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Re: Home sellers cautious on choice plan, May 26.
I have lived in Pinellas County for more than 31 years and am a product of the Pinellas public schools. I am now a public servant who deals with children and their families in Pinellas County every day.
I have learned something that will help home buyers and real estate agents when explaining the choice plan to prospective buyers. Tell buyers the key to their children's educational success is present in every home they are looking at. Walk them into the home, find a mirror, stand them in front of it, and tell them they are looking at the answer to "How are the schools in this area?"
Talk to any teachers and they will tell you the difference between a "good" school and a "bad" school is not based on the "JEBCAT." The "good" schools thrive through parental involvement. The parents who spend a lot of time scouting out the "best" school for their children will probably have successful students because of their overall effort as parents, not because of the school picked for their children under the choice plan.
Parents, stop the cycle of people blaming others for their misfortune. You are insulting yourself and your children by giving too much credit to geography instead of your family's hard work.
Re: Home sellers cautious on choice plan.
I find it amazing that this is the first time I've seen anything written on this. I have always been of the mind that school choice will have more effect on real estate values than it does on children. Choice can be seen more as opportunity as opposed to restriction, because parents are far more qualified to choose the house they can afford that fits their family needs than they are to choose the best school for their children.
Case in point: I've lived in St. Petersburg for more than 25 years and went to two Pinellas County high schools. Five years ago I moved to Jacksonville, only to move back with two school-age children three years later. Upon moving back, schools played a part in our house-buying experience - luckily, not the main part. At that time there were three locations we considered based on the schools our children would attend. We chose a fourth that offered way more house for the money, but presented a school we knew nothing about.
Since that time I've worked as a substitute teacher in the Pinellas County schools and have worked in just about every elementary, middle and high school in St. Petersburg. It turns out that not only is the school we knew nothing about by far the very best of the schools I've worked in, but the three that I thought I wanted my kids to go to are probably the very worst.
I've learned. This happens time and time again. My daughter started second grade last year with a classroom assignment that I had grave reservations about. I had seen bits and pieces of the teacher that she was to have, and I didn't like what I saw. My daughter on the other hand was enthusiastic about it. Turns out that the teacher I'm talking about was, by far, the very best teacher I've turned any of my children over to. I suspect she may hold that title forever.
As a retired educator, it is heart-rending for me to read of the effect of the FCAT on children, especially those in the third grade. To declare a child a failure at such a young age is despicable.
More persons than you can ever count have learned to read well at later ages than the 9-year-olds in third grade. Actually, we learn all of our lives; we cannot help it. Life demands it.
Everybody knows persons who were not great students but who behave well, raise fine families, pay their bills and have that quality known as "common sense." These used to be called "the salt of the earth" because at one time salt was used - and sometimes is still used - for preservation of food.
To have one's self-esteem ruined in the third grade marks one for life. "Success breeds success" is true. A criminal can result if one believes that one cannot achieve other than by disobeying the law.
Self-esteem has caused many mediocre students to achieve more than others thought possible. If this is lost in the third grade, it will be difficult to recover. How terrible at age 9 to be judged as failing.
There has to be a change to protect the tender egos of children in this society.
Re: Third-grade retention.
The standards movement brought with it an increased reliance on standardized tests. The FCAT was designed to measure individual students' progress over time, but its applications have been many. The inappropriate uses of the FCAT were expanded this year with the implementation of the third-grade retention rule. The result for many of Florida's third-grade students this year was retention based on a single type of test.
This new regulation is sure to have two immediate and significant effects. First, teachers of young children will spend even more time teaching the skills related to choosing the correct answer on a multiple choice test. Second, thousands of would-be second time around third-grade students will leave Florida's public schools and attend private schools that do not administer the FCAT and are not bound by its increasingly misdirected use. I believe that this second consequence was the intent of the legislation.
A decision as important as if and when to retain a student should be made by parents, teachers and administrators working together in the best interest of the child. The frustration and heartbreak that is being experienced by thousands of 9- and 10-year-old children and their families is simply a side-effect of the systematic legislative attack on the public school system. It is one more step toward privatized for-profit education. It is one more portion of a plan to redirect millions of dollars in tax revenue from the public system into the pockets of a few.
Re: Capitol offenses, May 20.
The two hallmarks of the Times' editorial style were again in evidence in this piece. You are long on inflammatory verbiage and short on facts. A "dismal succession of dead-end jobs" awaits those seniors who could not pass the FCAT on as many as five tries. Not graduating is a "frightful price to pay to make a political point." You imply that an indeterminate number of students unable to pass the FCAT will not go to colleges they were already provisionally accepted into.
More precisely, Mr. Editor, a dismal succession of dead end jobs awaits anyone who does not have the basic reading and math skills necessary to succeed in any job. The FCAT is easy, easy, easy. Inability to pass it reflects a very severe academic deficiency. Many of those who failed did so because English is their second language and they simply haven't been in our school systems long enough to gain the basic level of proficiency. Yet you would have us callously pass them through the graduation door to certain failure. Shame on that philosophy.
I challenge you to randomly sample the 13,000 FCAT failures to determine exactly what number have been provisionally accepted at any two-year or four-year college. I suspect the number is zero. You really should try harder to ascertain the facts before you you draw sweeping conclusions. As a U.S. Navy veteran, I can also assure you that a person unable to achieve the basic level of proficiency required to pass the FCAT will not succeed in the highly technical military of the 21st century.
As much as the Times fails to acknowledge it, the FCAT and the rest of the governor's education accountability program will improve academic achievement in the state. Why don't you track 20 or 30 of the FCAT failures for a year and see how much more ready they will be for the rest of their lives at this time next year. I suspect that might be more editorially responsible than you are willing to be!
Re: End of the road for Pinellas busing, May 21.
Finally, after 32 years, I get to see what I marched for in the '60s. Chrisshun Cox got it right when she stated that it was equality we were asking for, not desegregation. To understand what we mean, one has to look back at how life was for African-American students attending segregated schools.
As a junior high student, I attended the one school in upper Pinellas County for blacks, Pinellas High. I had classmates who came from as far away as Port Richey and Tarpon Springs. I remember hearing the sad stories of how these students had to get up at the crack of dawn to make it to the bus stop for the long ride to Pinellas High. For me to get to school, I walked past the old Clearwater Junior High, which was less than a quarter-mile from where I lived, to Pinellas High, which was more than a mile. By the time I reached my junior and senior year, I was bused from our new home in south Clearwater to the same Pinellas High. This time, the nearest high school was Largo High, which was within walking distance from where I lived.
I remember very clearly going to my first algebra class and not being able to use the textbooks assigned to our school. All of the answers had been written in by Clearwater High students. The books were repacked in boxes at the back of the classroom, and our teacher had no choice but to teach us without the use of textbooks. This was often the case with all our textbooks. I also remember the anger and frustration our teachers felt because they knew we were being cheated by their not being able to learn from textbooks. At the start of each school term, they had to wait until white teachers picked all the new books and barely used ones before they could go in the rooms to get our textbooks. Of course, the leftovers were barely usable.
Therefore, when I marched for equal rights in the '60s, it was not to desegregate but for the right to go to the school nearest my home and to have new textbooks like the students at Clearwater High were issued. I wanted an equal chance to learn and grow like my white counterparts were doing. I wanted to see me and my classmates go to school without having to get up at the crack of dawn for a long bus ride. That is why so many blacks were disappointed when the desegregation plan was enacted. We wanted an end to busing, not an extension of it.
So after 32 years, I and others who marched for equality in the '60s can finally see the fruits of our labor: black children being allowed to attend the school nearest their homes rather than being bused miles away, and being given the same opportunities to learn as other Americans enjoy. Now maybe black parents can get back to how they used to be when attending PTA meetings and participating more fully in their children's education was an enjoyable part of their daily lives.
A word of advice to those in charge of making decisions about how we do things in the future: Don't just ask the blacks you choose as our leaders for solutions to problems; include the ones who are most affected by the problems. Maybe then it won't take 32 years to hear what they are saying.
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