Posted on 12/13/2010 6:47:29 AM PST by Mikey_1962
By Marlene Romero’s count, her son has had just one effective teacher in his five years at McKinley Elementary School here. Most of the time, she said, he has merely shuffled through classrooms, struggling in math without ever getting extra help. So when an organizer came knocking at her door promising that if she signed a petition, her son’s school could radically improve, Ms. Romero immediately pledged her support.
Now, she is one of more than 250 parents in Compton who are using a new state law to force the failing school to be taken over by a charter school operator, the first such move in the country.
Voicing enormous frustration with the existing school, the parents handed over the petition on Tuesday to district officials. “We are completely fed up,” Ms. Romero said. “We’ve been told to wait every year and nothing changes.”
When Ms. Romero attended Compton schools in the 1990s, she said, nobody seemed to notice or care when she skipped school for days at a time. She dropped out at the age of 16. “I want my children to be able to have what I didn’t,” she said.
For the last several months, Ms. Romero has helped gather petitions for the school takeover, which is expected to face legal challenges from the school board and teachers’ union, which strongly opposed the new law.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The union will be making visits to their homes in no time trying to put a stop to this.
OTOH, my district dumped the big CA union and went with a smaller, local union. It was a fierce fight and even a non-member, like me, got a visit at home from the big union thugs.
How long before the Union owned legislators repeal this law?
With Jerry Brown at the helm, not long.
“Frank Wells, a spokesman for the California Teachers Association, questioned the group’s tactics and said that other options should have been considered.
“Were all the alternatives considered to help turn this school around?” Mr. Wells asked.”
What a laugh. “Were all the alternatives considered?” Bull. People are tired of jumping through hoops, hoping things will get better. I’m sure this school had ample time to fix all the problems and just couldn’t be bothered, and since the school couldn’t be bothered, the parents took advantage of a new law and managed to get 61% of them to sign a petition.
Arne Duncan and even Rham Emmanuel support this. The day of lazy “in it for themselves” school administrators and union thugs is coming to a close.
We’ve been told to wait every year and nothing changes.”
The Democratic party is the status-quo party when it comes to education. The Democrats and the left have been running public education for the last 50 years. They aren’t going to change anything.
We (conservatives) are also at fault here. We’ve failed to define the Democrats for what the are: the education status-quo party.
When we start doing this, then (and only then) will we start picking up the votes of parents that are tire of the education status-quo.
Getting the union out is a good thing.
Biggest problem is their parents don’t prepare their children to sit, listen, participate, behave and learn.
Then they go home and the kids are NOT having their homework followed up with by the parents.
IMO make the parents of children with problems be forced to the same classroom for parenting classes at night.
If they are on the dole and their kids are not performing, then threaten to take that away until the parent does their job and their child starts getting average grades.
Then again, about 25% of these kids were born handicapped by their parents doing pot, booze or other drugs while pregnant. Then what do you do with these kids when they grow up unable to do anything but pot, booze and drugs?
“How long before the Union owned legislators repeal this law?”
How long before they burn down the organizer’s house?
TELL US ABOUT IT?? (the union thugs coming to your home)
This is California. Some Che or Hugo Chavez-loving judge will just overturn it.
The real problem with the school is the overwhelming number of children of illegal immigrants.
This is the big Pink Elephant in the room.
The teachers and the district have to spend an inordinate amount of time just getting the extreme under-performers present in this part of the school population up to a level where they are just average.
Many times they lag by 2 to 3 to 4 years behind average.
Take these kids out of the equation, send them home to their parents home country with their parents, and watch the education magically turn around over night.
“Biggest problem is their parents don’t prepare their children to sit, listen, participate, behave and learn.
Then they go home and the kids are NOT having their homework followed up with by the parents.”
Bull crap!! My son failed in reading and we visited the teacher daily and it did not help. The problem is not just the fault of the parents. We pulled our kids from public school when my son was a year behind in reading. Now he is ahead of public school because my wife taught him how to read correctly. Public school S%$ks and it’s because of the union administration. It is not always the parents fault.
You run into this all the time. If people aren’t held accountable(in this case teachers) their performance drops.
They aren’t necessarily bad folks, they just need their feet put to the fire.
Even I’ll get lazy sometimes. I’ve been read the riot act more than once and it surely motivates me. I may get mad as hell but I’m grown up enough to understand it.
In our school district they now have to advertise for students because of competition by private schools and homeschoolers. Currently over 1000 kids get their education at home. We have only 80,000 people living in our county the last I knew. Screw the teacher unions.
That’s 1000 in our area.
Everybody needs metrics by which they will be judged.
Remove the consequences and the performance will suffer.
Thank you very much.
You as parents finally learned that it wasn't your visits to school, but your ACTUAL INTERACTION with your own child at home TEACHING them that did the trick.
Had you done that from the start with his lessons from school things would have been better from the beginning IMO.
Congratulations for somehow falling into that solution.
Yep, two of them....on a Sunday afternoon. When I answered the door, they asked for me by name. I asked who they were and what they wanted and when they told me they were with the CSEA (California School Employees Assoc) I told them that no way was I talking to them at MY home on a Sunday afternoon! I also added that I didn't appreciate them showing up at my door uninvited (I never sign on with them fully) and I shut the door in their faces.
I couldn't hide the hate I feel towards unions and the fact that I'm required to pay money them to keep my job.
We had been doing the home work with him every night, the problem was in the curriculum not our participation. The curriculum was set up to make it easier for the teachers and not for the students. It was us as parents changing what was being taught not a lack of participation on our part. We had been spending several hours every night trying to correct poor teaching from the teachers. Now we spend less than 5 hours a day on all of his school work and he is several grades ahead of public school. Public school is not designed for education in my opinion, but instead designed to cover the teacher a$@.
I find it insulting that you would assume that we did not participate in our kids education before we decided to remove our kids from the failing government schools.
Question, I though curriculum's were set for the state you were in for everybody if they were not in a special ed class. How do they have a poorer curriculum in that class versus the rest of the state? Makes no sense to me.
The curriculum was sight words, and was for reading. When we brought him home we switched to phonics. Sight words are a joke because they never build upon previous words. Phonics on the other hand allows the student to piece words together based upon previous lessons.
I am not sure but I think all the schools in Michigan do use the same curriculum. If you look at Michigan we rank something around 37 I believe. The schools here are bad. Our local district claims to be doing great. They are if compared to the rest of the state, but federally we are just under 50%. So we are failing.
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