I am on Long Island, not NYC, but yes, the cost of living is very high here.
(Long Island)
vs. Alabama
4 Likes
My sister generally taught K - 2 grades, but one year she was teaching in the Houston area, in a poorer area outside of Houston, and she had to teach 5th graders. She evaluated them to need the same skills she was teaching a year before to her first graders, but the problem was she was going to be judged by how well these kids scored on the 5th grade test. It was really hard for her to figure out how to give them skills to pass the test but try to give them fundamental reading skills they actually needed.
14 Likes
illiteracy and math illiteracy can be multi-generational, not to mention many parents are stretched thin working multiple jobs. there’s also teen pregnancy issues ( at least in the south. ) all of which, to me, seem rooted in poverty.
i feel like this country wants “personal” and “parental” responsibility in all things, and yet balks at giving people the tools to accomplish that: good education (including child rearing classes), living wages, healthcare (contraception!), heck even public transportation.
some people are lucky and manage to claw their way up, most are not, and multiple generations (be it in detroit, the appalachia, or rural texas) wind up left behind.
7 Likes
US, you DON’T have permission to be doomed!
This is unacceptable.
Un. Acc. Ept. Able.
5 Likes
Failure is unpresidented.
4 Likes
A smaller fiefdom is still a bubble.
Michigan is, and has been, broken for a while now.
AmeriCorps is supposed to help with this stuff. Why haven’t we massively increased those progams?
2 Likes
A national blood-lead level inventory would be a wise use of government dollars.
3 Likes
Yup. Testing (and most educational reforms) has put teachers in a double bind. It’s a terrible situation.
10 Likes
Sadly, the Charter movement wasn’t supposed to be that way, it was hijacked by those forces. My kids went to a terrific Charter k-8, it has it’s own union contract, is nonprofit, has an elected board of local parents, and resembles the good private schools in the area with a basic Bank Street model. It was a great experience for my kids, extremely diverse, and they got a good enough education to get into the one of the best magnet high schools in the state.
All this is despite getting nowhere near the funding they’re entitled to and paying a mortgage on their own building, unlike the charters in NYC and elsewhere that get city owned property. Sadly many other charters in my city are nowhere near as good, some have closed and others should be closed. Charters were supposed to be laboratories, not an end in itself.
So saying charters are all bad is as inaccurate as saying all politicians are bad, it just seems that way.
4 Likes
So? We have a disproportionately high property tax.
His Galaxy has speech to text (early model with it) and functional illiteracy is often enough to be reasonably sure that what you said is what the screen prints, but not enough for a solid copy-edit.
Semi-funny story – my Smother got one of those Galaxys, and Smother longs to be a teenage Cool Kid with all of her 60+ year old soul. She’ll use every bit of tech she gets her paws on, but usually does so very badly because RTFM is not in her vocabulary, and she is convinced she’s expert at everything. (She was also 6 years late to L33t, and it took months to get her to knock it off – thank Ghu for a Teen Vogue article that disparaged L333t.) At the same time Smother got the Galaxy, she changed carriers and phone numbers, and didn’t bother to tell my siblings and me that she’d changed her number. (We’re apparently supposed to download that patch with the overnight universal knowledge build.) I have a long standing policy of not actually talking to Smother, because she’s got a hazy notion of truth, accuracy or remembering anything that doesn’t serve her needs right this minute, and since I mostly talk to her about financial matters (I manage her trust), everything has to be in writing. Email and text, primarily these days.
Smother realized she could text via speech to text on her phone while driving (ohmigod) and got into a habit of ranting all of our failures and flaws into her phone while commuting. But the speech to text was more like Google Translate from Hindi to Mandarin to English in that model, so sibs and I are getting this weird spam-like extruded text-like product vomited all over our phones, from an unknown number. Which we ignored.
Then she threw a ginormous email and Facebook* tantrum because none of us were responding to her.
*Another medium in which I will not communicate with her, or actually use, because anything with an edit button is a NO when dealing with a truth-flexible person.
45’s early morning tweets remind me of Smother voice-texting.
13 Likes
To be fair, so did unions.
1 Like
I guess I’m not groking your point here? We have never prioritized the well being of our citizens. Never. When we sort of did, it was limited to certain people and came under pretty serious duress.
2 Likes
I’m betting on creeping dementia. I’m pretty sure he’s markedly less coherent these days than he was only a few years ago.
3 Likes
For them I guess I would say There is an extreme pettiness and short-sighted streak but wants to smoke pot.
5 Likes
That seems accurate.
4 Likes
That’s right. The national average for functional illiteracy is about 14%, with states like Indiana skewing a bit higher. Detroit is about 3.5x higher than the national average. This group effect has profound ramifications for a community and a society.
http://www.begintoread.com/research/literacystatistics.html
43% of adults at Level 1 literacy skills live in poverty compared to only 4% of those at Level 5
3 out of 4 food stamp recipients perform in the lowest 2 literacy levels
90% of welfare recipients are high school dropouts
16 to 19 year old girls at the poverty level and below, with below average skills, are 6 times more likely to have out-of-wedlock children than their reading counterparts.
Low literary costs $73 million per year in terms of direct health care costs. A recent study by Pfizer put the cost much higher.
8 Likes
Agreed, but unlikely to happen under the current regime.
In fact, I expect lead in gas, DDT, and Freon to be reintroduced because “freedom”
5 Likes
