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Related: About this forum9 Billionaires Are About to Remake New York’s Public Schools—Here’s Their Story
http://www.thenation.com/article/201881/9-billionaires-are-about-remake-new-yorks-public-schools-heres-their-storyHedge-fund manager Whitney Tilson stands at a Harvard club podium in midtown Manhattan, facing a room full of investors eating eggs and bacon, and eager to learn more about charter schools. The walls of the wood-paneled room are lined with the portraits of Tilsons Harvard forefathers. Above the podium where Tilson stands hangs an ornamental gold ship, swaying. In the corner of the room is a large screen, on which the logos of the days sponsors, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Sam Walton Foundation, float like guardian angels. Two large stone fireplaces dominate the west end of the room. Their exaggerated mantelpieces are each decorated with two empty crests and a laurelsymbols of power drained of any purpose.
Tilson begins an enormous PowerPoint presentation, speaking of the inequities black and Latino children face in the public school system. Your entire prison population is in these red bars, he explains, showing red bars indicating the high percentage of poor black and Latino children who could not read at a fourth-grade level. No such children, nor their parents, seemed to have been invited to this presentation.
Despite the role poverty plays in determining whose kids gets stuck in those red bars, Tilson declares to the room of Ivy League investors, This is not rocket science. Notice on my list theres no #5, no Spend More Money. You get new facilities and smaller classrooms but nothing changes. Nobody believes anymore that if you give us more money well solve all the problems.
Something is Rotten in the State of New York
These exact talking points were echoed in Democrat Andrew Cuomos State of the State address, last January, where the governor commanded the legislature, Dont tell me that if we only had more money [for education], it would change. We have been putting more money into this system every year for a decade and it hasnt changed and 250,000 [failing children] will condemn the failing schools by this system.
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9 Billionaires Are About to Remake New York’s Public Schools—Here’s Their Story (Original Post)
Starry Messenger
Mar 2015
OP
theaocp
(4,366 posts)1. Show me the evidence that public school classrooms
are getting smaller, regarding student:teacher ratio. I don't believe that's true.
Starry Messenger
(32,375 posts)2. Mine certainly aren't!
theaocp
(4,366 posts)3. and yet we know that our classrooms
would be more effective with a lower student:teacher ratio. That would be a great use of increased funding. More instructors teaching few kids per instructor would create jobs, yield better results, and build a better society. But where, oh where is the profit?!