“There is no nice way of saying it,” Mrs. Engelman said. “Our community protects molesters. Other than that, we are wonderful.”

The first shock came when Mordechai Jungreis learned that his mentally disabled teenage son was being molested in a Jewish ritual bathhouse in Brooklyn. The second came after Mr. Jungreis complained, and the man accused of the abuse was arrested.

Old friends started walking stonily past him and his family on the streets of Williamsburg. Their landlord kicked them out of their apartment. Anonymous messages filled their answering machine, cursing Mr. Jungreis for turning in a fellow Jew. And, he said, the mother of a child in a wheelchair confronted Mr. Jungreis’s mother-in-law, saying the same man had molested her son, and she “did not report this crime, so why did your son-in-law have to?”

Really good look into Ultra-Orthodox Jewry in Brooklyn from the NYT.

A Brooklyn School Saved Lives, and Some Now Try to Return the Favor »

I was 18 years old with a baby and three high school credits. I was a gangbanger. I was shot and left for dead.

My life was a pane of glass fractured into a thousand shards.

And this place saved me.

To sit in the audience at Bushwick Community High School in Brooklyn last Wednesday evening, to watch as young black and Latino women and men walked to a microphone and, with anger and tears and eloquence, pleaded with officials of New York City’s Department of Education to keep their school open, was to feel privileged.

It is rare in education and in life to hear love put so passionately into words.

“Where would I be without this school family? I would be in jail. I would be dead,” said Iran Rosario, a tall bear of a man who wandered in here as a lost 18-year-old and now returned 14 years later as a teacher. “Friends tell you what you want to hear; family tells you what you need to hear.

“They did that for me, and saved my life.”

Politics In Action

Update:

Change.org has a petition. Why this is important:

The education of the students who currently attend public school in the Corlears 056 Campus is in jeopardy. The Department of Education has proposed to co-locate an elementary charter school in a building that already houses three middle schools, a high school and a citywide space science center. We are not opposed to charter schools or this charter in particular. We are opposed to co-locations that will result in the loss of resources for high need students like the ones who currently attend school in the building. The elected officials in the community agree and have drafted a letter urging the DOE to reconsider this plan. By signing this petition you are showing these officials that you support their opposition to this plan and you expect them to follow through on their words.  You will also tell the Panel for Education Policy that you expect them to vote down this proposed co-location on March 21, 2012.

I understand this is as local as local gets; as mentioned in my previous post, this is politics in action. We see the interplay between local, state and federal government. The politicians who wrote the letter below are doing their jobs: their constituents are against this initiaitve and are trying to do what they can to convince a mayor who has all but ignored the residents and educators (those who know what’s best for the kids) of the L.E.S.

Take a look at the petition; read through it and read the comments by teachers, educators, parents and students. It will take more than signatures to stop this policy shift, as Bloomberg clearly believes education should be run like a business. But if you are interested, please sign. 

Here’s the link.

Original Post (for some reason, I can no longer reblog myself)

Politics In Action
NYC is home to the nation’s largest school system. Over 1 million students walk through the halls of the city’s schools. Naturally, there’s a tension between educators and politicians. Because NYC is, well, NYC, sometimes, there’s tension between the Mayor’s office and Congress (in this case, led by Caroline Maloney). 
After the break, you’ll see a letter penned by representatives of the Lower East Side to the city’s Department of Education head, Dennis Wolcott, about why it’s a bad decision to bring charter schools into public schools.
This is a bad policy decision for many reasons, as the letter points out. The bigger issue, however, is the Bloomberg Administration’s business approach to education. But it’s interesting to see how a Congresswoman, in conjunction with state representatives work together.

Politics In Action

NYC is home to the nation’s largest school system. Over 1 million students walk through the halls of the city’s schools. Naturally, there’s a tension between educators and politicians. Because NYC is, well, NYC, sometimes, there’s tension between the Mayor’s office and Congress (in this case, led by Caroline Maloney). 

After the break, you’ll see a letter penned by representatives of the Lower East Side to the city’s Department of Education head, Dennis Wolcott, about why it’s a bad decision to bring charter schools into public schools.

This is a bad policy decision for many reasons, as the letter points out. The bigger issue, however, is the Bloomberg Administration’s business approach to education. But it’s interesting to see how a Congresswoman, in conjunction with state representatives work together.

Read more

The New York Times, one of a number of media organizations that had requested the records, plans to publish the ratings on its education blog, SchoolBook, and has asked teachers to respond online. On Thursday, several posters on SchoolBook called the reports deeply flawed and criticized the city as well as the news media for making them public. »

Marie Kallo, a sixth-grade English and social studies teacher at Intermediate School 234 in Brooklyn, said that even though she had received an above-average rating, she was troubled by a significant error in her report: It said she had taught 120 students in 2007-8 when she had actually taught more than 200.

“That makes me question the accuracy of all the data reports,” Ms. Kallo said, adding that she also did not understand how the ratings were calculated. “How is it fair to be judged on information that is not accurate?”

Congress has been dumb since at least 1776

Reading books of the Revolutionary War and biographies of the men who shaped the U.S., it’s interesting looking at parallels between then and now. Ron Chernow’s “Washington: A Life” is beautifully written about a complex character and time. Washington was really the only person to lead both the Continental Army and then the new United States, for many reasons. And while he did make many costly mistakes along the way, during the Revolutionary War, there was a constant struggle between him and the Continental Congress.

Here’s a passage that highlights the dissociation between General Washington in New York (i.e., ‘on the ground’) and Congress in Philadelphia - as well as puts into focus (at least a little bit) today’s Congress and how certain things seem to never change (bolded emphasis mine):

When he (George Washington) raised the issue (of burning down Manhattan to prevent the British from having a haven) in a letter to Hancock on September 2 (1776), he did so in a neutral manner; the next day Hancock conveyed the congressional verdict that “no damage should be done to the City of New York.” Unaware of how entrenched the British would soon become, the self-styled experts in Congress insisted that they had “no doubt of being able to recover” the city. (page 252)

Unfortunately for Washington and his band of rebels, New York was lost to the British in November 1776 after the Battle of Fort Washington and became the center of operation for the British throughout the war. What would have happened if Congress listened to the General and let him ‘torch’ the town? Of course, we’ll never know. But I find it interesting, how even in 1776, ill-informed Congressmen were making decisions without trusting the experts.

“Mr. Gilbert was visibly annoyed by the persistent ring-tone, so much that he quietly cut the orchestra,” the concert-goer reports. She related how the orchestra’s music director turned on the podium towards the offender. The pause lasted a good “three or four minutes. It might have been two. It seemed long.”

Tuesday night’s New York Philharmonic performance of the Mahler Ninth was stopped dead by an unusual instrument—the iPhone.
An iPhone (using the marimba ring-tone) went off repeatedly in the fourth movement of Mahler’s final completed symphony. According to an eyewitness, the offending phone owner was in the front rows of Avery Fisher Hall when his phone went off, just 13 bars before the last page of the score. In other words, in the final moments of a 25-minute movement, that ends a 90-minute symphony.

Over the past six months, the New York City Clerk's Office saw a significant uptick in the number of marriage licenses it issued—4,042, or 14%, more than were handed out in the same time period in 2010. »

I’m interested in knowing what economic impact this marriage increase (which is attributed to New York legalizing gay marriage) has on New York; from marriage-license fees to stimulating local economies through celebrations, there has to be some kind of growth, right?