The Return of The Chicagoist Reader Meet-Up
Cubs Combat Casino
Notre Dame Fan Takes It Too Far, Allegedly Punches Clausen
County Sales Tax Rollback Vetoed - Here We Go Again
PHOTOS: Peaches And Amanda Blank At Metro
The Sun-Times takes a look at "elimination communication," a technique some parents are using to toilet train their very young children. Perhaps you read about it. In the New York Times. In 2005. [S-T, NYT.]
Police are investigating the human remains discovered in Downers Grove but so far can't establish age, race, or how long ago the man died. [Trib]
Alinea won Restaurants & Institutions magazine’s Ivy Award, which is a big deal in the food world. [Crain's]
The US Justice Department laid the smack down on Chicago Public Schools for short-changing students learning English and for releasing inaccurate, incomplete data. [S-T]
Neil Steinberg and Eric Zorn both joined and are puzzled by Facebook. Let the pokes begin. [Zorn, Steinberg]
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Chicago Public Schools and the State of Illinois continue to harm Mexican-Americans, especially kids from homes in which Spanish is spoken. How? By the damage done by bilingual education (which, in practice, is when most of the teaching is done in Spanish with some English translation).
Illinois has an army of teachers union henchmen who block mandatory English immersion. The result? Mexican-American drop-out rates stay high. Mexican-American college attendance stays low.
And the IMAGE test, given by the State of Illinois to many Spanish-speaking kids with English as a second language, is simply a dumbed-down version of the State's regular test for assessing progress in education. Even the name "IMAGE" is a cruel joke. I guess the name is supposed to give the Mexican-American kids a better "image" of themselves. How sad.
Bilingual teachers and other sanctimonious activists have battled English immersion for selfish and/or senseless reasons. What they are really doing is saving cushy jobs for the bilingual teachers while condemning kids to career disappointment and permanent lower class status.
California successfully broke the bilingual stranglehold, passing a law mandating that English immersion be the norm unless parents "opted out," i.e., demanded that their kids get bilingual education.
What happened? The English immersion kids in California started scoring way higher than the kids trapped bilingual programs. The proof became evident to the man on the street. To the parents. To the kids themselves.
When all these people saw the results, they realized that the charges of "racism" and "cultural extinction" were bogus. The bilingual cabal of teachers and union thugs were defeated. California's kids of Mexican descent were given a better chance for better lives. Maybe someday that can happen here.
Go sell crazy elsewhere.
How are schools supposed to give instruction in the child's home language when any one school could have students from 20 different countries? I'm certainly not an apologist for the CPS, but when I was teaching for them, in a neighborhood high school, I had Mongolian, Bangladeshi, Indian, Chinese, Mexican, ad Ukrainian kids all in one class.
(And the kids who did the worst were generally the Mexican kids who had had bilingual instruction instead of immersion instruction)
How are schools supposed to give instruction in the child's home language when any one school could have students from 20 different countries? I'm certainly not an apologist for the CPS, but when I was teaching for them, in a neighborhood high school, I had Mongolian, Bangladeshi, Indian, Chinese, Mexican, ad Ukrainian kids all in one class.
(And the kids who did the worst were generally the Mexican kids who had had bilingual instruction instead of immersion instruction)
Go sell lefty elsewhere.
To clarify, "Go sell lefty elsewhere" is my response to spookhatespuppies.
Are we keeping tabs on stories that may have been written years ago that pop up again, in a different city, with different perspectives? Really? Good job, Margaret. You should work for the New York Times.
The teachers union does not care about the kids. Chicago has the shortest school day and one of the shortest school years in the country. the kids are in school less than 6 hours a day. The kids are being short changed buy a teachers union that cares about short days and lots of days off but not about what the kids are learning.
Different perspectives? The stories interview the same two experts.
The Teachers' Union doesn't really care about teachers either, mostly it cares about staying in power.