with all the money wasted, you'd think they could open one school in each of the boroughs for kids that actually WANT to learn, and let the rest eat each other alive“The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School†(Grand Central Publishing) is Boland’s memoir of his brief, harrowing tenure as a public-schoolteacher, and it’s riveting.
There’s nothing dry or academic here. It’s tragedy and farce, an economic and societal indictment of a system that seems broken beyond repair.
Certainly sounds like this person lives in a very insulated bubble, and looks for a combat medal for living the real world for a while.
I didn't read the entire article; when I got to the part of the $110 textbooks, the rest didn't make any difference. What a waste of money for those books.
Conclusion says it all: “Boland ends his book with familiar suggestions for Âreform: Invest more money, recruit better teachers, retool the unions, end poverty. But there’s no public policy for fixing a broken kid from a broken home, or turning fear into resilience, or saving kids who can’t, or won’t, be saved.”
I am reminded of the girl who desegregated Little Rock’s Central High back in 1957.
Forty years later she returned to the school and received a shock.
She realized she had put HER LIFE on the line, so black kids could go to white schools, place their heads on the desk and refuse to learn.
Her actual words were... “I went through HELL for this?”
Lol, I taught three years in Jackson, Mississippi and had pretty good control by my third year. It was the horrible administration that chased me and half the teaching force away.
Girls' bathroom, or boys'?
His biggest mistake was really just not hanging in there for three more years and learning how to deal. It helps once you've been there for a while and the kids know you, and you find your niche. But I'm happy that the book isn't just a diatribe about the administration and the budget, because yes, a weak principal will make it harder, and I have long since learned to only ask for help in disciplinary matters if I have a kid who is so feral that he should be on meds...
BUT... most of the problem is the culture these kids grow up in, and the absolute lack of consequences for anything.
There was a billionaire’s son who did this back in the eighties. He ended up dead, after inviting some of his students to his penthouse, which they robbed while he lay dying.
I don’t remember his name, and can’t figure out be which means to Google him.
with all the money wasted, you'd think they could open one school in each of the boroughs for kids that actually WANT to learn, and let the rest eat each other aliveIn my father’s day, 1920s, and in my day 1950s-1960s this nation had the best education system world. A system now copied by a number of advancing nations around the world.
The school system is not broken and money won’t fix it. The kids are already ruined when they get there.
It won’t be fixed because liberals want it that way.
A gay metrosexual leftist, seeing the consequences of his ideology.
the words we are looking for are “cognitive dissonance.”
Why does it seem that these stories only come out of cities the Democrats have been running for the past 50 years or more? And Bloomberg was no Republican. He only ran as one because the Rat fiels was so crowded.
A very enlightening piece. Thank you for posting. I was especially interested in the honesty of the author - “resenting their poverty, their ignorance, their arrogance.”
He tried to help...
This ping list is for the "other" articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)
The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.
What a sad, disastrous story. This is the world LBJ created.
Fools trying to turn savages into civilized humans.
No good deed goes unpunished!
ends his book with familiar suggestions for Âreform: Invest more money, recruit better teachers, retool the unions, end poverty.....They’ve been trying this since 1968. M0’ m0ney, M0 money. Throw a fence up around these schools and let anyone who cares about these dregs feed’em. Don’t bother the working people.
Period.
bump
This is why we should pay the dysfunctional not to have children, rather than for having children.