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New York Post
09-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
Woke NYC schools are failing teachers and pupils because they have no discipline — this is why the UFT's Michael Mulgrew must be stopped
Voting is underway to elect the President of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City. Michael Mulgrew, who has held the position since 2009, is expecting he can sleepwalk into another term. However, under his watch schools are requiring less and less of pupils, to the point where attendance is essentially optional and almost everyone is handed a passing grade. Brooklyn-based Social Studies teacher Mike Dowd writes why its time for a change and for basic discipline to be brought back. Advertisement Officials love to brag about the 84% graduation rate for New York City public-school students. But if you thought that was an honest measure of how many kids are passing, I have bad news. High-school grading policies have become so corrupt, class credits have become almost meaningless. 8 Michael Dowd in front of the Tweed Courthouse, which is the Department of Education Headquarters in Manhattan on May 2. EMMY PARK 8 Michael Mulgrew, President of the United Federation of Teachers since 2009 is hoping he will be re-elected again, despite the current dire state of education in the city. Stephen Yang Advertisement In recent years, the Department of Education and many individual schools, have adopted 'equity grading' practices intended to benefit disadvantaged students. But by making it almost impossible for such students to fail, even when they don't show up to class, our school system harms the less privileged by discouraging hard work and reliability. Despite the demoralizing effect these policies have on teachers, the United Federation of Teachers, under the out-of-touch leadership of Michael Mulgrew, has failed to make this a public issue. New Yorkers would be shocked to see how far school standards have dropped. Advertisement Although many of us who taught under Mayor Bloomberg remember the pressure to increase passing rates or face retaliation, there was an important check on this practice — the longstanding notion that attendance was a basic requirement for passing. But this constraint disappeared under Mayor De Blasio, whose pursuit of equity involved eliminating 'seat time' as a requirement to pass. 8 Dowd says 'equity grading' practices, which are intended to benefit disadvantaged students, make it almost impossible for students to fail. Christopher Sadowski Thereafter, schools could award passing grades to chronically absent students who didn't deserve them alongside students who worked hard. Advertisement Then, Mayor Adams made attendance completely optional by continuing remote-learning policies that forbade any lowering of a student's grade due to absences. Nowadays, if teachers want to penalize students for cutting, they must give a makeup assignment for each missed day and inevitably accept work — even if it appears to be AI-generated. Meanwhile, many individual schools have incentivized absenteeism through another equity policy — minimum grades. In these schools, a missing assignment or test with no correct answers receives a grade as high as 55 — just 10 points below passing — instead of a zero. Students, therefore, can (and do) miss months of class in a semester and still pass, even without doing makeup work. 8 Attendance at schools has dropped since requirements to be marked in for every class have been eleminated. Not surprisingly, high-school attendance has fallen. But it's even worse than publicized. Because students need only show face at their 'attendance' class to be marked present each day, they can skip other classes and still have excellent official attendance. How often this happens is unknown because the DOE hides this data. The DOE has other ways of de-emphasizing attendance. Advertisement When students fail classes, teachers must select prewritten, explanatory comments for their report cards. But the DOE has removed Excessively Absent (More than 2 days/month) from the list, leaving no appropriate options for chronically absent students. They've even removed Excessively Late, as if to emphasize that old standards no longer apply. So we've gone from defining three absences per month as excessive to denying that absences can even be excessive. Meanwhile, the DOE's attendance app hides attendance records from parents and teachers. As a coach, I no longer know if my wrestlers are attending class and must keep paper records to know my own students' attendance history. Advertisement 8 Police outside of Angelo Patri School, in the Bronx in September 2024, the day after a bullet went through a window, striking a teacher. Matthew McDermott 8 Dowd says the UFT has has failed to make the demoralizing effects of undisciplined school policies a public issue, and blames out-of-touch leadership from Mulgrew. EMMY PARK A culture shift is underway as attending class goes from being a widely understood responsibility to a mere lifestyle choice. Regularly absent students often ask me with complete sincerity how they might improve their grades. Some even request college recommendation letters. As students offer ever weaker excuses for low attendance, it's clear that these new policies are teaching them to surrender in the face of everyday challenges. At a formative time in their lives, our future workforce is losing its self-discipline, reliability, and resilience. Advertisement 8 Dowd writes that new policies are not giving kids the life skills of discipline and reliability they need. Yuliia – 8 Dowd and other teachers are calling on Mulgrew and the UFT to fight harder for more discipline and better standards in classroms. Stephen Yang But the damage goes beyond work habits. Allowing students, especially those with weak academic skills, to miss vital classroom instruction denies them the full education they deserve. In fact, in a recent examination of equity grading, the Fordham Institute, an education think tank, cites research showing 'lenient grading leads to less learning.' Advertisement My fellow teachers and I wonder how the DOE can completely upend longstanding norms of student accountability without public debate and why our union leaders remain silent as our integrity is undermined from above. It's time for Mayor Adams to end these destructive policies or tell us why he supports them. In the meantime, the DOE needs to provide period-by-period attendance data, to show us just how serious our absenteeism problem is and tell us just how many chronically absent students are receiving class credit. And we need to identify the schools at which these problems are most significant and develop plans to fix them. We waited far too many years to address teachers' concerns about student cellphone use. Let's not do the same with lax attendance and grading policies.
New York Post
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Surprise! NYC's new Planet Hollywood restaurant has shockingly good food
It's a shocking twist: The new Planet Hollywood has really good food. The celeb-magnet eatery opened its third NYC iteration two months ago at 136 W. 42nd St., on a corporate block that's nothing like Times Square around the corner. After friends reported having tacky, processed-tasting snacks at an opening party, I was ready to laugh my head off over menu oddities like 'L.A. Lasagna,' an 'icon' from the original Planet that opened on West 57th Street in prehistoric 1991. 6 When Planet Hollywood 3.0 opened earlier this year, no one expected it would have legitimately good food. EMMY PARK Instead, I felt almost embarrassed to enjoy it — and other dishes vastly better than the ones from Planet's early years, when it was a culinary joke, notwithstanding the backing of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Demi Moore. The second Planet at 1540 Broadway closed in 2020. When I first reported in 2022 that founder Robert Earl planned another re-launch, he told me it would be 'more complex and more appealing to New York locals as well as tourists.' We'll see about that. They might be surprised to find that the three-level, 17,500 square-foot venue which cost almost $20 million to build, is almost entirely without the film posters, costumes and other memorabilia that were the main draw at he original Planet Hollywood and version 2.0. The colorful, second-floor dining room and third-floor event space have lots of booths, five-pointed stars attached to the ceiling and lampshade-like overhead lights. Video images of Dua Lipa and Daniel Craig's James Bond randomly alternate with outer-space cartoons and (for no clear reason) pumping oil derricks on screens all around the rooms. The place has drawn bevies of boldfaces, including Alec Baldwin, 50 Cent and Whoopi Goldberg on opening night and cast parties for Broadway's 'Moulin Rouge' and '& Juliet.' But celebs will eat anything when it's free, and the last thing I expected was better-than-decent food. 6 The new spot has limited movie memorabilia but screens aplenty. EMMY PARK It might not rank with nearby Michelin-starred Gabriel Kreuther and fancy steakhouse STK, of course. The more useful comparison is with the area's tourist-jammed venues such as Hard Rock Cafe and Bubba Gump Shrimp. Planet's menu blows them away. There's no identified kitchen mastermind, but Earl wanted to make people forgot the dreary fare of Planets past. He tapped unnamed local chefs to oversee the menu and sources quality ingredients, including meat from butcher-to-the-stars Pat La Frieda. They restaurants delivers what you want from 'fun' food — crispy, crackling mouth feel and sugar-loaded condiments that don't overwhelm the underlying flavors. I have a weakness for this style if it's done with integrity, and the kitchen nails it. 6 'Fun food,' like cheesy garlic bread, is well prepared and satisfying. EMMY PARK 6 A blackened shrimp appetizer was fresh and flavorful. EMMY PARK Cheesy garlic bread ($15) on ciabatta is a mini-pizza with rich marinara sauce, a staple which the house employs well on many dishes. A half-dozen blackened shrimp ($21) — fresh-tasting, marinated and seared with tangy Creole mustard — made me forget the usually wretched bar snack. Baby gem caesar salad ($16) using crisp leaves, Parmesan flakes and toasted croutons was worthy of a classy steakhouse. 6 The salmon entree was cooked to perfection. EMMY PARK Even after such good starters, I had little faith that sesame ginger salmon ($33) would be grilled medium-rare as I ordered it. But the filet arrived perfectly pink under crisp skin, and elevated to serious enjoyment by soy, ginger and sesame glaze. I could take or leave the humdrum chicken pot pie ($23), but the 8-ounce deluxe Wagyu burger ($28) more than redeemed it. The monster needed knife and fork to navigate the (again) properly medium-rare patty, bacon slices, pickles, tomatoes, onions, fried egg, avocado and ranch coleslaw on a toasted brioche bun. 6 The awkwardly named and oddly plate 'L.A. Lasagna' tasted great. EMMY PARK The biggest shock was that L.A. Lasagne ($26). It had no evident Los Angeles influence, nor did it resemble any lasagne I've ever known. But they can call it what they want. Four crispy, parmesan-breaded pasta tubes were filled with ricotta and bolognese-style meat sauce, and served in tangy tomato sauce. Delicious. It's the sort of sinful, guilty pleasure many crave after a night of clubbing, but works just as well at lunch. I hope the folks who work in the great office towers all around the place will forget Planet's old reputation and give its food a chance.
