Thursday, February 01, 2007

Bloomberg To School Kids: Too Bad If You Have To Walk A Mile And Take Three Buses To School

Like nearly everything else Joel Klein and Mayor Moneybags Bloomberg have reorganized in the New York City public school system, the "bus reorganization" plan pushed by a private firm the mayor hired (and spent millions of dollars to hire) has been a disaster and characterized by chaos and pointlessness.

The NY Times has the story here and the Daily News has the story here.

Both the mayor and the chancellor issued non-apology apologies ("We're sorry that you're mad that you're no longer getting your non-mandated bus service even though your seven year old kid has to walk three miles through a Staten Island swamp to get to school or hail a cab every morning.")

Klein and Bloomberg treat teachers, students, and parents with disdain on a daily basis. Their "reorganization" of the school system - completed just three years ago - has been declared a "great success" by the mayor and the chancellor (although test scores are actually down in many subject areas and the Dept. of Ed refuses to reveal its testing methodology for the tests where scores strangely increased by huge increments.) The reorganization was such a success that they have decided to reorganize the public school system again! Presumably the new reorganization will be characterized by the same chaos and pointlessness that the old one was and the bus reorganization plan has been.

That's what happens when you allow people with no education experience, no classroom experience and no idea how to run a school to fire all the teachers and education people and bring in General Electric CEO's and other business cronies to run things.

Comments:
reality, you wrote:

"That's what happens when you allow people with no education experience, no classroom experience and no idea how to run a school to fire all the teachers and education people and bring in General Electric CEO's and other business cronies to run things."

Frankly, I don't know who you would hire to organize the bus system.

Nevertheless, the bus fiasco has become a huge pain in my ass because my kid has been shanghied every day this week by buses taking all over Brookyn before dropping him at his stop an hour or more later than last week. He had previously reached his stop about 25 minutes after the closing school bell.
 
Someone was telling me today about a woman with two daughters, one of whom took a bus directly to school over a few minutes, while the other was assigned to a bus that went in a 90 minute circle.

The guy was unable to explain why mom didn't just put them both on the same bus. 15.8 million bucks, I think, for the folks who organized this episode.
 
You know who I wouldn't hire to reorganize the bus system, nyc educator? A company that made a mess of a similar reorganization plan in St. Louis. Which is what Alvarez & Marsal, the company Bloomberg hired for $16 million dollars, created. Here's the Daily New link for that story:

http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/494091p-416153c.html
 
On NPR today, they said it was 17 million.

Thanks for the link.
 
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