
Reincarnation of George Gallup, Greenwich style
Whoever was responsible for this farce should be fired, right now. Before Labor Day.
The poll (using a sophisticated polling program called “Monkey Poll”) was designed by “Metis Associates”, a collection of fuzzy-headed mush talkers just like type who run our schools now. By all means click on the link and review the survey questions. (Better yet, have fun completing the survey yourself, as many times as you wish. I myself discovered that I was a single mother of Hawaiian /Polynesian ancestry with 5 children in English as a second language gifted programs who all want to walk to their school – your milage may vary.) Your BOE’s idea of enticing parents to abandon neighborhood schools is to provide kids with the opportunity to:
Explore environmental and global issues;
Participate in community service learning; and
Learn in a multi-cultural environment
Nothing in there about real learning, advanced classes, tracked achievement groups, whatever you might think was associated (like or loth a particular method) with actual learning. Why not? Because people like this don’t think that way.
Look, here’s Metis’s mission statement – noble goals all, but revealing of what the group is and what it’s all about. The fact that the Greenwich Board of Education selected this organization to provide guidance for our schools says everything anyone needs to know about who’s in charge over there at the Havemeyer Building and what he – they – have in store for our children.
Samprana Tamm is still in hiding and could not be reached for comment.
Metis’s commitment to promoting the success of children and families—whether in education, the workforce, the justice system, or the economy—is every bit as critical as it was when the company was founded. We have been in business for over three decades because the needs for the services our clients provide, and by extension for our services, have been stubbornly persistent (and in fact, have worsened in many ways). More than 16 million children in the United States—one in every five—lived in poverty in 2010—a shocking increase of one million over the prior year. It hardly bears stating that our education system fails large numbers of low-income children who are disproportionately black and Latino.
Many of Metis’s 120 active projects in evaluation, information technology, and grant development address the deeply entrenched problems of poverty and educational inequality. For example, two years ago, Metis helped Orangeburg Consolidated School District 3 in South Carolina, an under-resourced region, attain magnet-school funding to bring greater academic rigor to their student population. Last year, we began an evaluation of an Allentown, Pennsylvania, program that unifies school-based anti-violence and mental health services for 23,000 youth.
We at Metis are pleased that our rigorous evaluations and data analysis projects are being used all over the country to guide organizations that are seeking answers to educational inequality. Yet, fierce debates over the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind demonstrate just how polarized our nation is over the best way to pursue educational achievement.