Latest news with #MikeDowd
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.
Yahoo
04-03-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Making Mardi Gras king cake on Teach Me Tuesday
JAMESTOWN, N.C. (WGHP) — It's Fat Tuesday and people in New Orleans are feasting for Mardi Gras. Every big meal needs a big dessert, so we are stirring up a classic on this Teach Me Tuesday in King cake — a traditional cake this time of year. Brad Jones went down to Guilford Technical Community College to meet Chef Mike Dowd and cook up something delicious. You can find a full recipe for the King Cake below: Dough: 1 cup milk 1 ½ Tbsp active dry yeast 1 stick butter – softened to room temp ½ cup + 1 Tbsp sugar 1 ¼ tsp salt 1 egg 1 egg yolk 1 tsp vanilla 2 cups bread flour 2 – 2 ½ cups all-purpose flour Cinnamon filling: 3/4 cup brown sugar 1/4 cup granulated sugar 1/2 cup all-purpose flour 2 tsp ground cinnamon 4 Tbsp butter – melted Glaze 2 cups powdered sugar 3 Tbsp milk 1 Tbsp butter – melted 1 tsp lemon juice 1 tsp vanilla Dough: Place yeast in a small bowl. Warm the milk to around 90˚F. Pour into the yeast and stir until mixed. In a mixer with a paddle attachment, combine the butter, sugar, salt together with a paddle until smooth and no lumps of butter. Add the egg and mix thoroughly. Scrape the bowl. Add the yolk and vanilla and do the same. Switch to the dough hook. Add the bread flour and only 2 cups of the all-purpose flour, and the milk/yeast mixture. Mix until a smooth dough, about 4 minutes at medium speed. The dough should be slightly tacky. If it is too soft, adjust with more AP flour as needed. Lightly oil a mixing bowl, place the dough in the bowl, turning to coat. Cover with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place for 1-2 hours until doubled in size. While the dough is proofing, make the filling. Combine all the ingredients and mix to combine. Set aside. Assembly: Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside. Once the dough has doubled in size, punch it down. Roll out the dough into a large rectangle on a lightly floured surface, roughly 10 x 16'. Use a pizza cutter to divide the dough in half lengthwise to create two long rectangles. Sprinkle the cinnamon filling evenly over the two pieces of dough and roll up on the long side into two long dough logs. With the 2 pieces side by side, twist together into a braid. Transfer to the baking sheet and shape the braid into an oval, pinching the ends together. Cover lightly with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm area for 30-45 minutes or until about 1½ times its original size. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Bake for 25-30 minutes until golden brown and baked through or until 190° – 195°F internal temperature. Remove from the oven and cool completely before applying the frosting. For the frosting: Beat the powdered sugar, milk, butter, lemon juice, and vanilla in a medium bowl until smooth. The frosting should be pourable but thick. Stick a plastic baby figurine into the cake from the bottom side to hide it. Color the frosting as desired (purple, green, and yellow are traditional or use white icing sprinkled with purple, green, and yellow sprinkles before it sets) and drizzle the frosting over the cake. Spread it with a spatula if needed for good coverage. Slice, serve, enjoy, and see who gets the baby. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
