Bronx News Network

1000 NYC Students Walk Out to Save Free Rides

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On June 11 about 1000 NYC High School students walked out of classrooms chanting, “This is what democracy looks like!” and “The students, united, will never be defeated!”holding up home made signs and banners protesting a plan to eliminate their free transit passes. The walkout commenced at noon as students converged at City Hall Park for a rally with both elected officials and transit union members present. The large swarm of students then marched across the Brooklyn Bridge to Metropolitan Transportation Authorities offices. Many students like Fernando Matos, 17, a student at Samuel Gompers High School in the Bronx, admit that without a free transit pass they would have to transfer to a different school.”I do not want to go to a local high school,” Matos said.

News

Dig Deeper Into The Schools Debate

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Kindergarten teacher Alison Brackman of P.S. 230 in Kensington, Brooklyn, tells parents that there are two kinds of books: Meat-and-potatoes reads, which stay with you long after they’re finished, and potato-chip books – momentarily delicious, but utterly forgettable. Summer reading traditionally falls square into the potato-chip camp, but for readers still hungry for substance–especially with a focus on city schools–three recent books are worth a bite. Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (Basic Books, 284 pp., $26.95) itemizes New York’s premier education historian’s evolution in school-reform thinking. Long before it was fashionable, Ravitch championed data-based accountability and national curriculum standards, as part of the (first) Bush and Clinton administrations. Yet now that the reform pendulum has swung hard to the accountability pole, Ravich’s book recants her earlier positions, with meticulous explanations of why her beliefs have shifted.