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July 23, 2010
WHO TAKES THE RAP IN NEW YORK CITY
By Profesor Martin Danenberg "El Quijote del GED"
Fred Smith reveals what I have been telling my readers about for some time. Mayor Michael Bloomberg did not listen to me over eight years ago when I presented my GED ideas to Jerry Russo in his first campaign. Many of the same mistakes are being made today by the GED programs that have been restructured. Now the education commissioner and the chancellor of the Regents admit the testing for New York's children has been bungled. The public school system including the charter schools has become almost as polluted as the Gulf of Mexico. President Barack Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have bought into the gains made by Mayor Bloomberg and Geoffrey Canada and it may be time to do an about face. It would be great to have another election for mayor in the City of New York in November, an election based on the truth. New York City has been made much weaker and it is sad to say this at a moment in history when things are so bad all over in the economy. Hundreds of millions of Bloomberg dollars used by Bloomberg to get elected have not helped the education of the children. I am not saying that everything was bad, because I am sure that there were other sound improvements. The focus on the testing is what I have been concerned about. Maybe instruction improved or advanced in other ways.
Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and Education Commissioner David Steiner have admitted that the state has badly bungled its testing of New York's schoolchildren. They are promising to do better -- but want to close the book on what went wrong.
Sorry: Assurances of more honest days ahead aren't enough -- we need to resolve accountability for the dishonest days of the recent past. After all, Tisch and Steiner are implicitly acknowledging that the critics have been right, and the state Education Department wrong, for years -- since 2006, at least," Smith writes today in the New York Post.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/who_takes_the_rap_for_ny_test_mess_cxq2Ro9d5i6C5fSOWBMfZJ#ixzz0uJz7fWqX
At this point, it seems like social promotion has not ended in New York City's schools. Four years of testing has largely gone down the drain. Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein must show increases on some other test to convince us that they have really accomplished their goals. If they can demonstrate this, we can give them credit for accomplishing something important. Remember that 80 percent of the high school and GED graduates are not passing some or all of the placement exams for the city colleges. Teachers are being blamed for poor instruction in the classes there. I feel for those teachers, because GED instructors have taken that heat for decades. The madness has to stop.
MARTIN N. DANENBERG
7 BLAZER DRIVE
ISLANDIA, NEW YORK 11749
631-348-1341
GEDHOTLINE@AOL.COM
New:
www.mygedhotline.com
www.geocities.com/gedhotline
www.ahorre.com/ged
www.ahorre.com
www.aspira.org
Profesor Martin Danenberg July 23, 2010 10:02 AM