The DOE has a slogan that claims "children first"...Always, except it is not true. The DOE is much more interested in their own pseudo-reform policies that waste millions of dollars on useless technology, high-priced consultants, and Administrative bloat. When it comes to real improvements in classroom resources that directly affected the children, the DOE pleads poverty and blames school Administrators and staff for the lack of proper materials that are necessary to educate the students.A case in point is Jamaica High School that was starved for resources and complaints were made to the State Department of Education (SED) about the effects of lack of resources on the students at the school. To the shock of most everybody, the SED, presented with the overwhelming evidence by Chapter Leader James Eterno and State Senator Tony Avella, wrote a damming report summerizing how the DOE hurt the students of Jamaica High School by starving them of resources, truncating their course selections, and worst of all, had non-certified teachers teaching Special Education students! In summary, here is what the State found.
· No honors or advance placement classes are offered to students· The school no longer offers calculus, chemistry, or physics
· Only three electives are offered to students
· Off –track classes are no longer available
· Students are not offered SAT prep courses
· Students are not able to complete specialty programs such as Business, Computer Science,
Engineering and Finance Institutes or Art Institutes
· Two teachers are not certified in the subject area they are teaching
The entire report can be found here.
Interestingly, the major media mouthpieces of the media, the New York Daily News, the New York Post, and the New York Times bothered to report it. Only NY1 ran with the report and can be found here.
The ICEUFT blog has been writing about the Jamaica High School situation and is a must read for the history of the DOE's attempts to destroy a once great school.
I taught at Jamaica H.S.for 26 years until I retired in 09. I saw first hand how the DOE demolished Jamaica HS. First, they looked for prime real estate to house their small, and charter schools. Then they sent every underachieving student they could find and sent them to Jamaica HS. Since the city does not have residency rules it was easy. Every time I asked one of those underachievers in my classe where they were from it was always somewhere far away from the school. Those underacievers were truants, special education, ESL,students with discipline problems,and even youth from Rikers Island Juvenile detention facility. Once they arrived they brought up the dreaded incident report numbers. An incident could be a fight, theft,etc. If a school had more then 6 incidents per. 200 students in a year under the No Child Left Behind Act the school was listed as dangerous. Every parent in the school was sent a form letter indicating that they could easily transfer their children out if they signed. Made it real easy. We lost alot of our best students that year. Mind you, the Mayor was in the papers every other day reminding the public of this. Then the DOE listed us as failing since we lost those good students. They sent a second wave of letters to the parents telling them that their children were in a failing school if if they wanted to transfer all they had to do was sign it. That was the last nail in the coffin. This has been done to every HS in the city that the Mayor is closing or trying to close. Very simple. Why is the media ignoring this? WILL A REAL INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER PLEASE STEP UP? Maybe 60 min. That is my wish.
ReplyDeletejust out of curiosity, how many atrs do people think will be in the system this year? september will be the biggest disorganized mess the doe has ever seen in my opinion
ReplyDeleteYou can see the same thing going on at Flushing HS.
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