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Re: JC schools worse than Newark?
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Home away from home
 
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NCLB mandates restructuring if schools fail to meet the state standards, and 2013-14 looks like a "crunch" year. Are JC schools in danger of losing Federal funds? http://www.greatschools.org/definitions/nclb/nclb.html
Posted on: 2014/1/4 17:41
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Part of the problem is with the Federal mandates of "No Child Left Behind," something that Fulop (or the BoE) can do nothing about.
No?
Posted on: 2014/1/4 14:02
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Newbie
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Beats me. These kids *will* procreate though, so this cycle will continue until they get educated or get condoms. Quote:
I don't think it has to do with scoring. I know for a fact that the high school I teach at graduates kids who are illiterate, and many other kids are reading well below grade levels. Many others just immigrated from Africa or the Caribbean and are still learning English. How does the school compensate for issues like this? Testing practice in school, Saturday test practice, literacy requirements in Gym/Music/Art/Math, all because this is what they need for the test. All I'm saying is, maybe this isn't what these kids need or want. Quote:
Cami Anderson is making good changes in Newark as superintendent, but the community hates her guts. Newark also has a much higher profile and as such attracts more attention from the media and from donors. Start with the Mayor and Council, JC Superintendent Dr. Marcia V. Lyles, and the media. Raise the profile of the issues somehow. To be honest, I don't think that Fulop, as a new mayor, is going to touch the mess that is JC public schools. But I could be wrong. Make a stink big enough and he'll have to do something about it.
Posted on: 2014/1/4 5:43
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The conversation gets interesting and productive at last! I appreciate hearing from the educators on JCList, and while some of the points raised are difficult - and probably, appropos of bobsacamanos's contention that some kids are lost causes, politically untenable - its good to think about, especially early in a new Mayoral administration when we citizen/taxpayers can make our voices heard. By way of advocating for change, who and where should we start with?
Posted on: 2014/1/3 16:49
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Is it simple pass/fail scoring that's the problem? I would have thought that the curriculum and testing should be about aiming for grades in the tests, and improving the overall grade averages in different levels of students. If the standardized testing doesn't cater for a grading scale, then there is a problem...
Posted on: 2014/1/2 18:46
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Actually no personal offense taken. If the county and state can meet it's education obligations by providing virtual classroom access from home, why bother placing them in any bricks-and-mortar classroom? If neither the kid nor the parents take an interest in their education, why should the teachers and taxpayers care? From their virtual classroom, they can choose to learn, choose not to, or choose to behave and be readmitted to a regular classroom. Their call.
Posted on: 2014/1/2 17:40
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Drug dealers as 'undocumented pharmacists' works too!
Posted on: 2014/1/2 15:15
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Yes, standards are good, but I don't think they're good in their current form. They need to be tailored to the area they're in - for instance, if a suburban school exceeds the standards, why keep them low there? On the flip side, many of my students have trouble reading and writing at a high school level (or even English for that matter), so a standardized test is much more difficult. Again, there are always those kids who are fine, i.e. at grade level, which presents more challenges. Don't take this personally, but if you think a disruptive inner city kid is going to learn from home then I have a bridge I want to sell you. These kids are basically "lost causes," no amount of traditional or at-home instruction is going to save them because their lives are already so screwed up from parents, drugs, alcohol, and street life. I think if you started putting these kids in their own boarding schools you might be getting somewhere.
Posted on: 2014/1/2 14:42
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I think I agree in part. Generally this boils down to providing parents, students and teachers more choice. Standard tests and curriculum seem to be set too narrow, so lets let's provide some local leadership and broaden them where it makes sense - for example, to include passing vocational apprenticeships. However, any standard is better than no standard, so I don't think throwing the standard tests out is the right answer. On disruptive kids in schools, why not just let them learn from home? If they cannot play nice with other kids, why not just give them virtual classroom access? That way they get access to the education to which they are entitled, they can be put on mute when disruptive, and would probably save money overall.
Posted on: 2014/1/2 3:20
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I'm a teacher too, and the ones making education policy wouldn't last 4 hours in a Jersey City or Newark classroom. The situation is completely insane.
Posted on: 2014/1/2 1:24
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'undocumented immigrants' are not undocumented. They are here illegally.
Period.
Posted on: 2014/1/2 1:13
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+1, Bob.
Posted on: 2014/1/2 0:58
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I live in JC and teach in Newark.
It's tough to point to any one issue and say "this is why our urban schools suck." There's a lot of things going wrong and it's a whirlwind of different factors that's causing this failure - if you combined what everyone has already said in this thread, you might have 25% of the problem figured out. If you've ever seen The Wire, then you've heard of the "corner kid/stoop kid" problem - basically, the more violent, socially dysfunctional kids are preventing good "stoop" kids from learning. I see this every day, and there is nothing in place - district wide or school wide - to deal with these disruptive kids. Instead they tell me, "you have to find ways to engage those kids." Really? This kid just told me to go #OOPS# myself, how would you like me to engage him? Some of my students are even under house arrest and wear anklets to school. If you HAD to sum up the problems with urban schools in one sentence (which, again, I think is a bad idea) I'd say that the problem is we're trying to run urban schools like they're in the suburbs. We need to separate kids based on behavior/academic performance, offer vocational options and apprenticeships, on top of MUCH more oversight into where the money goes and how it's being spent, NOT on conforming to state and national standards/standardized testing.
Posted on: 2014/1/2 0:54
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I taught HS in a small town for about ten years.
Each year I would poll the students as to how many homes had either books, magazines or newspapers in their homes. The response was always a tiny fraction of the class having anything of literary value in their homes. More frightening than that--the majority of teachers rarely were seen with a book during free time or a prep period. Most were on a literary level with the students. Yet each student within the last few years had at least one mobile device that was more important to them than anything we were learning in the classroom. The desire or need for learning has gone out of the window today in a large sense, so I can only imagine the learning environment in the larger cities.
Posted on: 2014/1/1 17:46
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I think the student population (and the state) would be much better served with an across the board vocational system in each and every high school.
Kids need that option. Not all students are interested in book learning.
Posted on: 2014/1/1 17:35
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The children of undocumented residents are not 'visiting' - they live here (and may in fact be citizens themselves if they were born here) and they are all "our" children to the extent we, as a nation and a society, have a vested interest in their doing well, succeeding at their jobs, etc. As a nation of immigrants (and my great grandmother was an illegal immigrant from Poland), lack of legal citzenship of the parents is no predictor of failure for their children - on the contrary, historically the public school system in the US succeeded very well. So dealing with inner-city children's multi-generational lack of success in school boils down to... what? My grandparents succeeded in school while their poorly educated, non-English speaking parents were not in a position to help them with their homework etc. So what is missing from all these arguments?
Posted on: 2013/12/30 22:17
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Ahh the 9/11 argument! How many Al-Qaeda operatives has border patrol caught? Not many I'd imagine. Mexico's southern border with Belize and Guatemala is approx 1/4 the length of the US-Mex border. And Canada does't have a land border with anyone other than the US. Don't you think it might be easier to secure 500 miles south of Mexico against terrorist crossings, than 7,500 miles currently? http://cis.org/north/lets-pay-some-at ... -southern-border-and-otms The biggest downside is that the Mexican cartels may assert their right to continue bearing US arms.
Posted on: 2013/12/30 17:22
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Let's see Mexico open their borders first to Americans and see how that works out. Have you seen how they treat illegal aliens themselves? We need secure borders now, given the threat of another 9/11, not ones more porous.
Posted on: 2013/12/30 16:42
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It's a pretty insular view. It's a little disingenuous to bar immigrants from working and contributing, then argue their kids shouldn't be educated in the US because their parents don't contribute. Alternatively the Americas could extend NAFTA to include EU-style freedom of movement/flexible labor agreements. Jobs are already moving out of the US at an alarming rate. Moving the borders to Canada and Mexico would likely save more in border patrol costs alone, than what is spent educating immigrants. Not to mention the extra billions of revenue generated from the immigrants. And that way US parents could send their kids to Canada to get a decent education.
Posted on: 2013/12/30 16:24
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Just can't stay away
 
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No, not to you at all, nor to anybody else specific. Just a general impression on comments from all over the space these days since the 2012 PISA test results came out.
Posted on: 2013/12/30 14:42
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If you're taking a poor shot at me-I'm just trying to figure out how we can improve our own inner city kids education. Most of the countries that send millions of their citizens to be educated, fed, housed, and have their medical problems fixed on our tax dollars are much less likely to do the same with illegals who visit THEIR country. Suggesting that our own children get a better education is a bad thing AND xenophobic? Why don't you support the children of the USA; black, brown, white, red, and yellow?
Posted on: 2013/12/30 14:34
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Just can't stay away
Joined:
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Great post. It's amazing a lot of people in this country whine about healthcare (which is valid) while at the same time deny that US education is in bad shape overall and find all kinds of excuses, like xenophobias blaming everything on immigrants. Even US top students lag behind other countries in math: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/edu ... l-standardized-tests.html
Posted on: 2013/12/30 14:25
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Forgot to mention. Although it makes sense to talk dollars and look at how much extra money is being taken away from needy disadvantaged kids. The thing is that it really isn't all about money all the time. It's more about who the student is and what the family is like. Money spent does not necessarily equal student success.
Posted on: 2013/12/30 13:40
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I teach ESL in a JC charter school. I don't know how much additional money it costs to educate non-English speaking students (ELLs). I do know that JC public and charter schools receive federal grant money through Title lll funding. My viewpoint on ELLs in JC schools is that we are lucky to have them. You can't compare JC schools with a wealthy suburban school district which has been overwhelmed with illegal farm laborers. In my opinion, the large amount of immigrant students, including ELLs, is one factor which might make JC schools better than Newark. JC schools have an extremely diverse ESL and bilingual population, and many times these students are the best in the class. Their parents came here seeking opportunity and they know that education is their ticket. Look at the magnet programs for academically advanced students in Jersey City and you will see that the majority of the kids there come from immigrant parents or are immigrants themselves. Most of them probably received ESL in kindergarten. Regarding bilingual education, the law states that a bilingual program must be offered if a district has more than 20 students speaking a particular language. I'm not sure how JC deals with the problem of having so many students of different languages spread out among different schools. They might bus the kids, but I'm not sure. Anyway, my take on the whole thing is that the diversity of the JC public school population is definitely a plus. I work with them, and they are generally wonderful students and so are their parents. I wouldn't work in JC doing anything else.
Posted on: 2013/12/30 13:32
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Monroe - I'd actually be against an effective 5% increase in per student spending. The merits or otherwise of educating kids of people in the country without documentation is a different debate.
The whole immigration issue seems backwards. The Republican stance is more like a "closed shop" trade union, protectionism at its worst, and goes against some of the founding principles of this country. It would be better to devise a way of having these immigrants pay taxes and social security, contribute more, and not be forced into the black economy and related crime. However, given most of these immigrants are Latino, it isn't simply about protecting local jobs and resources, is it?
Posted on: 2013/12/30 4:40
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dtjcview, while I don't know the number of children of illegal immigrants who are attending JC schools, I'd guess that it's at least 5%. Do you think, say, our impoverished black children would benefit from class sizes 5% smaller? Or perhaps the high cost of remedial education/ESA/school breakfasts and lunches spent on that 5% could be used for our own kids?
You make great points about the waste, though.
Posted on: 2013/12/29 21:58
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The "spending per student" includes immigrants, so the spending itself is still high, so dilution probably isn't the issue. As far as welfare goes, there might be something to that, but it's tough to imagine other countries don't have the same issue.
From reading various sources, it seems that money is being wasted on items not directed at improving education. Smaller class sizes doesn't seem to corrrelate to education improvements. The US has an extremely high spending on non-education items like Sports. The US does invest in early childhood education, but that program doesn't seem to reaped dividends as it has in other countries. I think some of the things that are broken are: - Little fiscal accountability. The billions of dollars of spend is managed by locally elected moms and pops. Local government isn't the right way to run a multi-billion dollar industry. - No competition for teaching jobs. It seems there is little initial and ongoing standardized teacher training and assessment, performance incentives, career development, etc. The teaching industry seems geared to attract and retain the worst. Paying teachers more, but removing obstacles such as tenure might be the way to go. - Misdirected parental participation - according to authors such as Amanda Ripley, parents in the US engage as much other countries in ed-related activities, but it's not directed to helping the kids learn. Cheering the school team at the weekend doesn't help the kid count. - Bar is set too low. Lessons, homework, tests don't challenge the students to think critically, and are more designed to "learn-by-rote". The focus should be on education and the educators, and not the excuses. Standardized student testing and more competition and choice provided by charter schools are steps in the right direction.
Posted on: 2013/12/29 18:33
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I would also imagine that a lot of money is being spent educating children of illegal aliens (since NJ won't check legal status of students) and that it obviously costs more to educate those children who probably live in non-English speaking households. And that $ dilutes the amount of resources available for the children of parents who are here legally or are citizens.
Posted on: 2013/12/29 14:07
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Seems to me the difference is probably made up in social programs that help alleviate poverty and income instability. When a child's home-life is full of violence, income instability and stress it doesn't matter what you spend on educating them.
Posted on: 2013/12/29 14:00
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I would imagine it's much more expensive and difficult to educate diverse student populations than ones that are not. We can't, for instance, compare Finland with the USA. Isn't JC the most diverse city in NJ? How many different countries are represented among the students? How many different cultures? Languages spoken at home? Religions?
Posted on: 2013/12/29 13:07
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