Performance Based Failure

I finally received my Viewpoints section to the Sunday (May 1, 2016) Buffalo Snooze – formerly the News. Everything about it is so predictable that reading it puts me to sleep. Even the comics. (Can we get rid of “For Better or For Worse” and can “Get Fuzzy” stop the re-runs? I like “Pearls before Swine.” I'll deal with Peanuts because I like Snoopy and in a role playing space game years ago designed a battle cruiser called the Woodstock. It had a slight navigation problem…..)

On page H2 there is a misguided argument for performance based funding for education. And I mean seriously misguided.

The argument is this in a nut shell: If a school is scoring well on tests and has high graduation rates, then it receives the funding it needs for its programs because they are working.

If a school is scoring poorly on tests and has a low graduation rate, then its funding is cut because what it is doing is not working, so taxpayers should not have to pay for it.

Can I do that for the Buffalo News? It got Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, the Ukraine, Georgia (former republic in the USSR), among so many other international stories wrong.

It also got the Bush & Obama economic policies wrong. (Basically it regurgitates capitalist economics exclusively rather than searching out a socialist economist to explain what is going on.)

And so many other things.  I didn't read it for a day and my blood pressure went down without my taking any medication.  The doctor was surprised.  

In the realm of education, schools that are performing poorly are usually in economically disadvantaged areas that require more financial assistance in order to bring in the reading teachers, 1-1 aides, special education teachers, and other support staff to help the students get caught up to grade level.

Under performance based funding, these necessary supports for student success are the first to get cut. (Not football or extracurricular sports. Note the word “extra” there. It means after curriculum needs are met.) This means that students that are already struggling will have fewer people t help them and therefore fall further behind and we all know how the spiral goes downhill from there.

If the writer were truly knowledgeable about education and spent any time looking at under-performing schools in any real way instead of looking at numbers on a spreadsheet, he would know the negative impact that poverty has on educational achievement and would be concerned about rectifying the problems associated with poverty rather than punishing the schools where the impoverished attend.

Then again, if we look at the writer's pedigree we understand their bad perspective on education:  they work for a Washington DC based think tank (The Lexington Institute), they served in the US Department of Education (a pencil pusher basically), and in the US House of Representatives Education and Workforce Committee (paper pusher).

What degree does he have? What teaching experience does he have? How much time has he spent in the classroom? How much experience does he have working with special needs students?

This article is an insult to teachers and students everywhere (I'll include administrators too).

It is an article that falls under the rubric of “Those who can, teach. Those who can't – complain.”

Back to the Buffalo Snooze – With everything that it gets wrong – foreign policy, domestic policy, economics, etc, - what type of funding cut should it get? Or should we be eliminating editors,etc that are getting it all wrong and bring in new editors that are willing to take chances on different policies? I'd love to see some socialist economics in the “Business” section. It would be great to see the News tear into the unfair “Free Trade” agreements that have screwed over American workers and have actually hurt the newspaper. I'd relish the day I read an article that tore into the misguided US Middle East and Asian policies (as well as our policies towards Russia) and advocated the closing of US military bases and elimination of overpriced weapons systems that fail to work as advertised.

I'd really like the paper more if it were more critical of the establishment.

But that would be asking it to bite the hand that feeds it.

No dog does that and expects to be fed.

So WNY is stuck with a predictable and boring newspaper that can, for the most part, be ignored.

And so I will still read the Snooze knowing what it is going to advocate for education policies – policies that have not been proven to work and that punish the poor.

Someone can turn out the lights in the editors' offices.

Nothing to read here.

Post Sciptum: I received a small section of the paper on Monday & finally got around to reading it today. Otherwise I would have belted this out on Sunday.

And we all know what the Snooze wants us to do in the School Board election – support their candidates for privatization. Carl PaladiNO, “Sell Out” Sampson, and some other person that they have raved about that I really don't want to type up.

Boring.

Can we get another paper in town with a different perspective? Please?