Posted on 09/16/2012 4:04:08 PM PDT by reaganaut1
TUCSON The forecast for the year ahead is dire, so officials in the public school district here, the oldest in the state, summoned parents to an urgent meeting one evening to lay out the options: close schools and increase class sizes or impose across-the-board pay cuts, making it harder for the district to recruit quality teachers.
In the auditorium at Cholla High Magnet School, Bryant Nodine, the planning program manager for the Tucson Unified School District, peered into the audience and pleaded for suggestions. We need your help, he said. The district needs to find at least $17 million in savings, about 7 percent of the money in its general fund, he said, to balance its budget for 2013-14 school year.
Meanwhile, at the districts central offices, Maria Figueroa was busy sifting through résumés and rearranging her calendar to squeeze in one more interview. As the director of a new program intended to help the districts perennially struggling Hispanic students, by far the majority of the enrollment, Ms. Figueroa enjoys a rare distinction: she has jobs to fill and money to hire.
She also has a big task mending the fences broken by the dismantling of the Mexican-American studies department last school year after an acrimonious debate over the politics of its curriculum and the type of activism it had promoted. A 2010 law banning lessons that fostered racial resentment and solidarity among members of a single ethnic group, drafted as legislators worked to frame the states controversial immigration bill, eventually killed the program. Facing persistent financial problems, the school district buckled under the threat of millions of dollars in fines.
Instead of classes about historical realities and the everyday experiences of Mexican-Americans, once a hallmark of the department, Ms. Figueroas program will offer tutoring to Hispanic students
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Boo-Hoo.
I bet Rahm has some suggestions....
Also, 60 percent of the school population there is Hispanic. I would bet that more than half of those were brought into the country or produced by parents who entered illegally. Someone should be saying that they would have plenty of money to educate the children if they weren’t having to educate someone else’s.
Maybe the students will disrupt a supervisors’ meeting by chaining themselves to the desk and setting off a smoke bomb like they did a few months ago.
Why are Hispanic students struggling? Seriously.
Hispanic organizations La Raza, & MEChA, they keep telling Mexicans they are entitled, this is Mexico not America plus some of their parents who have been here for a number of years, keep to other Spanish speaking people so they can't speak English - the children suffer the most. Our Asian immigrants learn quickly to speak their new country's language and assimilate. The teacher's union encourages this also keeping the non-English speaking youngsters from quickly moving-on-up.
Do you think that they’ll start complaining that the Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Filipino kids are taking up all the space in the library after school?
So...
Instead of preaching victim-hood, instead of preaching "racial" superiority, and instead of hiring upcoming community organizers, they will be mentoring students in such trivia as "success" and "socialization";
No wonder Senora Figueroa is ticked off.
The parents could help by going back to Mexico and taking their kids with them
Discussions of political philosophy aside, the big issue is diminishing budgets. Why are the budgets diminishing? They are diminishing because of the sucky Obama economy which kills jobs and penalizes success. What is the solution? Obama’s solution and the solution of most Democrats is to raise taxes on the “wealthy” and practically speaking, the middle class as well as pump more money into government and unions. None of this works, of course. The real solution is to build the economy by reducing taxes and encouraging business growth in the private sector. So, while this school district and districts across the country as well as government entities everywhere are bewailing their reduced budgets, they really ought to be demanding steps to be taken that will in actuality build their community and state tax bases through increased growth in the private sector.
Yeah, no bias at all there, NYT. Thanks, or should I say gracias?
If they’re having such a rough time here, they’d probably learn better in the Mexico City public school system.
Who knows....if we could get away from people who make money from "victim hood" and our courts away from "Social Justice" maybe Self reliance could take hold again...the adults have got some growing up to do also.
How would they know this if they never go in the library?
I used to hide out there from the gangs. Glad they didn’t know.
I suggest using “Alpha-Phonics” to teach them to read English successfully. If they would then like to use their English skills to read about the history of Mexico, I don’t see why they shouldn’t, as long as they were able to write correct essays, in English, based on their research.
I wrote research papers, in English, for Spanish class in high school, and then I wrote research papers, in Spanish, for Spanish class in college. Ah, those were the days, when I could correctly conjugate Spanish verbs.
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