Last year, the City Council voted 46-4 to approve the School Construction Authority’s plans for a new school building on the lot of P.S. 133, or the William A. Butler School, on Baltic Street and 4th Avenue in Park Slope. The 109 year old school is currently under asbestos remediation, shrouded and hidden from site.
Part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Race to the Top is a $4.35 billion grant program that rewards states that are making strides in turning around struggling schools and enhancing education standards. Here’s what some of the players in New York’s education system are saying about the state’s application.
Beth Fertig, a senior reporter on education for WNYC, continues her Reader in Residence series with us this month with her second of four posts about literacy and education in New York. The author of Why Cant U Teach Me 2 Read?, Ms. Fertig tackles the issue of federal education funding this week under the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top program.
Welcome to the first installment of Reader in Residence on BrooklynTheBorough.com! Here we will feature contributions by authors, professors, journalists or book enthusiasts – basically anybody with interesting things to say about literature. We started out with the notion that a book club might be appropriate, but we know you probably don’t want, nor have the motivation, to sit through our boring assessments. Instead, we bring you ideas and excerpts from the authors themselves. These author contributions will appear weekly, building on ideas over the course of a month to prolong discussion in a digital space so often overlooked after the refresh button is pushed. Please share your thoughts and comments with us, we want to respond!
And so it is our great pleasure to bring you journalist and author Beth Fertig, a senior reporter on education for WNYC, New York’s NPR affiliate, and the author of Why Cant U Teach Me 2 Read?, an appropriate inaugural topic for this feature. Ms. Fertig’s book, out last year on FSG, dissects the successes and failures of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind act through the prism of three NYC public school students. Here she shares a short excerpt preceded by current policy planning efforts.
Today on Boroughing Brooklyn, our local blog partners have plenty for us to read about. Today, Bollywood comes to Dumbo and Clinton Hill gets ready for Halloween.
“It’s not like libraries are over-funded!” said Soledad O’Brien, master of ceremonies for the 12th annual fundraising gala for the Brooklyn Public Library on Thursday. “It’s not like, ‘Trim the fat off those libraries!’ Those are cuts that are going to be very much felt.”
