I got a weird little story about my friend Blitz Krieger to bring to you today.
He's had a crazy car problem, he has, and over the past few months he thought he had found a solution - in fact, he thought he had found the solution of his dreams - but in the end, he's discovered that the things you dream about often don't go according to plan.
The way it's worked out for him so far, it's been a lot of anticipation followed by a sudden wave of frustration, but I feel like he's a lot better off having his particular problem with his car...because if he'd had cancer instead, he'd surely be dead by now.
Police say she "stole" $15,000 in costs to cover her kid's education.
Tonya McDowell, 33, is accused of stealing $15,000 -- the cost of her son's public education -- from the Norwalk School District, according to the Stamford Advocate. She was arrested Thursday.
McDowell, whose last known address was Priscilla Street in Bridgeport, is facing first-degree larceny and conspiracy to commit larceny charges, the paper reported.
Police began an investigation in January, after the Norwalk Housing Authority filed a complaint that McDowell had registered her son at Brookside Elementary School in Norwalk, even though she had been living in an apartment in Bridgeport.
McDowell allegedly admitted to police she was allowed to sleep in the apartment on Priscilla Street in Bridgeport by the tenant, but had to leave during the day, according to the Advocate. She also told police she sometimes stayed at an emergency shelter in Norwalk.
Police say McDowell used the Norwalk address of the boy's babysitter to register him at the school.
"Usually when they find a kid out of district, they send him back. I have never heard of people being arrested for it," Norwalk Board of Education Chairman Jack Chiaramonte told the Advocate.
The apparent crackdown may have something to do with the city's tightening budget.
"This now sends a message to other parents that may have been living in other towns and registering their kids with phony addresses," Norwalk Mayor Richard Moccia said.
I'm not even sure where to go with this. She has no permanent address, she tried to do the right thing for her son and SHE GETS ARRESTED.
O_o
RAGE
Maybe she should have sent her kid to New Caanan to school, at least then he'd be attending one of the highest-rated public elementary schools in the state when she GETS ARRESTED FOR TRYING TO DO WHAT'S RIGHT FOR HER CHILD
ETA: Any teachers out there familiar with the McKinney-Vento Act? Is what happened here even legal???
Remember all the federal stimulus funds that were supposed to flow to local school districts to help offset locally-incurred school budget cuts?
Well here in Connecticut you can forget it.(subscription)
Gov. M. Jodi Rell (R-CT) has set up a shell game, reducing state funding for local schools by 14% each of the next two years, and supplanting those funds with the $542 million federal education funds allocated to Connecticut through the Stabilization (SFSF) component of the Recovery Act.
Shays denounced the claim that he supported $13 billion in cuts from the Student Loan Program. He pointed to his vote for the Deficit Reduction Act in 2005, which included student loan reforms that will save the government $14.3 billion over five years, and the program was not cut at all. "What happened was we said to the bank, if we are going to guarantee you that you don't lose money from student loans, then you don't get to make an excess profit," Shays said. "And anything above a certain amount goes back into the general fund Instead of it being 13 billion of federal dollars, it's $13 billion of the banks."
In fact, it was precisely because Shays and his Republican buddies actually did stick it to students and parents that incoming Congressional Democrats made cutting the interest rate on federal student loans in half over five years one of their "six for '06" priorities in the new congress. Here's an article I wrote in 2005 that tells the truth about Shays' deciding vote and how education advocates condemned what he did. Shays is always attempting to fool the voters about his real record. Let's make sure the public knows the truth:
As a proud grandmother, I have been thinking about the impact of this election on America's children. Normally, such a thought might be taken for granted; or else it would appear to be a "no brainer;" but not this year. For starters, just consider a few issues that Obama wants to talk about: global warming, health care, and education (including a program, attacked by his opponents to help protect young children from sexual predators). The McCain ticket doesn't focus on any of these things.
From the Republicans, we hear a great deal about Family Values, and it is difficult to imagine that anyone opposes this concept. However, if we examine the conduct of this year's nominees in the context of values that most Americans would say they hold, we are presented with a stark contrast.
I like the backdrop behind DeStefano - that building should look familiar to Lamont volunteers:
The latest edition of UConn Alumni Magazine features a story on John DeStefano (class of '77) and Bill Finch (class of '79) and the challenges their cities face. There's some good discussion of environment and education with regards to urban centers, and how cities relate to their suburbs. A snippet (emphasis mine):
FINCH:Where is change coming from? It's coming from mayors. What is the change that's coming? It's the new green revolution - the next great industrial revolution in the United States is going to be a green revolution.
It's going to create millions of jobs and add billions of dollars to the U.S. gross national product. Green roof tops, solar energy, changing your vehicle fleet to hybrid, collecting rain water run-off, doing something about storm water run-off and making sure that we continue our investments in the Clean Water Fund, and changing building codes so that people can get quicker approval ratings, quicker approvals on top of the pile or density considerations or tax consideration.
We need to bring people closer to the urban core and develop the land much more intensely. This is not a new concept. The theory of concentric rings is something John and I both studied in our UConn classes.
DeSTEFANO: Our core responsibility is to make these places safe. I don't think anyone is going to live in a place or locate a business to where they do not perceive it is safe. The second thing is to have public schools that work for people.
Our major investment when I took office was in our schools. We didn't build a baseball stadium and a hockey arena. We've re-built or built 30 new schools, and we'll have 42 done by 2014. We're spending $1.5 billion dollars doing this.
I think that's part of the reason why we've seen the school drop-out rate cut in half, why 80 percent of our kids go on to two- or four-year colleges.
That's a good progressive message.
Here's another perspective on the relationships between local and state government...
DeSTEFANO: Bill's been around for a while and he has the benefit of having stood in other places that will help him, help me and help our colleagues become better mayors.
The large issue here is we go through life looking at a zero sum game, which means to say that in order for me to put bread on my table, I've got to take it off yours. When you're a mayor, you learn pretty quickly the distinctions of class and race and political party are really meaningless. What's important are the values we share as residents of our community and of the state, and to act on those values in service to one another and become a whole that's more than sum of the part.
FINCH: I had a phenomenal experience being a member of the state Senate. It's certainly one of the most enjoyable political experiences you could ever have.
But there's a disconnect between the levels of government. It shouldn't be the state blaming the localities and the localities blaming the state. We've got to make government more seamless.
I think one of the things that I have to try to do is to continue to work with the General Assembly to get them to understand how difficult it is being a First Selectman or a mayor in Connecticut.
The buck always stops at the local government level. They didn't call me when there was a fire when I was a state senator. Now they call me. They want action. They want something fixed.
It's a great feeling, but it's also one that I think other levels of government need to be reminded of and, like John said, not look at it as a zero sum game.
To take it one step further, I think what they're hinting at is the way the property tax has become a crutch that municipalities rely on, and how when the economy goes bad in the state it hurts the cities and poor schools the most. This is something that's been perpetrated by the conservative movement, by dividing and conquering (with NCLB being the key component). And when you have something like pollution credits trading, (if it's not set up correctly) it can result in disproportionate distribution of toxins in poor urban areas. Getting out of the mindset of competition, or a zero-sum game, and thinking in terms of regions will be a key part to turning around the urban-suburban education, environmental and economic gap.
Most of us already know that press censorship and propaganda have replaced a media that formerly served to inform the public. What may be less obvious to some readers is an additional "dumbing down" of the news, prompted by an apparent failure of our education system. An avid news hound and hopeless bookworm, I have become acutely aware of the fact that many otherwise good writers -- if you simply evaluate ideas or creativity -- no longer understand the concept of noun-verb agreement and also cannot distinguish between a noun and an adjective. In the latter case, politics have come into play. I recently submitted the following letter to two Connecticut publications; however, it is unlikely that either paper will print it, as my comments reflect poorly on the publications themselves. Here's the letter:
(Dodd's part is interesting, but read through to the extended text for discussion on education, science proficiency, and class issues. - promoted by mattw)
Currently, No Child Left Behind mandates states conduct testing to measure schools' performances, but it allows states to use their own criteria for evaluation. A news item in the current issue of Science magazine (subscription or institutional access required)describes how Mississippi was able to show improvement without actually improving students' proficiency:
Mississippi education officials patted themselves on the back in 2005 when state-administered tests showed that 53% of the state's 8th graders were proficient in math--a jump of 14 percentage points in the 3 years since federal mandates for improving school performance went into effect. But a few months later, a nonbinding, nationwide evaluation found that only 13% of that cohort were proficient, ranking Mississippi last on the country's math scorecard. The discrepancy--a product of standards that reflect the state's low expectations for student achievement in math--earned Mississippi a "cream puff" award from an education journal published by Stanford's Hoover Institution.
...
The tremendous variation in what a state teaches and the way it measures how well children are learning has triggered a move for national standards and assessments in elementary and secondary school science and math education. Last month, two legislators long active in education reform--Senator Christopher Dodd (D-CT) and Representative Vernon Ehlers (R-MI)--introduced a bill to create and implement a set of voluntary national standards in math and science. A week later, a panel reporting to the policymaking body that oversees the National Science Foundation went further, calling not just for national standards but also for national assessments of student achievement in science and math and national certification for teachers in those fields. "Currently, we have states adopting less-than-rigorous standards to game the system," says Shirley Malcom, co-chair of the National Science Board's Commission on 21st Century Education in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics and head of education and human resources programs at AAAS (publisher of Science). "As a nation, we need to drive a stake in the ground and say this cannot go on."
The 2006 Connecticut Mastery Test shows that the number of elementary and middle schools failing to make progress has doubled since last year.
John DeStefano says we can do better. From a campaign email:
John's innovative education plan addresses locally the issues that Gov. Rell has failed to confront. Our elementary education plan, announced last month in Waterbury and Danbury - will focus on the 19 Priority School Districts and has three major components: universal pre-kindergarten for 3 and 4 year old children, Master Literacy Teachers in grades 1 to 3, and “Books for Children and Families,” an initiative to create family book collections or mini-libraries in every child's home.
As Mayor, John has helped improve student performance and the public schools have made progress in closing the achievement gap. New Haven's high school drop-out rate is half of what it was in 1994 and more than 80% of graduates attend 2 or 4 year schools - more than the state average.
Since there has been some talk of Dan Malloy "pandering" to bloggers, I thought I'd begin this installment of the debriefing on Saturday's blogger confab with Dan's remarks on the Internet and the current primary campaigns. Then, we'll move on to education.
MLN is powered by