America Brings Home Bad Report CardHigh-school seniors in the U.S. showed no gains in math or reading skills in 2015. Only 37 percent were prepared for college coursework.
Bronx Science Students Walk Out, Risk College RecommendationsWhen we were in high school, the superintendent of schools tried to eliminate the school’s home-economics curriculum. Because everyone liked the home-ec teacher (we still fry eggs in the hole of a slice of toast), all the students marched down to Town Hall to protest. It was front-page news the next day in our town of 8,000. What was not front-page news today was the walkout that happened yesterday in the Bronx. The students of Bronx Science (the city’s competitive, second-ranked public school) walked out because they hate their principal, Valerie Reidy. Why do they hate their principal? Because (a) she seems to be what the kids these days call a “jerk” and (b) because she was firing a teacher that they liked. Oh, and because she went around telling people to call her “Dr. Reidy” even though she doesn’t have a Ph.D., which is classic. The Department of Education denies the claims about the fired teacher and the “doctor” line but seems to be evasive on the whole “jerk” thing.
Now, from the outside, a protest of 100 students (at a school where there are more than 2,500) may seem sort of like small potatoes. But try to remember: Walking out of class in high school is kind of a very scary thing to do. And standing up against the powerful principal of your school is kind of like facing off against Lord Voldemort: Basically, you’re bound to lose unless there’s a last-minute technicality with someone’s wand. So to those students, a moment of respect. Just a word of advice: If you try that whole “walkout” thing in college, no one will care, and if you try it at work, you’ll get canned faster than you can say “Bull’s-eye.”
Students Stage a Walkout at Bronx Science [NYS]
Earlier: The Kids at Stuyvesant Aren’t Gonna Take It
intel
In Which We Defend the Honor of ‘Gossip Girl’Over at the Huffington Post today, children’s author Lesley M. M. Blume takes on Gossip Girl. Like, she really goes after it. “Gossip Girl represents nothing less than the soft death of youth culture and rebellion and self-determinism,” she writes. Sorry, what? Are you watching the same mind-shatteringly brilliant show that we are? Every week we pore over each episode and analyze it for our readers, who immediately tear apart our reasoning with their press-on nails and braced incisors. So we’re excited to finally have the chance to examine someone else’s reading of the show! (Not to mention examine what Blume herself looks like. She’s trying to tell us someone who looks like that doesn’t watch the show? She could practically star on it!) Let’s look at her argument, piece by piece.
• “Gossip Girl supposedly exposes the seamy underbelly of Manhattan’s Upper East Side overclass.”—Again, is she watching the same show we’re watching? Gossip Girl isn’t meant to expose anything more than Star Trek was supposed to teach you what space is really like. It’s a high-camp fantasy. Does Lesley think skinny women writers with only one regular freelance gig really drink multiple fishbowl-size martinis a night at fancy clubs and never look broke or hung-over? Then she must have really loved how Sex and the City “exposed” real New York life.
the morning line
The Islamofascist Handbook
• To aid in terrorism surveillance, the NYPD has released a jihadi version of The Preppy Handbook, detailing how average Muslim schlubs morph into Islamic terrorists. Grow a beard, renounce booze and broads, play paintball war games, dis the U.S. a lot — you know the drill. [NYDN]
