That may be your experience, but thats not the norm. Also remember that the class room size was probably smaller which means more individualized instruction.
Actually I DID know that, and theres several reasons for it. First, they bus their kids all over the city in order to meet racial quotas, which is a load of crap. Second, there is WAY more special ed, ESL, and kids with special needs, which all cost money. Also, No Child Left Behind, thanks to Bush, they have to try and get kids that don’t know what’s going on to pass standardized tests. While a teacher in class could easily see if they are making progress, a grader in Albany has no idea if a kid has every possible advantage, or lives in a tent on the corner and can’t speak English yet. Last time I visited my mom’s class at Buffalo #45, she had a 10-year old refugee from Africa in her third grade who still didn’t know she couldn’t crap on the floor. Williamsville can say that all their kids need to go out and buy a $100 graphing calculator, Buffalo has to either buy it for them or do without.
I do think that parent accountability is a must. A large majority of the time, poor parents simply dont care and wont cooperate with teachers, especially if there are racial and economic divides.
Which is why we need to invest more money into public schools to reduce class sizes.
I would be interested in seeing the pay rates for private, private religious, and public school teachers. I mean there are only a couple private non-religious highschools in the area, and really only a handfull of non-religious private K-8 schools
The best teacher in the world won’t make a bit of difference to a kid who has been raised to think an education is a waste of time. You can only learn from someone you respect, and there are way too many kids, inner city especially, that have never been taught the meaning of the word. It’s evident in the test scores and in the violence. It all boils down to very core beliefs, something you’ve picked up long before a teacher even gets a shot at you. By the time a teacher is involved your parents have already had a chance to royally fuck you up for life.
Look at the school rankings, it’s obvious the “rich suburbs” are doing better. But the fact is the vast majority of these people are rich because they know the value of an education, and have passed that value down to their children. I don’t buy the arguement that it’s all about school budgets and tax bases, especially when Buffalo spends more than Williamsville per child. That’s an easy “PC” answer, and that’s why it’s popular. No one wants to admit the real issue is parents and their core values, because demographically a majority (read NOT ALL) of those parents that are doing such a poor job raising their kids are of a specific race. And as soon as you try to bring that up, no matter how many statistics you have to back it up, you’re labeled a racist. If we’re at the point that we’re too PC to even discuss the real problem, how are we supposed to fix it?
perhaps what im going to contradict myself by saying what im about to say, but…
like everything else, it ALL comes down to money. if you’re making six figures a year (or close to is), odds are you busted your ass all though school, went to good schools (not saying that doctors, lawyers, engineers or whatever DON’T come out of public schools, because many do), had your parents pay for private tutors, and whatnot. they prob had the same things provided for them because thier parents had mone and it keeps going back. and odds are, if you came from a well-educated and well-funded yourth, you are gonna do the same for your kids.
now, im not saying that theres people that, for one reason or another, can’t afford these things (tutors, private schools, ect) are never gonna be sucessful. sure, it happens that less fortunate people want to be sucessfull and bust thier asses and do good and there are also people who are just naturally gifted. i’ve seen it happen before my eyes. my point is, is that a lot of parents who are sucessfull in life know why they are sucessfull and see how vaulable a good quality education is and want thier kids to have the same if not better education that they did so thye can be sucessfull. and all of this costs money. so again, it all comes down to how rich mommy and daddy are and how rich you’re gonna be.
I agree with you, but I think you’re wrong to assume that once they’re 12 or whatever that good teachers can’t get through to kids. Even if we cut it down the middle and say only 50% of todays ‘problem’ kids can be reached by a great teacher/school, that’s still a huge number.
Race IMO really has nothing to do with it or little compared to economic status. It’s just that in a lot of urban areas the majority of the lower economic class are black or hispanic.
I think ‘ghetto-culture’ is also a huge contributor to the problem. This goes back to community involvement in neighborhood, etc…
The first generation to change it will bring upon a generation of smart parents. Gotta get someone to make the first move though
Not true.
I graduated without a regents diploma, I took 2 regents exams. Physics and something not math… I didn’t need to.
I took Calc BC in 10th grade.
Our country can produce that number because we have money
that changed in 99 
(last year that didnt require it as faw as I know)
I don’t think that’s true. Lets say you go to to one of the public schools that’s middle of the pack. I think the rankings were 1 to 97, so you’re at the #48ish school. Your parent’s, and your parent’s parents don’t have to be rich for you to get a good education there. If your parents raise you to know that you need a good education to go anywhere in life, you’ll get a good education. You’ll go on to college and do well there as well, even if you have to work part time and take student loans to do it.
I still think the fact that rich parents kids do so much better is the fact that most rich parents got that way BECAUSE of their education, so they raise their kids to strive for a better education as well. Sure, there are advantages when mommy and daddy can hire an expensive tutor if their kid is having trouble, but that isn’t absolutely needed. That vast majority of the kids that are doing poorly in public schools could be doing fine if their parents just took the time to be involved. Punish little Billy when he fails his math test. Make sure little Billy is doing his homework, find out when his tests are, and make sure he’s studying for them. Parents who know the value of an education do these things, and their kids do well regardless of income.
things have changed since then. trust me. i had top take a regents earth science, regents bio, regents chem, regests math A, 2 different regents english exams, and 2 social studies exams to get a regular regents diploma. if i would have passed the regents math B and actually took physics, i could have gotten and Advanced regents.
Agreed.
Agreed, race has nothing to do with a person’s ability to learn. The problem is with today’s PC world, you can’t say an economic class of people and their lack of values is the problem if the majority of said class is of one ethnic background. As soon as you try to say that someone will play the race card and then nothing good comes out of the discussion.
Where we differ is that I think you think giving the poor schools more money will solve the problem, because you think it’s a “rich vs poor” thing. I’m on the side of the fence that says no amount of money will fix the problem without first addressing the core values. This isn’t a Hollywood movie where “super teacher” can suddenly take a class of gang bangers and show them what they’ve been taught since birth was wrong and that the right path in life is through the pursuit of knowledge, not hoes and bling.
word… if the kid hasn’t been brought up correctly, there is very little chance that he will give a shit. i doubt that teachers could impact 5%, let alone 50%.
i lived in buffalo when i was 11~12, then moved to the burbs. it was ok then, but it’s terrible now. anyone who wants to learn and have a future has to go to school outside the city or to private. ignorance and an uncaring attitude seem to be passed down from parents to kids… instead of values like respect, friendship, and courtesy. people who lack values will rely on others to take care of them, ala parents, friends, or the state. that leads right to the lax attitude about education - who cares - someone will help me - why work hard when i can just be lazy and poor and uninformed?
if people don’t WANT to be educated, there’s no way to better the system. go spend some time in a public school, whether its middle or HS. most don’t think about their future, b/c their biggest role models never stressed the importance.
im not saying that its 100% dependant on how much money mommy and daddy have. theres obviously people out there who cant afford to go to an expensive private school, cant afford the private tutors and whatnot, that still want to learn and make something out of thier lives so they bust thier asses using the resources that they have and make the best of it and usually do just as good as the people who can afford to have the private schools and tutors. I belive i touched on this in one of my earlier posts, but i could have thought about it and not actually typed it.
I don’t think that extra money needs to be put into poor schools over rich schools. I think they need to be on equal grounds, but once you have that I don’t think extra money should need be given. I dunno if that’s clear…whatever.
Communities at large (ALL OF WNY) need to work on getting the ghettos cleaned up. I posted about this in a different thread:
I would be willing to bet the if every house across buffalo that needed new paint/windows was given them, you’d see crime drop within a year. Clean cut lawns and nice looking neighborhoods IMO will go further in lowering the crime rate than having a month, 6 month or year long push in police presence. When people feel good about where they’re living, they become more personally invested in the success of their area. You have more citizens calling in tips to police, etc… etc…
I think this same thinking can be applied to schools that are/look run-down.
Unfortunately there are some schools, particularly in the innercities where teachers don’t care. And that’s a problem that needs to be delt with.
We’re too relaxed on standards for teachers. Being a teacher should be one of the highest paying jobs out there
Without question we need to scale back federal involvement in education, but at the same time allow for federal standards.
exactly. people start seeing that thier parents didnt give a shit thier whole lives, and now they sit around all day in thier house that the government helped pay for and wait for thier welfare check to come in the mail. the kids see that and think ‘well what the hell do i need to work and learn for when i can jsut sit on my ass all day and the government will pay me for it?’
How many of those teachers that don’t care have simply been crushed by the system though? You can only swim into the lake trying to save drowning people who refuse to swim for so long, before you eventually say “screw if, if they refuse to at least try to swim, let them drown”.
My mom is actually a teacher in a public school no where any of you would recognize. It’s a very rural area in WAY upstate NY. I can see her starting to become jaded in her final teaching years. She told me she only needs one or two good kids to keep her spirits up when teaching, but for the last couple years she hasn’t even had those in her classes of 25-28. And for the past 10 years she’s said the “parenting class” has been going downhill each and every year. She’s now dealing with the generation of “nothing is my fault” and it’s horrible. The parents are in yelling at the principal because it’s always someone else’s fault their kid is doing so poorly.