I remember how it was -- JR
Charter schools narrow achievement gaps in Harlem, outperforming NY state averages in math, reading
Charter school students in Harlem are now performing better than the New York state averages in reading and math — a key indicator of the once-struggling neighborhood’s upward trajectory in education, according to a new report.
Today, 59% of kids in community School District 5 attend a privately run, publicly funded charter school compared to a traditional district school in Harlem, research compiled by Success Academy Charter Schools found.
And they’re passing with flying colors — beating state averages by 10% in math and 9% in reading, the data showed.
That’s a vast improvement from 2005, when Harlem students, most of whom attended district schools, performed an abysmal 25 points behind the state average in math and 22 points in reading, according to Success.
The new scores have helped close the Manhattan neighborhood’s statewide performance gap to 3% in math and 2% in reading on the grades 3-8 tests that Albany uses to gauge performance and compare districts across the state.
Public school students in the district also helped shrink the gap with modest 3% gains in math test scores and 6% in reading, according to the data dump from Monday.
Success boasted of the latest stats as Gov. Hochul struggles to win support for her budget proposal to lift the regional cap on the state’s charter schools and allow about 100 more to open in the coming years. Currently, New York City is only allowed to have 275 of the state’s 460 charter schools.
“Harlem’s example demonstrates that raising the cap on charter schools in New York City wouldn’t harm district schools,” Success said in its white paper report. “Rather, it would simply give more alternatives for families who are dissatisfied with their district school options — and many of them have good reason to be.”
The opposition to the charter expansion plan is led by the United Teachers Federation, which argues that charters cherry-pick highly motivated students from supportive families, while the public school system is left to educate the neediest masses, such as English-language learners, special education students or those from the poorest families.
The UFT, which represented 190,000 current and former educators in the city, according to 2022 tax forms, is a major donor to Democratic lawmakers, who control both of New York’s legislative houses.
Former Democratic City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz opened the flagship Harlem Success Academy in 2006, at a time when students in the neighborhood scored 25% behind their statewide peers on math tests and lagged 22% behind in reading, according to Success.
Some 141,000 city students now attend charter schools — making up 15% of the student body in the five boroughs. About 90% of the charter school students are black or Latino, and 80% are from economically disadvantaged families, according to the New York City Charter School Center.
Former governor and charter advocate George Pataki told The Post last month that opposition to raising the cap was “absolutely” racist.
Even the state’s top educator was recently quoted as dismissing the success of charter students as a racial anomaly, as she lobbied against Hochul’s proposal.
“If it [creating charter schools] is such a wonderful experiment, then let me see it in places that embrace it other than communities of color,” State Department of Education Commissioner Betty Rosa said at a February legislative budget hearing. “Good things are embraced by everybody, not just some.”
Success, which runs 47 charters in four of the city’s boroughs, refuted criticism that charters were taking away resources from public schools by highlighting three public Harlem schools — PS 30, PS 133 and PS 194 — with large declines in enrollment that had not suffered financially and benefited from smaller class sizes.
“When charter enrollment increases, it actually increases the amount of money that district schools can spend per pupil on their remaining students since the amount of money a district school loses when a student chooses a charter school is less than the district school would have spent on that student had they remained in the school,” Success argued.
The charter chain also pointed out that students at Harlem charters were more likely to be poor minorities than those attending public schools in the increasingly gentrifying district, where DOE statistics show that 11% of students are white or Asian.
Students are admitted via lottery, and charter school officials are banned from discriminating or favoring their admissions bid based on intellect, disability or any other reason.
Charters are held accountable through a five-year “performance contract” with the state focusing on student achievement — and the low performing ones are closed if they don’t meet standards.
The New York City Department of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/13/charter-schools-narrowed-achievement-gaps-in-harlem-report/
*************************************************Woke colleges are literally driving students mad
Whom the gods would destroy, the old saying goes, they first drive mad. Which means they must hate elite educational institutions a lot.
Take what happened at Stanford Law School last week.
Judge Kyle Duncan of the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit went to speak there at the invitation of its Federalist Society chapter. He was to talk about the Fifth Circuit, the Supreme Court and constitutional law.
Duncan is a conservative, and Stanford Law’s “progressive” students didn’t want to hear what he had to say.
They could have avoided that by simply skipping the talk, but they didn’t want anyone to hear what he had to say.
When Duncan showed up, they literally shouted him down.
About 100 protesters made sufficient noise, shouting insults: “We hate you!” “Leave and never come back!” “We hate FedSoc students, f—k them, they don’t belong here either!” and so on.
They also carried childishly insulting signs with slogans like “JUDGE DUNCAN CAN’T FIND THE CLIT” and “FEDSUCK!”
Duncan finally became angry, calling the protesters “juvenile idiots” — which they were — and asked an administrator to restore order.
Stanford Law’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Tirien Steinbach came to the podium — and sided with the protesters, speaking from remarks she’d prepared in advance.
The scene seemed shocking, but this sort of thing is inevitable when students are told that being exposed to views they disagree with is “harmful” and an intolerable personal insult as well.
And that’s what they’re taught in America’s “elite” institutions and in many non-elite ones too: Words you don’t like are “violence” and do “harm.”
(A friend comments that anyone who thinks “Words are violence” has never been punched in the mouth.)
Stanford’s president and law dean quickly apologized. But I suspect Steinbach’s views — which at a law school, where students must learn to handle encounters with opposing views and persuade people (like judges!) they cannot compel, are basically lunacy — are in fact close to the institution’s true beliefs.
So yes, Stanford is crazy.
Nor is Stanford alone. Last year, Georgetown Law hosted a similar descent into madness when Ilya Shapiro, just hired as director of the school’s Constitution center, posted a critical tweet about President Joe Biden’s promise to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court.
The students not only protested but demanded “space to cry.” (Who wants a lawyer who needs “space to cry” when confronted with a disagreeable tweet? Nobody.)
Rather than telling them to grow up, the dean paid for catered food for the protesters. So Georgetown Law is crazy too.
That’s bad. But what’s worse is that the woke/DEI approach to education also makes students crazy.
Jonathan Haidt recently wrote a fascinating essay on why the mental health of college students has been in such steep decline for the past decade.
He noted cognitive behavioral therapy, used to treat depression, teaches patients to stop ruminating over perceived slights and setbacks and engaging in black and white thinking or emotional reasoning.
But the culture of DEI does exactly the opposite: It encourages students to dwell on slights, engage in (literal) black and white thinking and prioritize their emotions. It’s “reverse CBT,” in his phrase.
Instead of being taught to overcome traumatic experiences, negative thoughts and emotional instability, students are encouraged to dwell on them and even to base their identities on them.
And when students are told their weaknesses provide an excuse to bully others, expect more bullying — and more weaknesses.
This isn’t good for the bullies or the bullied, and it isn’t good for the institutions they inhabit.
Students’ worst, and most juvenile, behavior is indulged and rewarded, with the predictable result that students grow increasingly juvenile and ill-behaved.
This from institutions that charge top dollar to, purportedly, educate America’s future leaders.
Over the past decade, universities have spent a fortune on DEI (though the “inclusion” part certainly wasn’t visible at Stanford) and there’s no evidence it has made things better on campus for anyone except the DEI bureaucrats.
Insanity, we’re told, consists of doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result. Maybe it’s time to stop the craziness.
Or maybe right-wing critics of the higher-education establishment should stop criticizing and cheer this on.
After all, those whom the gods would destroy, they first make crazy. And there’s a lot of craziness going on.
https://nypost.com/2023/03/14/woke-colleges-are-literally-driving-students-mad/
******************************************************A disastrous Aboriginal school in South Australia
Schools with Aboriginal majorities are well-known for violence in Queensland but the problem is not confined to Queensland. Everybody is too politically correct to take the firm measures needed to deal with the problem
A student at Port Augusta Secondary School has refused to return to school after a brutal bashing by a fellow student left him with concussion and almost shattered his cheekbone.
The 16-year-old boy, who was attacked on February 21, says he is too scared to go back amid fears he will be targeted again.
During the attack, the boy, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, was punched in the head from behind before being pushed over a retaining wall and hit several more times.
The boy’s father told The Advertiser his son had suffered post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the incident and did not feel safe leaving the house on his own.
“Enough is enough,” he said. “Somebody’s going to end up dead.”
The father said he flagged threats made to his son in the weeks before the attack but police and Port Augusta Secondary School took no action. “My son can’t even go down the street on his own,” he said.
The father said violence had continued at the school despite the installation of CCTV and the use of security guards. “They’ve had nothing but issues,” he said. “These kids are still going at it. Cameras aren’t going to keep the kids safe.”
He also said escalating violence on the town’s streets was being “dragged into the school”. “It’s just got to stop. Kids shouldn’t be doing this,” he said.
On Friday, The Advertiser revealed students at Port Augusta Secondary School were being “stomped on” during fights.
“The school is f**ked,” one student said.
In February, parents of another student who was the victim of a vicious attack told The Advertiser they had warned the school about a potential fight before the incident.
Videos of fights, which appear to be planned, have been posted to several social media accounts in recent months.
An Education Department spokeswoman said the student who assaulted the 16-year-old had been “excluded” from the school for the maximum period of 10 weeks.
She said the school met with the victim’s family on “numerous occasions” before the attack but “despite their efforts an assault did occur”.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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