The Magic Formula

Sue Edelman has a piece in the Post about how several schools have avoided takeover. Evidently whether or not a school gets taken over entails graduation rates, Regents passing rates, and whether or not you are in the bottom 5% of schools. So these schools dodged a bullet, but the article suggests they are still not doing that well.

I wonder what the difference is between a school in the bottom 5%, which appears to be bad, and the bottom 6%, which somehow is not. What makes schools only in the bottom 7% so much better? I can't really say, but I guess if you live by the numbers, you die by the numbers.

When you reaize that test scores pretty much all coincide with income or lack thereof, you might determine we should simply close all schools that poor people attend. Under that model, which is pretty much status quo anyway, we could judge the students by income. For example, we could find out how many students qualified for free lunch and simply expel them. That'll get those test scores up in a hurry.

Of course the solution to so-called failing schools, according to Governor Cuomo, is to place them under receivership. Let the state run them. That's worked out fabulously in Roosevelt New York, just a few miles north of my home in Freeport. A young woman who took my blood pressure at a doctor's office went there, and told me many stories of what the high school was like under state control. I'm surprised my blood pressure didn't spike right then and there.

Now the state does not necessarily have to take over these schools with high percentages of poor people. Perhaps we could let Eva Moskowitz in to work her magic. Of course, a lot of charters have not done so well under that particular paradigm. Locke High School was taken over by Green Dot, Randi Weingarten's favorite charter chain (UFT partnered with them to bring them to NYC), and they didn't fare all that well.

But the important thing is to take these schools away from their communities, which are too poor to have or run their own schools. And once we get rid of that bottom 5%, there'll be another bottom 5% to worry about. Maybe if we keep attacking public schools 5% at a time, eventually there'll be so few left that the hedge funders will be able to drown union in a bathtub or something. That's something folks like Broad, Gates, and the Walmart heirs have wet dreams about.

Until and unless we attack poverty, like Finland did, there are going to be a whole lot of schools our insane system deems failing on the basis of tests that may or may not measure what's important.

It's too bad we've been vilified and libeled so widely and for so long. I'm no genius, but I can write tests for my kids a whole lot better than the companies getting paid millions to assess them.

The Magical Twelve ESL Credits

In New York, children from other countries are supposed to learn English via magic. That's about all I can conclude from the mandates that have been issued by Merryl Tisch and her gang of geniuses up there. Since I started teaching ESL, beginning students have been entitled to three periods a day of instruction in English language. Because Merryl knows better, now they only need one period per day.

The other two periods can be math, social studies, chemistry, or pretty much whatever. The teacher of those classes will pick up the magical 12 credits of ESL cheap via NYSUT or UFT, and then magically teach not only chemistry, but also English! And this magic teacher will do both those things in the same time it takes all the other teachers to teach the American kids! Because it doesn't matter whether the kids know a lick of English, whether we teach them a lick of English, or even whether they want to learn English. Once that magic teacher gets those 12 magic credits, all those problems will simply disappear.

And even better news--once the kids become high beginners, they only need to study English half of the time. And once they hit intermediate, they don't need to study English anymore at all! Do you see the beauty of that? The magic teachers, with no extra time, will teach them not only how to pass that troublesome Global Regents exam, but also basic conversation, listening skills, and reading and writing. And they will do this while covering the same textbook and giving them the same assessments that kids who've lived here all their lives take.

Not only that, but in New York, we've overcome a basic tenet of language acquisition, i.e., the older you are the harder it is to acquire a language. In fact, after puberty, the ability to acquire language drops precipitously. But that doesn't matter in New York, because anyone with the magic twelve credits can squeeze English out of the most reluctant individuals. It won't matter if they've been dragged here from China kicking and screaming. It won't matter if they've left their families and friends behind. It won't matter if they've missed years of formal education. It will make no difference if they are illiterate in their first languages.

Once people take those magic twelve credits, they will overcome these and all other obstacles via sheer grit. They will impose rigor on these kids, and with rigor and grit the English language will be no obstacle whatsoever. Sure, when they go to college and know little or nothing about English structure or usage they will have to take costly remedial courses to learn what they could have learned in high school. Sure, they will be unable to actually pass tests that are wildly inappropriate. Sure, they will spend extra years trying to graduate, and schools will be penalized, closed, put into receivership, and whatever.

But the important thing is we'll have all those magic teachers, and all those magic credits, and New York will be a magical place to learn English. Because if you can't learn English via magic, you just haven't got any grit. Just ask Merryl Tisch. She's just full of grit.

Or something like that.