--- In AsburyPark@yahoogroups.com, "justifiedright"
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> This Board of Education sounds like a bad episode of MTV's "The Real
> World," where teenagers sit around yelling at one another: "You're a
> racist!" "No, you're a racist!" "No No, you're a homophobe!"
Funny, Tom, but you were the first to use those labels in this
discussion. I know that seems hard to believe, but check the paper
trail. Since you're at least a generation younger than I, you
compared it to something on MTV, while I had said it was a bad soap
opera. To put it in perspective, however, I spent almost thirty years
dodging the slings and arrows of the Middletown Board of Ed. There
was an upper middle class community, monolithic to say the least, and
when they fought publicly amoung themselves, it makes whatever
disagreements we have had, even here, seem like a genteel tea party by
comparison. There is no correlation between infighting and test scores.
There have been comments here about Jersey City and its possible
emergence from state control. Back in 2004, and Mrs. Ross could
confirm this, the Asbury Park Board of Education bought the very same
Math program with all of its bells and whistles that had succeeded in
Jersey City. It was put in place in the 3rd grade, and has advanced
every year. Being an old Math teacher, I was skeptical about the new
approach but voted along with my colleagues to approve it, feeling we
needed to do whatever we could, and at whatever expense, to raise
learning levels. The administrators keep telling us that the Math
program is beginning to show the same success as in Jersey City (my
hometown). That remains to be seen. But the fact is that even though
the board at the time and continuing to this day has sparred
constantly and often bitterly, when we are confronted with a vote for
a program that the administrators believe will improve learning and
teaching, we have never to my knowledge declined to approve it. So
the infighting, disgusting as it is, is a sideshow.
Frank
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