, grade-to-grade, and school-to-school.

In their oft-cited article "Volatility in School Test Scores: Implications for Test-Based Accountability Systems," education researchers Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger found that in North Carolina, the smallest schools had 50 percent more variability in test scores than the largest schools. In layperson's terms, this means small schools had swings in their scores that were 50 percent "wider" than large schools.

If you take a moment to think about it, the logic of this test score volatility makes absolute sense. Say you have a small high school or school-within-a-school of 200 students (50 per grade). In one year, you may have recruited 20 students who achieve higher test scores relative to the rest of their grade. Because your high school is small, and these 20 students (fully 10 percent of your total small school population) did well on a test, your school will show strong gains in test scores and AYP. Kudos for you and your school.

But say that in your next year, you recruited 20 more students who perform poorly on standardized tests. Suddenly, this new group of students' test scores, because they represent 10 percent of your student population, will have a drastically negative impact on your school's overall test scores. Whoops! You've shown a drop in scores, didn't meet your AYP, and are now placed on the NCLB school watch list where, if you don't improve in three years, you could be privatized or reconstituted.

Perhaps one of the twisted implications of small school volatility has to do with its impact on diversity. From the angle of high-stakes tests scores, small schools are better off having homogenous populations. If a small group of either high-scoring or low-scoring students can have such a drastic impact on your school's high-stakes test scores, and the future of your small school depends on the standards set by AYP, then it serves a small school's interest to keep low-scoring students out. Because we know that statistically black, Latino, and low-income students perform poorly on the high-stakes tests relative to white and middle-class populations, there is an incentive for small schools to keep poor students of color out of their schools for fear of having scores that don't meet AYP.

A similar logic extends to other, non-racial, subgroups that are counted for AYP. If, for instance, you have a significant number of bilingual or English as a second language (ESL) students, then you have to show AYP on test scores for that subgroup. If you don't have any bilingual or ESL students, then you have no reason to show improvement in that category because the subgroup simply does not exist for you. The more subgroups you have, the more ways there are for you to fail to meet AYP. In an article in Education Week, "Subgroup Reporting and School Segregation," authors Amy Ellen Schwartz, Leanna Stiefel, and Colin Chellman note, "Ironically, be-cause of the way the law is written, the schools and districts that could end up being most heavily penalized are those that are the most heavily integrated." Looking at it from the other direction, homogeneously tracked or privileged small schools can insulate themselves from NCLB's "close the gap" mandate by avoiding student populations with test-score gaps in the first place.

Small schools may be able to sneak under the subgroup reporting radar, however. If you are a small school and you have just enough diversity, but not enough to be required to report subgroups under NCLB, then it is possible that you might avoid having to report test-score data for any group at all. Many states have set their magic number at around 30 to 40 students in any one subgroup to be counted for AYP, but predominately rural states like South Dakota cannot work with subgroup reporting numbers that high, since many of their schools are so small that they have no "official" test scores to report for AYP.

High-Stakes Battle

Many of us who have taken up small schools reform have done so for the best of reasons. I know that I loved working in a small school. I knew my students' home and life situations, I knew their academic histories, and best of all, I knew them personally. Small schools hold the promise of building community and allowing us to create institutions of learning that are not as alienating and inhumane as the large factory-school prototype.

But NCLB and its focus on high-stakes testing and AYP puts a stranglehold on small schools' abilities to work effectively with kids, especially if we build our small schools around diverse student populations. Issues like social justice, equity, and opportunities to learn don't count for much on the tests. Thus we are faced with having to wedge our schools into a behemoth assessment and "accountability" system that is structured for standardization, not creativity and social justice.

Many people have already been resisting high-stakes testing in high schools. A coalition of more than 45 education, civil rights, child advocacy, disability, and religious organizations including the NAACP, the Children's Defense Fund, the National Education Association, and the National Alliance of Black School Educators recently sent a letter to Congress protesting Bush's new plan to increase high school testing. This same group of organizations released a "Joint Organizational State-ment" in October 2004 calling for substantial changes to NCLB. Addition-ally, small schools in New York waged a fierce battle against the Regents tests, touting a portfolio assessment system that was far more rigorous than the tests [See "Standardizing Small," page 15.] Even though policy-makers ignored the power of portfolios, this spirited and organized resistance shows that communities are standing up to the tests.

To add fuel to our fires, and maybe to "empirically" prove what many of us already knew, a recent study by the Northwest Evaluation Association found that the high-stakes tests weren't really working anyway. This study, which used data from more than 320,000 students in 23 states, found that test-score gains have slowed greatly, and improvements may be attributed to students getting used to taking tests as they grow up in an educational era dominated by NCLB. Additionally, this study found that test-score gaps between students of color and white students were still widening, instead of closing. "

It's not that all standardized tests are bad - not at all - but the way these tests are used, and the conclusions that are required to be drawn from NCLB laws are the problem.