Posted on 06/06/2006 11:23:28 AM PDT by freespirited
There they were, parents and students from the New Explorations Into Science, Technology and Math school, banging drums and shaking maracas in front of Cipriani Wall Street to disrupt the black-tie benefit where Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein was speaking.
There they were again, hundreds representing NEST, as the school is known, passionately chanting "Save the NEST" in front of City Hall. And there they were, hoisting "Don't Tread on Our School" signs on a wooded patch of East Hampton near the Ross School, a private school founded by Courtney Sale Ross, the wealthy widow of a former Time Warner chairman.
In the two months since parents at NEST learned of the city's plans to place the Ross Global Academy, a new charter school also founded by Ms. Ross, in their building on the Lower East Side, they have filed a lawsuit, hired a publicist and printed buttons and postcards. The city has not budged.
Now the battle over NEST, which has about 730 students, has become a tale about the intersection of class, race, parents, politicians and philanthropists in the New York City public schools. It pits the mostly middle-class parents who have nurtured NEST, a kindergarten-through-12th-grade school for gifted and talented children, against Ms. Ross, a multimillionaire with homes in the Hamptons and on the Upper East Side whose supporters say she is creating a school to help the poor.
"They're trying to destroy our school," cried Arianna Gil, 12, a NEST seventh grader, at the Cipriani rally, as she handed out gift bags embossed in silver lettering with the NEST logo and filled with publicity materials. She warned of "complete chaos" if the Ross charter school moves in.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
If I am reading this right (please click on link for the full story), a multimillionaire from the Hamptons wants to engage in social engineering of a school far from where she lives. Any impact will not be on her or any of her family, friends, or neighbors.
Brings to mind Tom Wolfe's essay, Radical Chic.
Oh, oh ... trouble is brewing:
"According to city statistics, 52.6 percent of NEST students in the 2004-5 school year were white, compared with 15.1 percent in public school citywide. At NEST, 18.9 percent of students qualified for free lunch, compared with 57.4 percent citywide. The school admits students based on factors including test scores, interviews, classwork and observed play sessions. "
We live in Fairfax VA so our kids could go to special programs for Gifted and Talented. Probably the best GT system in the country.
Very few black children but there are some. A LOT of Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans.
Egalitarians can't stand elitism. They want to level everybody to the least common denominator.
You misinterpret.
The school is a magnet school with children coming from all over the city. The parents of these children are generally quite well-off - multimillionaires, many of them, in their own right.
Not only does Mrs. Ross have the right to fund and to set up a charter school if she gets all the proper permissions, the city is entitled to do whatever it wants with its property.
It is a quarrel between two groups of very wealthy New Yorkers over how taxpayers' money should be spent.
So they're fighting over their own money, then...
I don't blame them.
The NEST school is pretty controversial in its own right: it has segregated classes for boys and girls in science and math and coed classes for English and history - the idea being to eliminate boys from taking classes with girls in subjects where feminist ideologues believe boys have an unfair advantage and to put boys in classes where girls are thought to have an advantage. This ensures, in the ideologues' minds, that girls will be able to show up boys in their strong subjects while avoiding being shown up by boys in their weak subjects.
It's a socialist experiment which is extremely expensive and which is funded by taxpayers even though most of the NEST kids' parents could easily afford a private education.
Somebody will win, somebody will lose. Government is going to pick the winner, and the criteria will be "what benefits the political elite the most?"
Actually they are fighting to make sure that tax money is set aside to benefit them and to make sure that other taxpayers' children are prevented from enjoying the same benefits.
Having a charter school on campus doesn't injure their kids in the slightest - it's just a threat to the whacko socialist segregation program they have going in NEST.
I agree with that.
the city is entitled to do whatever it wants with its property.
More or less true.
Actually you misunderstood me. The article is somewhat ambiguous as to whether Ms. Ross is the impetus for moving her school into the NEST building. It does imply that she is. That was my point. That if this is true, she is advocating something the results of which have no impact on her.
That is a habit of liberals, you have to admit.
The NEST school is a feminist experiment beloved by wealthy liberals and the charter school is a class experiment beloved by other wealthy liberals.
I also am going to guess that less than 5% of NEST students live within walking distance of the school.
The only "impact" is that the kids who attend sex-segregated classes in the NEST program will be wondering why the kids in the charter program aren't sex-segregated.
That doesn't seem to be much of a hardship to me.
Not sure I understand. If you mean that there are competing factions, I certainly agree.
My point is that politicians always make decisions based on what will benefit the politicians.
Sometimes, doing good things for children will benefit politicians. Do the politicians "do good things" because they care about children? I would say "No". I would say that politicians "do good things" because they care about politicians.
What we have here are two competing demographic groups (both are wealthy Liberals, I guess). Politicians will decide which group of wealthy Liberals will win and which will lose. Because the topic is a school, it would be nice if the issue were decided on the basis of "what would be best for the most number of children" -- but I think it will be decided on the basis of "what would be best for the most number of politicians".
This is why I say that government should not be in the education biz.
This school is NOT geared towards gifted children!
The Ross Global Academy Charter School is admitting children via blind lottery, and intends to include children with learning disabilities and ESL children.
From their website, "Ross School seeks students of diverse geographic, academic, economic, social, ethnic, and racial backgrounds."
http://www.ross.org/WebSite_98/index.asp
"Our goal is to serve students from diverse backgrounds with a variety of academic abilities, including students with special needs and English Language Learners (ELLs)."
http://www.rossglobalacademy.org/
The whole ridiculous Gifted & Talented thing is hoax, put together to make certain parents feel better about themselves. Flame away.
Common reaction from non-gifteds.
That's one of the reasons for special GT classes, jealousy and resentment from "normals."
Y'all belong with your own kind.
Ha. Good one!
I was considered gifted, then I got over it.
Yes it is. When you look past the boilerplate description, you will see that the blind lottery pool is not purely random.
Applications are taken from children who fit the standards and then the applicants who measure up get into the lottery.
The school requires a massive amount of mandatory homework time and parents who demonstrate their commitment to supervising this rigorous study, the school is specifically geared as a college preparatory program, etc.
And every NYC school must have special needs students as a matter of official policy ("mainstreaming")- there are plenty of special needs students (dyslexics, behavioral cases, paraplegics) who are quite bright. The same goes for ESL students.
The Ross school is a school for gifted children just as surely as NEST - who children are also preselected according to the school's criteria and who include ESL and special needs children as well.
When I say muddled I mean that there is no clear constituency here that will be lost or won.
Mayor Bloomberg supports Ross, Speaker Silver supports NEST. Bloomberg can afford to lose 700 votes in white Manhattan - he has enough money to fund his own campaigns and his worst fear is alienting minority voters.
Silver lives near NEST and needs NEST parents to fund his campaigns with contributions and fundraisers.
Who is more powerful? Who will prevail? Hard to say. There is no clear political homerun for anyone here.
It didn't start out as a hoax, but political correctness has certainly been taking it more and more in that direction.
You know, someone could make a similar snide remark about your comment--that it's designed to make certain parents who don't have gifted and talented children feel better about themselves. Its all the kind of talk that is uncalled for. The point is simply to match children to an academic environment appropriate to their intellectual ablities--and if the school district has the curriculum, their artistic or other talents.
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