Governor Cuomo proposes isolation based education system to be run by Prinicipal Bill Gates

 

NY Post

Remote learning could replace the practice of a teacher standing in front of a classroom instructing students in the post-coronavirus area, Gov. Andrew Cuomo suggested Tuesday.

Cuomo dropped the bombshell while announcing a partnership with the Gates Foundation to “reimagine” education in the post-COVID era.

“One of the areas we can really learn from is education because the old model of our education system where everyone sits in a classroom is not going to work in the new normal,” the governor said at a press briefing Tuesday at his Manhattan office.


“And you do that all across the city, all across the state, all these buildings, all these physical classrooms,” he said. “Why? With all the technology you have?”

“When we do reopen our schools let’s reimagine them for the future, and to do that we are collaborating with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and exploring smart, innovative education alternatives using all the new technology we have at our disposal.”

What's this "the new normal" shit he keeps bringing up? Obviously to justify then implement privatization of all government departments and services while maintaining a climate and culture of fear and a stranglehold on power. This is dangerous.

A disservice to parents, teachers and children

From the NY Times:

Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to “shake the foundations of New York City education” in 2014 with a new program called Renewal, a signature effort to improve the city’s 94 poorest-performing schools by showering them with millions of dollars in social services and teacher training.

A year later, aides raised a confidential alarm: About a third of those schools were likely to fail. The schools were not meeting goals that the city set for higher test scores, increased graduation rates and other academic measures — and probably never would, staff members in the Department of Education warned in an internal memo prepared for the mayor.

“In order for these schools to reach their targets for 2017, the interventions would need to produce truly exceptional improvements,” read the December 2015 memo, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. “Historically, it has been quite rare for schools to improve that much in two years.”

Mr. de Blasio kept most of the schools open. Now, after sending thousands of children into classrooms that staff members suspected were doomed from the start, the administration appears ready to give up on Renewal. Its cost: $773 million by the end of this school year.

King of the hill, top of the heap!

From Metro:

New Yorkers may feel like this is one of the best cities in America, but a new report has named New York City one of the worst-run cities in the United States.

New York City ranked as the third-worst-run city in the country according to a WalletHub study published on Monday.

This is the second year in a row New York landed near the bottom on WalletHub’s ranking of the best-run cities. Out of 150 cities measured on a variety of “quality of services,” New York came in at number 148, above only Detroit and Washington, D.C. Gulfport, Mississippi and San Fransisco came in above New York, rounding out the top five worst-run cities.

WalletHub's list looks at how effective the local leadership is, but how can that be measured?

"One way is by determining a city’s operating efficiency," per the report. "In other words, we can learn how well city officials manage and spend public funds by comparing the quality of services residents receive against the city’s total budget."

The study’s “quality of services” score looked at different details across several categories: financial stability, education, health, safety, economy and infrastructure and pollution.

New York fared well in the safety area, but its finances and economic issues dragged down its overall score. According to the report, New York has some of the highest long-term outstanding debt.

The report also dinged New York City when it came to education. The high school graduation rate here is 74.3 percent, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced in February.

Wages not increasing enough to make NYC affordable for most

From Epoch Times:

A shortage of talent for mid-skill jobs in New York City is linked to low wages and an inadequate education system, experts say.

A mid-skill job is one that requires a high school diploma and a post-school certificate, but not necessarily a four-year degree—for example, many technology, health care, and trades jobs.

“Tech in particular, while growing, is not at levels of mid-tier cities like Seattle and Austin due to higher cost of living,” said Jessica Walker, president of the Manhattan Chamber of Commerce, in an email. “So figuring out how people in tech, health care, and business and finance can live with families in NYC and the state is important.”

The shortage of talent prompted job search website Indeed.com to dig into its vast database for answers.

A big problem in New York City is labor market polarization, or “a hollowing out of middle wage jobs,” said Daniel Culbertson, an economist at Indeed.com.

The company separated its job database into 800 different categories, then ran the data through two filters: The first was whether a wage had kept pace with inflation, and the second was whether a wage was higher than the unadjusted median amount for that job in the year 2000.

Only 35 percent of New York City jobs made it through the filters.

The origin of talent shortage lies in the education system, said Allison Armour-Garb, senior fellow at Public Policy Institute of New York State.

In New York City, only 35 percent of high school graduates are college-ready, she said, and at least 50 percent of students have to take at least one remedial class when entering college.

The city spends more than $70 million on remediation classes at CUNY alone, Armour-Garb said. “[We’re] paying millions for material they should have already mastered in high school.”

Gambling with school funding?

From Politico:

Tens of millions of dollars in revenue from Resorts World Casino at Aqueduct slated for state education will instead be invested in capital spending to expand the site, according to an agreement in the 2016-17 state budget approved last week.

Assemblyman Gary Pretlow, a Democrat from Mount Vernon, estimated the award to be $40 million a year going to Genting New York LLC., which operates Resorts World.

“That would be money that should be going to education and not to Genting, which is one of the richest companies in the world, a multi-billion dollar corporation,” he told POLITICO New York. “They don’t need to take money from children of New York to build a hotel or for any other reason.”

But state and Resorts World officials insisted that in the end, the investment will result in twice the amount of money being used for the casino's growth.

“Now that we are eligible to participate in the State's capital allowance program, we will be able to embark upon a considerable expansion of our facility, which will be developed in consultation with our local community partners,” Genting senior vice president of public affairs Michael Levoff said in an emailed statement. “This investment will lead to increased visitation, more good-paying local jobs and a significant increase in overall revenue for New York's education fund.”

Lots of illiterate people in the U.S.

From Forbes:

A report conducted by the OECD and commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education entitled Time for the U.S. to Reskill? has found that a staggering 36 million adults in the U.S. are “low-skilled.” That is, they lack the most basic skills in literacy, numeracy and problem-solving deemed minimally necessary for meaningful employment in a high-tech global economy.

Moreover, one-third of these low-skill workers are immigrants.

What the OECD does not discuss, however, is that many of these immigrants may have entered the U.S. illegally. Thus, they may not be eligible, or may not believe they are eligible, for government-sponsored educational benefits. Moreover, because of their status, illegal immigrants might be afraid to get training in crucial language skills. In addition, English may not be spoken in the home, at work, or in their community, further hindering English language development.

Historically, the low-skill status of immigrants has not been so troubling. In fact, it has been a hallmark of the American immigrant experience for centuries. Whether Irish, German, Polish, Italian, Mexican, Chinese or what have you, new immigrants (legal or not) have historically taken the low-rung, low-skill jobs that more skilled or longstanding Americans no longer felt compelled to take.

Moreover, the children of these immigrants have historically gained access to new skills through America’s free and extensive primary and secondary schools, near-free community colleges and low-cost state universities. Consequently, they accrued far greater skills than their parents did, enabling they and their offspring to move quickly up the American economic ladder.

Unfortunately, this comforting narrative has been interrupted.

Is this the way to reform workfare?

From the NY Times:

Mayor Bill de Blasio is revamping the city’s welfare program, vowing to dismantle what was once the largest workfare program in the nation and to embrace new strategies for moving thousands of people off the welfare rolls and into jobs.

Workfare? Do you remember workfare? It is the program that ballooned during the administration of Rudolph W. Giuliani, with 36,224 people working in it or assigned to it by the year 2000.

The program mostly dropped out of the headlines after Mr. Giuliani, a Republican, left office, but his work-first ethos still prevails: In April, 9,194 welfare recipients participated in or were assigned to workfare, and thousands more were required to engage in job-search programs that de Blasio administration officials have described as largely unsuccessful.

Now, Mr. de Blasio says, it is time for change.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, plans to prioritize education and training for able-bodied welfare recipients instead of automatically assigning them to workfare positions — cleaning parks and subway platforms and performing clerical duties — that have been described as dead ends by advocates for impoverished families.

Over the next two years, city officials say, those workfare jobs will vanish completely and be replaced by transitional employment programs, internships and community service positions in growing sectors of the economy to ensure that more welfare recipients find paying jobs.

Research shows that programs heavily focused on education and training have been less successful than others at moving welfare recipients into the workplace. And somewhere out there, Mr. Giuliani must be wagging his finger, warning of the dangers ahead.

7 of Avella's bills passed by Senate

This week the State Senate passed a series of legislation, authored by Senator Avella, dedicated to expanding public safety, creating an early learning program, advocating for noise reduction, preventing fraud when paying off tax liens, and minimizing the potential for miscalculations in child support payments.

The bills which passed through the Senate include:

· S4898: Mandates the New York Transit Authority to produce annual reports concerning actions to reduce noise.
· S7089: Requires that the Metropolitan Transit Authority provide the public with a pledge to customers; this ensures that riders are provided with more information and that their interests in utilizing the public transport system are protected.
· S6903-C: Enhances public safety and directly protects animal caretakers, those interacting with wild animals, bystanders and the animals themselves by preventing direct contact between wild animals and members of the public.
· S680: Relates to method of payment on delinquent real property taxes, sewer rents, sewer surcharges, water rents, or any other charges that are made a lien; payments must be made in certified check or money order to prevent fraud
· S6961: Establishes the Early Learning Council with the purpose of securing public and private support for early learning program for children up to the age of five.
· S6784: Amends an inconsistency in existing social services law to ensure that an accurate method is used when calculating the amount of child support payments by the Supreme Family Court
· S725A: Increases the terms of office of members of the legislature to four years

Three of the bills, S4989, S7089 and S6961 have already passed the Assembly and will now be delivered to the Governor for his signature.

Lots of conflicts of interest keeping boathouse plan afloat

I've been pondering the whole Newtown Creek boathouse debacle and wondering why the City Parks Foundation has been pushing so hard for the project and how it leapfrogged over more popular projects as voted on by stakeholders back in 2011. Well, the dots have been connected.

The choice of the City Parks Foundation to oversee the whole community outreach process for the wastewater treatment plant settlement was a joke, since they are part of the Parks Department. They may say, "City Parks Foundation is the only independent, nonprofit organization to offer programs in parks throughout the five boroughs of New York City," however, all of their employees have "parks.nyc.gov" e-mail addresses. The CPF is a 501c3 that allows Parks to accept tax deductible donations. They should not be involved in any decision making or vote collecting process regarding how the settlement money is spent. Why? Because, as the WSJ explains: "the money comes from $10 million in fines levied against the city for failing to meet deadlines in constructing a new treatment plant and in lowering the level of pollutants in the water". The City is overseeing where the fines it paid will be spent? Hello, conflict of interest.

Open Space Alliance of North Brooklyn is a multi-park conservancy authorized by the NYC Dept of Parks. (The OSA Director is also the Parks Department's North Brooklyn administrator - a Parks employee.) OSA's purpose is to raise private money for public parks in northern Brooklyn. But strangely, it’s accepting donations on behalf of this private boat club. OSA even went so far as to apply for funding for the boat club from the Exxon settlement money.

Hello, conflict of interest #2.

The boathouse project went from 3rd on the list to 1st on the list after the vote. Is this because DEC determined that it's what people in the area really wanted, or because "Commodore" Dewey Thompson, the president of the boat club, is a board member of OSA, which is affiliated with the Parks Dept, as well as a board member of GWAPP? (GWAPP applied for the sewage treatment plant money on behalf of the boathouse.) Conflict of interest #3.

Conflict of interest #4? How about the fact that the project submitted to the DEC and to the public is nowhere near the same as the one being pushed now? Don't we deserve to see the plans? (Interestingly, I hear that some of the board members of the groups behind this endeavor have not been allowed access to the plans.) Perhaps there should be a revote? Or was the result of all this "community input" pre-determined, with the necessary steps taken after the vote to ensure that the outcome looked legitimate?

And then there's Newtown Creek Alliance:

NCA Supports a New & Improved Home for the North Brooklyn Boat Club

And here are the reasons why they support it:

1) Access: Along Newtown Creek’s 11 miles of waterfront there are only two safe public access points: DEP’s Nature Walk and the Manhattan Ave. Street End park. The new NBBC facility will provide a third much needed public access point.

2) Eyes on the Creek: Dozens of pollution investigations and enforcement actions against Newtown Creek polluters have been set-in motion as a result of the first-hand observations and vigilance of concerned local residents. Waterfront and water access results in more “Eyes on the Creek”, which will ultimately lead to a safer, less polluted Newtown Creek.

3) Education: There is nothing quite like being on the water itself to inspire curiosity about the multifaceted history of the Creek and wonder at the innumerable life forms that call Newtown Creek home. Over the past two years, NBBC has introduced hundreds of people to Newtown Creek for the first time. A permanent home for NBBC that includes an education center will help build a well informed constituency for the Creek that cares about it’s future.

4) Water Quality: How the public uses a waterway informs how clean the government requires it to be. That is to say, if people are swimming in the water, then that body of water must be cleaner than one that is simply used by ships for navigating from point A to point B. Currently, Newtown Creek is misclassified with the lowest water quality designation, a classification that belies the fact that people boat and fish on Newtown Creek. It is our hope that the growing presence of human powered watercraft on Newtown Creek, enabled by a NBBC that teaches safe boating, will force a reclassification of Newtown Creek’s water quality designation so it reflects its actual use as a recreational waterway.

Hmmm... They forgot to mention reason number 5, as revealed by the NY Times:

There are also discussions to include office space for Riverkeeper and the Newtown Creek Alliance, nonprofit organizations working in the area.(inside the boathouse/hotel)

Ah...Conflict of interest #5.

Pushing "4) Water quality" when the public has been warned to stay the hell off the Superfund site, doesn't seem very responsible to me. But I am not a member of this group. I was asked many years ago to join, but I got a bad vibe from the people trying to recruit me, and I declined. Always trust your tweeding radar, folks.

I really have to wonder how the 2 men who are responsible for creating this monster - then Attorney General and now Governor Andrew Cuomo, and current Attorney General Eric Schneiderman - are allowing this to continue. And Bill DeBlasio, who is anti-conservancy for reasons perfectly illustrated by this situation...how about you? Public Advocate Letitia James? Anyone?

How about Queens elected officials whose constituents were disenfranchised by this process? Van Bramer? Crowley?

Assembly Member Joe Lentol and Council Member Steve Levin: You've been listed as "sponsors" of this boathouse. Are you supportive of the way this process has been carried out? You've been eerily quiet about the whole controversy. Of course, a member of the press would have actually had to ask you about it. Speaking of which... WHERE THE HELL IS THE PRESS? Specifically, the BROOKLYN PRESS?


Meanwhile, Miss Heather has been told that the above rendering is that of the boathouse. A tipster told her that it actually is 10 years old. Amazing that this has been going on for so long. You'd think that they'd be working out of more than just shipping containers by now if they had the community support that they claim to have.

To be continued...

Education trumps environment for Cuomo

From Capital New York:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo's proposed education bond act might put an iPad in the hands of every student, but a chance to fix the state's leaky sewage infrastructure River would go down the drain.

The $2 billion education bond act floated by Cuomo in Wednesday's State of the State speech would get computers, tablets and high-speed broadband into every school across the state. But it will also effectively kill off any chance of a $5 billion environmental bond that would pay for sewer upgrades, drinking water protection, climate change adaptation, improved air quality and farmland protection.

Only one bond plan can be put to voters statewide vote a year and it must be for a single purpose, according to the state Budget Office.

Cuomo made it clear Wednesday that he'll put his weight behind the education initiative, not environmental improvements, on the same ballot where his name will appear in November.

Crowley takes credit for things she didn't do

Ooooh, I can't wait to hear this!

"When a house is sold in my neighborhood, I no longer worry about a developer tearing it down to build an oversized eyesore. Thanks to Elizabeth's rezoning, we will never have to worry about overdevelopment again."

Is this guy serious? First of all, the rezoning process for Maspeth-Middle Village-Glendale was started in 2004 by community volunteers, 3 years after Elizabeth Crowley initially ran for City Council, lost, and promptly disappeared. While civic groups were going door-to-door collecting building information, Elizabeth Crowley had a no-show job courtesy of Brian McLaughlin. She resurfaced only in 2008 to run for Council again. The ULURP for the rezone started a few months after Elizabeth assumed power in 2009, mainly because Amanda Burden insisted on personally touring the area before giving her seal of approval. Although the rezoning provides more protection from overdevelopment, there still is plenty of it around these neighborhoods. You'll still see 3 or 4-family houses being built in the future where there currently are one-family houses. And a lot of the area was not rezoned because City Planning couldn't decide which zone it fell into or felt the zoning already matched the housing stock.

Crowley doesn't send her kids to the Maspeth High School. And I guess she thinks we forgot that she voted against the construction of the school and that a lot of Maspeth moms can't send their kids to the school because Crowley failed to obtain the necessary concessions from the DOE. We didn't.

She's fighting for good schools, but the one she is at apparently has a teacher that can't spell the word "repercussion". Hmm. They must have known she was coming, however, because the words "fallacy" "manic" "recession" and "indict" appear next to her head on the blackboard.

This is the creepiest mailer of the bunch. A woman appears on the cover of the folded mailer. When you open it up...

Crowley appears next to her. (She apparently was photoshopped out of the cover.)

Crowley's office referred a constituent to a social worker who enrolled her in Medicaid. That's a basic function of a council member, not fodder for a mailer.

The Forum endorsed Crowley's opponent, Craig Caruana:

The 30th Council District is facing a laundry list of intimidating issues: A woeful lack of senior housing, overcrowded classrooms, an arts center that aims to serve liquor to thousands of patrons in a residential area inhabited by many older residents and families, and not enough green space.

There is much that needs to happen for the district’s residents, and in order for that to happen there must be an elected official who is not only responsive to constituents’ needs but able to get along with the City Council’s top brass, including the Speaker.

That person is Craig Caruana.

We know that Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley has done some good. She has put money into schools and parks. But she has not done nearly enough. Fairly or not, she couldn’t get along with Council Speaker Christine Quinn – and that has hurt the district financially. She is routinely missing in action when it comes to responding to constituent complaints, and, when asked if she would run for a third term – something she repeatedly slammed Mayor Bloomberg for pushing – she didn’t say no. Additionally, she is supporting the Knockdown Center, despite almost every other elected official and numerous civic groups in the area raising a litany of concerns about the facility’s request to serve alcohol to up to 5,000 people at the site.

We need someone who will listen to, and fight for, the people.

Craig Caruana grew up in Middle Village – he knows this district. An involved civic activist, he is committed to this neighborhood and will fight for his constituents – whether they are Democrats or Republicans.

It’s time to vote in someone who aims to reduce property taxes and bring more resources to area schools. Who will return phone calls and get along with other legislators. Who won’t say, with a wink, sure, I’d love for that to happen – and then never follow through.

Vote Craig Caruana Nov. 5.

For comparison, here are some of his mailers:

Sad school stats

From the NY Post:

Nearly 80 percent of city public high-school graduates who enrolled in a City University of New York community college last year had to relearn the basics of reading, writing or math — the highest percentage in years.

A stunning 79.3 percent of city public-school grads who went to CUNY’s six two-year colleges arrived without having mastered the basics, up from 71.4 percent in 2007.

The ballooning numbers come despite the state having raised the requirements to graduate from high school in each of the past five years.

In 2012, this meant that roughly 10,700 students who earned high- school diplomas and enrolled at two-year CUNY schools weren’t prepared for college-level work — most of them because of math.

Those students were then forced to shell out money for non- credit-bearing courses — for as much as $1,000 a pop, they said — before they could start making their way toward a college degree.

DeBlasio advocates for more free babysitting

From the Queens Courier:

Not enough of the city’s school four-year-olds are going to pre-kindergarten, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio announced in a new study, especially in Queens.

For Queens, this means that for every five applicants there is one Pre-K seat –- effectively leaving many tots without the early education the public advocate believes they need.

Two of the densest Queens school zones regarding applicants per seat are District 24, in the central and southwest parts of the borough, and District 26 in the northeast.

Only 20,000 of the city’s 68,000 eligible children get to go to Pre-K, according to de Blasio’s report. The public advocate has proposed a plan to allow all four-year-olds to go to Pre-K, along with after school programs between 3 and 6 p.m. for middle schoolers.

Has Bloomberg dropped the education ball?

From the NY Post:

Remember the time Mike Bloomberg jetted off to sunny Bermuda as a monster snowstorm bore down on the five boroughs? Never again, he said afterward, woefully, while the city ever-so-slowly dug itself out of the drifts.

Well, some tigers just can’t change their stripes.

For there he was last week, down in Maryland giving America a firearms intervention while the United Federation of Teachers and his own crack Department of Education negotiators pulled his pants down on teacher-quality reform.

Transforming the city’s public-school system into a national model for quality and effectiveness was once right at the top of Mayor Mike’s personal legacy list.

But then came the third-term blahs, the departure of Joel Klein as schools chancellor, the ensuing Cathy Black debacle, the ascendancy of the thuggish United Federation of Teachers boss Mike Mulgrew — and the now-pervasive sense that Bloomberg no longer much gives a damn about the city’s 1,400 schools.

Fact is, he’s always been long on big ideas and short on follow-through (congestion pricing, anyone?). The schools seem to be no different.

Quinn proposes schools become all-day babysitting service

From Metro:

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn announced a fleet of education proposals this morning, including extending the school day and axing textbooks and using tablets instead.

Quinn targeted the education system with her speech at the New School.

The Speaker is battling to be the next mayor, facing an ever-growing list of competitors to replace Mayor Michael Bloomberg when he finishes his term next year.

Her proposals, which she vowed would cost less than $300 million, included appointing a deputy mayor for education and children.

She also wants to make the school day longer, keeping students until 6 p.m. five days a week in schools with the highest percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch.

No more textbooks would be needed under her plan – instead, students would use tablets.

I'm sure tablets cost much less than books. And are we also providing free dinner to the children since they'll be there until 6pm? How about another round of school buses?

NY's financial health in jeopardy

From the NY Times:

New York State faces long-term budget problems that are compounded by the teetering finances of its local governments, an aging infrastructure and the possibility of severe cuts in federal funding, a panel of fiscal experts said Tuesday.

The State Budget Crisis Task Force, a nonpartisan group, said that New York’s problems had been “papered over with gimmicks” for decades, and that while Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had taken some steps to rein in spending, the state was still saddled with burdens that would leave it unable to make ends meet in the long run. Over the past decade, the report said, New York had postponed a reckoning by using one-time measures to produce $25 billion in revenue.

Former Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch, a co-chairman of the group, said the math spoke for itself. “There are expenditures that are growing at a rate faster than revenues,” Mr. Ravitch said. “As long as that happens, then we are on an unsustainable course.”

A report released on Tuesday by the panel, which was also led by Paul A. Volcker, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve, offered a sobering assessment of the state’s finances, raising concerns about its outsize spending on health care and education, its vulnerability to the ups and downs of Wall Street, and the struggles of its local governments to pay retirement obligations.

As one major area of concern, the report highlighted the state’s enormous Medicaid budget, which is larger than those of Florida, Pennsylvania and Texas combined. The report said that while the Cuomo administration had put in place a cap on annual increases in health care spending, it was not certain the measure would drive down costs over the long run.

More charter schools for Queens

From the Daily News:

More than a half dozen charter schools are vying to open in the fall of 2013 in Queens, the borough with the most school overcrowding in the city.

Seven of the controversial institutions have made it to the final rounds of the notoriously difficult state application process. Decisions are expected in October by the state Board of Regents and the SUNY Charter Schools Institute.

The proposed schools center on everything from working with foreign-born students to having a Chinese-based curriculum with mandatory martial arts training.

“Charters have a place in our educational system,” said Isaac Carmignani, co-president of the Community Education Council District 30, a northwestern Queens parents group.

But “what would concern me is if they’re...drawing resources away from our district schools,” he said. “I’d be concerned about co-location [in public schools.]”

James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter School Center, which supports the institutions, said there are only 11 Queens charters due to the dearth of available space in the borough.

There are 61 charters in Brooklyn, 44 in the Bronx, 42 in Manhattan and three in Staten Island, according to the center.

Dream Act would cost taxpayers a pretty penny

From the NY Times:

Much of the public debate surrounding proposals to allow illegal immigrants to receive state financial aid for college has centered on questions of legality: Would such legislation legitimize the status of people in the country without authorization?

But lawmakers have also been puzzling over another critical matter: How much would it cost the state?

Advocates for the bill who met this week with a member of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s staff said costs seemed to weigh heavily on the minds of administration officials.

The State Education Department estimated the cost at $627,428 per year for a measure it sent to the Legislature in December. That proposal is one of at least two circulating in Albany, commonly known as the New York State Dream Act.

The department’s bill, like the other measure, would make state tuition assistance available to illegal immigrants attending college in the state. But the Education Department’s estimate has been criticized by some analysts as unrealistically low.

Children of illegals remain uneducated

The next time someone argues that illegals should remain in the country because they work hard and their kids succeed, please show them this NY Times article:

About 41 percent of all Mexicans between ages 16 and 19 in the city have dropped out of school, according to census data.

No other major immigrant group has a dropout rate higher than 20 percent, and the overall rate for the city is less than 9 percent, the statistics show.

This crisis endures at the college level. Among Mexican immigrants 19 to 23 who do not have a college degree, only 6 percent are enrolled. That is a fraction of the rates among other major immigrant groups and the native-born population.

Moreover, these rates are significantly worse than those of the broader Mexican immigrant population in the United States.

The problem is especially unsettling because Mexicans are the fastest-growing major immigrant group in the city, officially numbering about 183,200, according to the Census Bureau, up from about 33,600 in 1990. Experts say the actual figure is far larger, given high levels of illegal immigration.

...educators and advocates say that unless these efforts are sustained, and even intensified, the city may have a large Mexican underclass for generations.

These problems extend throughout the swelling Mexican immigrant diaspora in the New York region. They have also afflicted the population of second-generation Mexican-Americans: While educational achievement is far higher among American-born children with Mexican ancestry, it still lags behind the rates of most other foreign-born and native-born groups, according to census data, which was analyzed by Andrew A. Beveridge and Susan Weber-Stoger, demographers at Queens College.

Syndi Cortes, 19, one of five children of Mexican immigrants in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, said she dropped out after getting pregnant at 16. She had already been cutting most of her classes, she said, and so had most of her Mexican and Mexican-American friends.

Last year, she tried to resume school, but her mother, who was working long days as a housecleaner, was opposed to day care and forced her to drop out again to look after her baby.

We are encouraging and protecting millions of illegal immigrants from countries that do not value education, view a woman's role as that of a baby factory, and live off the backs of taxpayers, while prohibiting people from better-educated countries, who are practically guaranteed success stories, from setting foot into the States. This is yet another Ponzi scheme that is costing Americans and legal immigrants big time.

Furthermore, the reason many of these folks can't learn English is not because they don't want to, it's because they never learned to read and write in their own language. When mom and dad pulled you out of school in 3rd grade so you could help them work, you don't have time for book learning. In turn, you can't help your own kids when it's their time to learn and don't feel the need to encourage them to study hard because it wasn't a priority where you came from. It's a sad situation, but one we can't and shouldn't be responsible for trying to fix.

Let's also realize that legalization means a guaranteed minimum wage. Which means the incentive for employers to hire illegals has been removed. This sets up a situation where they are now directly competing with Americans for retail and other low-level jobs rather than just the "jobs Americans won't do" like farm labor and slaughterhouse duties.

Damned if I know what the answer is, but neither amnesty nor the status quo are it.

Teacher tenure rules changing

From the NY Post:

No stranger to making education reforms, Mayor Bloomberg outlined a plan today to do away with lifetime positions and replace it with a system where teachers would be required to earn tenure.

In an effort to focus on teacher quality and effectiveness, the city will implement a four-tier rating system for determining whether a teacher should be awarded the tenure protections that come with the job.

Starting this year, only teachers rated “effective” or “highly effective” will be eligible for tenure, Bloomberg said, transforming a system from one in which tenure is taken for granted to one in which it must be earned.

In the announcement, city officials said tenure may be awarded in the third year -- or any time thereafter -- always contingent on whether a teacher has made a significant impact on student achievement.