Actually, There IS Free Lunch

That's true for NYC's schoolchildren. No more getting free lunch forms and letting all your friends know your home income is below poverty level. No more paying half price and letting them know you're close to it.

This poses a problem for my school, and I presume, a whole lot of others. Why bother filling out a lunch form if lunch is free anyway? Will there even be one, now that it makes no difference? And what are we going to do about Title One funds, assuming Betsy DeVos doesn't donate them to her good friends at Walmart?

The article says 75% of city students were eligible for free lunch. Up until now, Title One has been distributed school by school. I don't recall offhand the percentage our school needs to hit to receive it, but it seems like around 60%. In Staten Island it's closer to 40%. It's ridiculous that children in Queens have a higher threshold than children in Staten Island.. Evidently there's less poverty in SI somehow, so their schools might not qualify otherwise.

I've seen a lot written about so-called Fair Student Funding. Aside from making principals have to think twice about hiring experienced teachers, it has another major drawback. That is the fact that the city does not issue many schools funding it calls "fair." Schools get varying percentages of it, which by its own definition is unfair.

I know that schools that don't get Title One are struggling to keep up. They don't have enough teachers to keep up with exploding class sizes. In our building, being Title One, we probably have enough money, but we haven't got any space. In any case, without Title One, we'd probably need to excess teachers and then we wouldn't have enough personnel. It's a ridiculous situation.

The city is a huge district, with all sorts of rules we have to follow. We have not only the UFT Contract, but all sorts of Chancellor's Regulations. (Unless of course, you're a charter, in which case you take the money and do any damn thing you want with it.) A whole lot of things are centralized. Yet every year, the administration of our school puts an inordinate amount of energy in collecting lunch forms. We've made Title One by the skin of our teeth the last few years.

It boggles my mind that we need to find a higher percentage of students than other boroughs. How can aid revolve around which borough you reside in? Why on earth do SI kids need help more than Queens kids? Why on earth are there different thresholds in different boroughs? I recall Queens being the highest. What possible rationale could there be for Queens students getting effectively less support?

It's great that the city is giving free lunch to all children. But if they're going to do that, they ought to distribute Title One equally as well. The city gets a big federal grant, and who knows what it does with undistributed funds? All city schools need all the help they can get, and it's time we dropped the insane formulas.

If all city kids need free lunch, they all need funding too. It's time to take another look at "Fair Student Funding," another look at Title One,  and it's time to find a system that works for New York City, rather than just Bloomberg's held-over thugs.

Also, Mayor de Blasio, it's well past time you showed all of Bloomberg's leftovers the door.

MaryEllen Elia--One, Needy Kids--Zero

Showing all the sensitivity of a sledge hammer, MaryEllen Elia demonstrated forcefully that all her talk about meeting with concerned parties and listening was just that. Otherwise, why would she threaten to withhold Title 1 funds from the neediest students in the state for the offense of opting out of state exams?

This comes just after Elia met with a group of activist parents and Diane Ravitch. So clearly she's willing to sit down and listen. Unfortunately she has a corporate agenda and doesn't give a golly gosh darn about common sense. In Spanish, actually, there's a saying that common sense is the least common of all the senses.

I'm not sure what sort of a person would take money away from the poorest students in the state simply because parents from their school, maybe theirs, maybe not, would see fit not to make their kids sit through largely meaningless tests. But it's absolutely clear Elia is that person.

And Elia does not need any sort of extensive program to determine who does well on tests. The trend is clear, and it has been ever since we've embarked upon this nonsensical program of making all kids college ready, whether or not they intend to go to college. It's been clear ever since we decided that all kids, no matter what their disabilities, no matter what their backgrounds, no matter whether or not they knew English, were going to take the same tests no matter what.

That pattern is this--where there is high income, there are high grades. Where there is low income, there are low grades. Where there are few disabilities, there are few low grades. Where there are many disabilities, there are many low grades.

What Elia proposes to do, of course, is to take money away from districts. This money is specifically earmarked to help kids who need it most. Any person who actually cared about the progress of our neediest students would never, ever consider such a thing.

Last year, there was a resolution in the UFT Delegate Assembly to vote no confidence in MaryEllen Elia. It failed. This year we know that MaryEllen Elia is capable of threatening the most vulnerable of our children. I now have no confidence in her whatsoever and frankly, I question why anyone who cared about children would.

Of course if I were Andrew Cuomo, bought and paid for by the reformies, I'd be jumping up and down. If I were Bill Gates, who gave her a ton of money back in Hillsborough, I'd be doing cartwheels. If you want to decimate union, reforminess is just fantastic. If you want to privatize education and make money for your hedge-funder BFFs, reforminess is a bonanza.

But if you want what's best for the neediest children in NY State, you don't want MaryEllen Elia's ideas anywhere near a public school.