On Death Penalties for Schools and Misplaced Outrage
Posted on September 9, 2013
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This is an issue I’ve written much about over time – the persistent failure of New York State to fund its highest need public schools, and more recently, the audacity of state officials to place blame for their own egregious failures on the teachers and administrators in the state’s least well-funded school districts. Here’s a recap of previous posts:
- On how New York State crafted a low-ball estimate of what districts needed to achieve adequate outcomes and then still completely failed to fund it.
- On how New York State maintains one of the least equitable state school finance systems in the nation.
- On how New York State’s systemic, persistent underfunding of high need districts has led to significant increases of numbers of children attending school with excessively large class sizes.
- On how New York State officials crafted a completely bogus, racially and economically disparate school classification scheme in order to justify intervening in the very schools they have most deprived over time.
Much like my recent posts regarding the completely misinformed bluster of pundits like Andy Smarick regarding Philadelphia, when I read stuff like this from Joe Williams of Dems of Ed Reform – I get a little irked!
This column from Joe Williams of DFER goes on the attack against those who would criticize NY Governor Cuomo’s call to impose the “death penalty” on failing schools. Williams asserts that any opposition to Cuomo’s statements can be rooted in nothing other than union/teacher self-interests. That there clearly is no possible case, on behalf of parents and/or children, for opposing Cuomo’s death penalty option. It’s just the right thing and only thing to do on behalf of suffering