Board Of Education caught wasting school and PPE supplies

Quinn proposes schools become all-day babysitting service

From Metro:

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn announced a fleet of education proposals this morning, including extending the school day and axing textbooks and using tablets instead.

Quinn targeted the education system with her speech at the New School.

The Speaker is battling to be the next mayor, facing an ever-growing list of competitors to replace Mayor Michael Bloomberg when he finishes his term next year.

Her proposals, which she vowed would cost less than $300 million, included appointing a deputy mayor for education and children.

She also wants to make the school day longer, keeping students until 6 p.m. five days a week in schools with the highest percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch.

No more textbooks would be needed under her plan – instead, students would use tablets.

I'm sure tablets cost much less than books. And are we also providing free dinner to the children since they'll be there until 6pm? How about another round of school buses?

You are formally invited...

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I've always liked your website-Just started www.wallstreetsmayor.com
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Best
Neil Fabricant

Scratch-n-sniff your way across the city!

From WCBS880:

New York City is known for, among other things, well, how do we say this, its scents – both the good and the bad.

36-year-old Amber Jones was walking home from work one day when she was inspired.

“I was like, ‘Oh gosh, that pizza smells so good.’ and right as a I was walking, I was wearing flip flops, I stepped into horse droppings,” she says.

So, she decided to create a book called “New York, Phew York: A Scratch-N-Sniff Adventure.”

Yes, she has the subway in there...

New book isn't vibrant and diverse!

From the Daily News:

Nicole Steinberg grew weary of books about Queens that harped only on its ethnic diversity.

So the former Jackson Heights resident has compiled an anthology that reflects her experience growing up in the borough and being viewed as an outsider in New York City.

"It often felt like I didn't fit in," said Steinberg, 28, who regularly hung out in Bayside, Flushing, Forest Hills and Rego Park as a kid.

Queens, she added, is "sort of this in-between place where you're not really part of Long Island and you're not really from the rest of New York."

That identity crisis is key to "Forgotten Borough: Writers Come to Terms with Queens."

Released in February, the 206-page book covers race, class, industrial growth and other factors that define Queens, while describing the borough as "New York City's biggest underdog."

Never felt like the borough had an identity crisis (that's the same lame reasoning behind the Ed Koch Bridge) but I'm glad someone else out there is sick of the vibrant, diverse mantra. It's gotten really old.

Is the Queens Library being shortchanged?

From WNYC:

The Queens Library, one of the city's public libraries experiencing the budget squeeze, is taking an unprecedented step in its 104-year history and has stopped buying books.

Queens Public Library CEO Tom Galante said he doesn't want to upset bookworms, but late last year, Mayor Bloomberg asked the library to cut $4.5 million from its spending. As Galante saw it, the library board faced a choice: trim hours and staff as it had been doing for the past two years, or do something that goes against the very idea of a lending library and stop buying books.

Queens has consistently received less money per visitor than the other two library systems. From 2007-2010, the city spent on average $5.89 per patron in Queens, and $6.76 and $7.86 per patron in the Brooklyn and New York systems, respectively. A third more was spent per New York user than per user in Queens, on average.

Response to this Daily News article:

Sick substitute high school teacher gives sex assignment

From CBS:

It was one assignment students in Queens will not soon forget.

The scandalous schoolwork was loaded with sexually explicit material, and as CBS 2′s John Metaxas found out students were given a book with some very racy reading.

Sixteen-year-old Giavanna Grasso got the shock of her life Monday.

The junior at Robert Goddard High School in Ozone Park was asked to find descriptive language in a passage of literature for her digital arts English class. But to her surprise she found herself reading explicit, sexually oriented and vulgar language that included a crude joke about animals.

The Education and Deconstruction of Mr. Bloomberg

This is an exposé detailing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg´s education and construction policies between 2002 and 2009 inclusive. It covers all major education issues: schools chancellor, school budget, grading of the schools, reducing class sizes, small-, charter and culturally themed schools, standardized testing, school safety, overcrowding and mayoral control; and all major real-estate-development issues: rezoning, ULURP, self-certification, various fatal construction accidents and disasters, affordable housing, lack of construction-law enforcement and the large projects that characterized the administration. This book features a list of abbreviations and a comprehensive index in the back.

A page of the Introduction, p. 11, is crucial for understanding references made throughout the book. Therefore, it is reproduced below:

I have observed that there were three recurring themes in Mr. Bloomberg´s modus operandi in both Education and Real Estate Development:

Theme 1: He was overly optimistic. As his various education initiatives and construction projects progressed, he routinely threw around and changed numbers on standardized test scores, graduation rates, school openings, school crime rates, construction costs, creation of jobs and affordable housing units, among others, and sometimes even distorted facts outright.

Theme 2: Time after time, Mr. Bloomberg asked for input from the community, or purported to, on new school openings and on construction of schools and other projects, but usually ended up hiring his cronies and ignored the community´s wishes.

Theme 3: He took advantage of legal loopholes or skirted around the law to forge ahead with his agendum.

His agendum was to acquire power. Why else did he take control of the schools and overturn term limits? It was not for the money. In November 2009, Mr. Bloomberg won his third-term election bid by a narrow margin, mostly because he was still viewed as a stronger candidate than the opposing one. His power and popularity were waning, however, rocked by various investigations in recent years, including a slush-fund scandal, and corruption and sloppiness in construction that led to fatal accidents, that resulted in the termination of decades-long unethical practices. Further, he was accused of being involved in various conflicts of interest and of being hypocritical on environmental and health issues.

Two farmyard clichés and one generic cliché also aptly describe many occurrences during the Bloomberg administration between 2002 and 2009:

Cliché 1: "Just another case of the fox guarding the henhouse"

Cliché 2: "Closing the barn door after the horses have already fled"

Cliché 3: "Do as I say, not as I do"

The above themes and clichés are so common in my text, that I refer to their generic names; i.e., I will use the blog style, for example, "File under Theme 1" or "File under Cliché 2" when providing evidence of same. Enjoy.

Please visit my book blog and visit here to read additional excerpts.

In September, the book will appear on Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com. In the event you wish not to wait, you can buy "Education and Deconstruction" here.

Happy reading!

- Sally Friedman

Library forced to cut back on Russian soaps

From the Daily News:

Most borrowers will never see the maps that line librarian Sze Wai (Lacey) Chan's cubicle at the Central Library in Jamaica, but as the library system's official demographer, she's made a career of tracking them down.

Part statistician and part detective, Chan has studied the borough's newest immigrants since 1997. Using the data she gathers, she helps tailor new materials and programs to their interests.

But looming budget cuts may soon make much of her painstakingly-collected data useless because the library won't be able to buy new foreign-language materials to chase the changing population, library officials said.

For Chinese immigrants, those materials include a never-ending supply of Japanese and Korean films, while West Indians prefer Nigerian movies. And Russians can't live without their soaps.

Our tax dollars are subsidizing the acquisition and rental of Russian soap operas?

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

Here's an idea: During the recession, how about limiting libraries to what they were built for - education through BOOKS.