mooseLimbsCatLicks OP t1_ir0xxz8 wrote on October 4, 2022 at 3:20 PM

Reply to comment by cC2Panda in Board of Education Candidates Make Their Pitches - Jersey City Times by mooseLimbsCatLicks

My take on the LeFrak backing is... They have an incentive to make schools better, which is that it makes their luxury housing more attractive if the schools are actually good. The shitty schools causes people to move out of their apartments. So trying to actually improve the schools makes sense.

The other team (education matters) has clearly shown that the main driver of their policies is not improvement of childrens' educations. Their incentive seems to be to keep the teachers and unions happy, which of course is important, but is not the same as improving the educational standards of our schools.

I will vote again for the Change for Children over the Education Matters slate.

JCwhatimsayin t1_ir1aime wrote on October 4, 2022 at 4:40 PM

I guess this would make sense as an alignment of interests if LeFrak had thousands of 3-4 bedroom dwellings in the pipeline or on existing rent rolls. I don't think that's the case. I think their primary incentive is to keep taxes low and appeal to single and couple buyers and investors. For their primary buyers with kids (if any), subsidizing private schools is a much cheaper and more precision-guided strategy than actually trying to make the public school system better.

reputationStan t1_ir7gj74 wrote on October 5, 2022 at 9:54 PM

hmm, idk why you're downvoted. you present a good argument. if there were larger apartments, families would be inclined to stay (if the prices were reasonable as well).

upvoted since you were -2.

cC2Panda t1_ir11yv4 wrote on October 4, 2022 at 3:45 PM

Aside from not wanting to risk their lives over COVID before we rolled out vaccines, what makes you think that children's educations aren't their primary goal? They might be inefficient with the budget which is a different conversations but what specific examples non-COVID related do you think the BOE doesn't care for children?

I don't know if we as a city would allow it, but from the words of Baez talking about removing funding from low performing programs and freezing teachers pay it really sounds like some No Child Left Behind bullshit that saw money moved from poor low performing areas and given to wealthier areas. My mother worked for low income public schools for about 25 years and I can tell you that policies that reward test taking make it so that teachers focus on teaching to the test rather than actually educating children effectively.

mooseLimbsCatLicks OP t1_ir1b13d wrote on October 4, 2022 at 4:43 PM

I understand people wanting to protect themselves of course. But it must be acknowledged that this was at the expense of children's educations. Remote schooling was ineffective and this was both obvious before and during remote schooling, and proven with test scores after the fact. And remote school ended in JC public schools WELL after covid vaccine was available, and well after private schools and other public schools opened.

There was a whole range of workers deemed essential workers who were required to report in person to their jobs since they are deemed essential to society. These included people who stack boxes and sandwich makers. I believe in person teachers are much more essential than sandwich makers. Teaching in person and in person school for children was obviously better for kids than remote BS that was extended for way too long. It was very disappointing to see the refusal to reopen the schools and repeated excuses. And worse, they have never acknowledged their mistakes, which raises the question if they will repeat the same mistakes in the future...

cC2Panda t1_ir1h64v wrote on October 4, 2022 at 5:22 PM

It's worth noting that places that opened up early like Florida had very similar drops in reading comprehension and math. COVID had a significant impact regardless of closures, and a June study in Florida showed that 3rd grade reading levels in Florida are stagnant for the last 2 years despite having been mostly in person since early 2021.

On top of all that what do you think the BOE would have done to force the teachers union to go in last year? Do you think they would have threatened to fire hundreds of staff and replace them when the number of open positions was already much higher than the people to fill them? The teachers unions here have a lot of power and so the teachers made a decision regardless of the BOE and I don't think the BOE really had any recourse.

Regardless, schools are back open so it's a moot point moving forward until we have our next pandemic(hopefully not in our lifetime) and you literally didn't answer my question. I said aside from COVID related issues what are your examples of the BOE/unions not caring about children?

mooseLimbsCatLicks OP t1_ir1jr2e wrote on October 4, 2022 at 5:38 PM

Your question translates to: "Asides from the recent disastrous, unnecessarily prolonged remote education experiment that you specifically mentioned, what are other examples of BOE not caring". Its a silly question because for me the COVID handling was outrageous and disqualifying on its own. I guess I could think of some. Horrible food options. Horrible bussing options. They didnt raise the school tax levy for years, only deciding to do so when it was an emergency since the state withdrew their funding (which was inevitable). And the pandemic is still ongoing. Who is to say they wont decide to close schools again for a winter peak. Nobody knows because they haven't said anything.

cC2Panda t1_ir1xgl6 wrote on October 4, 2022 at 7:04 PM

>They didnt raise the school tax levy for years, only deciding to do so when it was an emergency since the state withdrew their funding (which was inevitable)

You know that because we didn't have full autonomy from the State Abbott districts until 2017 we had limited authority on changing taxes for schooling. Because the state funding was a function of a % of local spending they limited the BOE ability to increase funding unilaterally.

> Who is to say they wont decide to close schools again for a winter peak. Nobody knows because they haven't said anything.

Even during the Omicron outbreak in 2021 we only went remote for 5 days, so I severely doubt that quadruple vaxxed teachers are gonna shutdown. I mean just compare the general environment now compared to any other point since March 2020 and it's fair to say that the majority of people are basically done trying to mitigate anything short of getting vaccinated.

Not to try to sound like I'm making excuses for everything I'm sure there are tons of things to be fixed but I don't know enough about the finer points, like schools lunch quality or busing. I'm just EXTREMELY skeptical of anyone who comes in talking about fiscal responsibility with no concrete plan and funding from a LeFrak PAC.

If any of the three running had actual tangible actions for how they intend to make the system more efficient that isn't freezing teacher pay and "removing programs"(literally no more detail than that), I could consider them, but as it is 90% platitudes and Republican PAC funding take them out of contention for me.

mooseLimbsCatLicks OP t1_ir28rg9 wrote on October 4, 2022 at 8:13 PM

No the school board retained the power to increase the school tax levy. It is an independent power granted to them, independent from the city budget. It just didn’t do it for many many years until the state announced it was withdrawing . Probably since they were allied with the mayor at that time and didn’t want to increase taxes. Think the days of the dishonorable sudhan thomas. They have an allowable increase of a few percent per year (don’t remember the number). When the state announced their cuts few years ago I read up a lot on civic JC’s blog. They only started doing that when it became a big commotion. So instead of being proactive, they fell behind and had a much larger deficit than they would have.