Recent Comments
Re: “Teachers contract sidesteps work on student discipline, advocates say”
The issue is not some teachers or all teachers criminalizing student behavior. The issue is that the contract leaves open a huge loop hole that can seriously endanger students based on one teacher's, or a few teachers, inability to properly assess and solve problems with students.
Again, this is about the contract language, not the "few students" that this could effect for creating an unsafe school environment. Essentially, this big downside to this is that it can further reinforce the school-to-prison pipeline in Rochester.
Re: “Another schools ‘solution’ that avoids the big issue”
Actually, this is a well thought op-ed that highlights one problem and offers one solution. Perhaps reading more closely is required of some commenters. Additionally, the proposed solution comes from the fact that schools with mixed income levels (integrated schools, and therefore integrated neighborhoods) are the most effective for improving performance. So, at the end of the day, the real problem is "how do you integrate schools in an equitable way?" This is tied up with issues related to transportation and housing. The root causes of these issues is racism. This American Life did a nice program on this very issue http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/562/the-problem-we-all-live-with
Re: “Is it possible to make America whole again?”
I will just have to paraphrase my friend who summed up this whole issue pretty nicely
" What gets me about this 'Washington is broken' explanation that Trump supporters have is: then why not reform the political institutions that incentivize such suboptimal collective decision making by politicians, rather than support someone who is less likely to understand how the system is suboptimal?
If we think that there is an issue with the manner in which kids are being educated, we don't propose having inexperienced or ill-qualified teachers come in and teach as 'outsiders' - we instead work towards fixing the system so teachers are incentivized to work for the best interests of the education system. The same would go for policing or firefighting reform - it would be ludicrous to suggest we should simply hire 'outsiders' to fix the problem."