]
>> What do you need to know?]
How about where we stand on the state of education?]
Your children attend schools, and you are at least paying for
the schooling with your taxes from your own pocket.]
Your neighbors and those with a stake in the state of education
will take center stage for the next half-hour on this "need to
know."]
[captioning made possible by U.S. department of education]]
]
>> Rochester's newsmagazine since 1997, this is "need to
know."]
]
>> Thanks for joining us.]
I'm Michael Caputo.]
Last Tuesday, some of us walked into a voting booth and
participated in an essential form of democracy.]
Many view voting as our only means of expression in a
democratic society, but, of course, participation doesn't begin
and end on election day.]
It needs to happen over back yard fences, across tables and
diners, in community meeting halls, and in the chambers of
village, towns, county, and city governments.]
Public broadcasting wants to help make those conversations
happen.]
That's the foundation for the project known as by the people.]
MacNeil productions, the group that brings you "newshour,"
started the effort.]
They partner with local stations across the nation, including
the one here in Rochester.]
You may have seen the nationally broadcast "by the people"
special last Thursday night.]
We're concentrating on the Rochester conversation.]
The topic this year, the state of education, teaching our
children here in Rochester and in New York state.]
We had help from local supporters of this project.]
This year we did something different.]
We wanted to extend the conversation beyond deliberation day,
and those happened because of community partners who hosted
followup discussions.]
The democratic exercise began at the Rochester institute of
technology a few weeks ago.]
That's where the by the people deliberation day was held.]
Let's go back to that day.]
The discussions centered on what ails education, and one woman
was definite about where she placed blame.]
]
>> I think a lot of are you school teachers, my daughter's a
schoolteacher, she teaches high school in the city.]
She has, I think the problem starts in kindergarten.]
All this problem where children are zrpt active and are having
problems starts with the day they walk into a school.]
She has students in the 11th grade who cannot read cursive, who
can't write cursive, who can't even read on the primary book.]
These children were passed on and on, and I blame the teachers
in the elementary school for just passing these children on.]
]
>> So are you blaming -- ]
>> Exactly.]
I'm blaming the system.]
I'm blaming the teachers.]
I'm blaming all of them, the little children who are starting
out, and I blame the parents who don't insist.]
]
>> I taught early childhood education, and it's a tough -- it's
tough, and there are gaffes.]
I mean, those kids walk into your classroom, they're guests.]
You know, as teachers, we do the best job as that we can, and
sometimes you're dealing with kids who don't speak English or
whose parents don't speak English or you're trying to get them
into parent-teacher conferences, there's disconnected phones,
there's gaps.]
There's only so much a teach Kerr do.]
You know, we do the best we can, but there's only so much we
can do to get the parents on board.]
]
>> It seems now that this problem of disruption, inability to
manage behavior, is becoming a problem affecting even littler
and littler children.]
Did you see the article that was in the paper where there's an
increasing problem with 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds who have to
be removed from their classrooms because they cannot be social,
they cannot manage their behavior.]
They're aggressive.]
They bully.]
They hurt the other children.]
So I don't see how you can blame the teachers for this kind,
whether it's in the food we eat or whether it's in the way our
families are structured, who knows.]
But the fact that you have 3-year-old convicts that have to be
removed from their school population, that is really
interesting to me.]
Frightening, but interesting.]
]
>> One thing you mentioned is where -- well, you're putting
some blame or responsibility, whatever, on the system --
parents, teachers, whatever.]
For passing people along so they get to 11th grade and can't
read a third or fourth grade book, whatever.]
When he was at Kodak, I was a manager there, and I had
engineers with master's degrees that couldn't put a cohesive
sentence if their life depended on it.]
These are educated people.]
They can do their job, but they weren't totally educated.]
Passing people on, you can't blame the teacher for that.]
I've been there -- well, I've been there.]
My daughter is there now.]
The teachers that I'm aware of, obviously I don't know every
teacher, but the ones that I'm aware of would love to hold
those kids back.]
They would give anything to hold those kids back and give them
a chance to catch up to if they can do it, where they need to
be.]
They're not allowed to.]
The school says that child will be passed on.]
That's not the teacher's fault.]
]
>> Plenty of blame to go around, said our by the people citizen
participants.]
As I said, we wanted to spread the discussions beyond
deliberation day itself, so we invited interested parties to
lesson to the citizens, then hold deliberations of their own.]
Community partners, the league of women voters in our region
made one of those conversations happen.]
They focused on the educators of our region.]
They invited teachers, school board members, and other
educators to Nazareth college for a sitdown after the by the
people event.]
These educators picked up on a theme -- the nostalgic talk for
a mythic time in American education.]
]
>> The good old days, when parents did support teachers, there
would have to be something really wrong for them not to do
that, whereas they blamed their own generation of parents for
saying, not my child, can't be true.]
So I thought that was refreshing that they were willing to take
a look -- at their own parenting skills, and they wanted to be
a partner, and they wanted all kinds of information.]
For me, I have 11th grade juniors who are trying to pull away
from their parents a little bit, and so there's a little bit of
tension there because parents would like to know every time a
kid missed an assignment, and this is a kid who's shortly going
off to somewhere else to go to school.]
Although I understand colleges are getting pressure from
parents who want to solve roommate problems -- ]
>> Yeah, we get calls from parents now.]
It's come down to the college level.]
]
>> This isn't used to happen 10 years ago, but increasingly it
does now.]
I think it's just a carryover from what -- well, for one thing,
you have many more people now whose parents themselves went
through college.]
Now, 20 years ago, that wasn't the case.]
You had many students going on to higher education, they were
first-generation college students.]
And so parents certainly are not hesitant to speak up when they
-- ]
>> That's an interesting contrast.]
With the exception of my group, of Jim's group, that parents
were not doing their job, they weren't pulling their weight.]
In the good old days, you know, if your teacher scolded you,
you'd get a whipping when you got home, etc.]
That was repeated a number of times in my group, too.]
But there was even many question about, you know, now that
teachers can't touch children, the discipline is falling apart,
I really -- I really doubt if people are asking for a return of
corporal punishment, but they were talking about it
nostalgically in this context of parents aren't doing their
job.]
]
>> I thought the opposite end of that story.]
I had a woman in my group who was talking about when a teacher
called from home when she was a girl, she got a whupping, but
then she turned around and said, that experience made me
question when a teacher would call home for my child, because I
knew, I got a whupping whether I deserved it or not.]
Nobody ever asked me my side of the story, so she turned around
and she would say, OK, she would -- she expected her children
to come to her and tell her what the problem was, because if
she did get a call out of the blue, then there was going to be
-- there were going to be some serious consequences.]
But if she knew, then there was some room for negotiation.]
It opened up a very interesting conversation about expectations
of teachers and the support of parents, but also expectations
of parents.]
]
>> I think that behavior in the classroom is based on
reciprocal respect.]
I believe that teachers should be respected and so should the
students, and it should not be an authoritative kind of
behavioral consequence.]
Parents should be called for positive comments, as well, and
that makes a more welcoming atmosphere so that this punishment
in the punitive kind of focus is not the most positive in a
classroom situation.]
I think once we let students know that we care about them, we
like them, we're happy to see them and happy to have them
there, that certainly creals the learning curve in the
classroom, and once we welcome parents into a positive rather
than continual negative situation, I think it changes the
dynamic of the classroom tremendously.]
We need to look a little more clearly at that.]
]
>> There were discussions in our group, as well, about the good
old days and what it used to be like in terms of education in
the United States, but I'm not sure many of the participants
were aware of the fact that back, let's say, in 1910, only
about 10% of 18-year-old males graduated from high schools, and
the number of students going to high school and completing high
school seems to increase in the United States since that period
of time.]
]
>> The citizen deliberation on education spent plenty of time
on standardized tests.]
These Rochester educators also had plenty to say about the
comments that they heard.]
Finger Lakes community college professor and president Dan
Hayes asked the other educators if they heard complaints about
teachers teaching for the test, and when the answer was a
resounding yes, Hayes began talking about what he heard.]
]
>> But I had a couple of people that I thought made some good
observations.]
We hear that sometimes as a citizen of standardized testing,
but a couple of the people made the point that as long as the
standardized tests truly reflect what the expectations of the
teacher, of the school system really are, there's nothing wrong
with teaching to the test, which I think is some good food for
thought.]
But one thing that I noticed is that none of the people, at
least that I observed, had any idea about how these
standardized tests are put together.]
They don't have any idea about what the process is that has to
go into putting together a test that supposedly is measuring
the expectations that the teacher or that the curriculum would
have of its students.]
And again, an example of how maybe we as educators have not
done a particularly good job of expressing in layman's terms
what it is that we do or how we test students to see that they
are succeeding.]
]
>> Some of the people in my group are particularly cynical,
actually, about that process of teaching to the test because
they felt that they didn't have a lot of faith in the level of
integrity of the tests, and they cited the example of the math
regent's test, where so many children failed because it was
"too hard," and then, gee, next year the test was much more
successful, and they felt that, are we simply lowering the
standards of these tests by saying that everybody has to pass
these standards or we lower them so that everyone can pass?]
]
>> Let me just share a conversation that took place in the
group I was observing much the conversation dealt with the
pressure that's put on schools and administrators to have their
students do well on the tests.]
One person described what they perceive to be a reality that
this particular school, the principal would encourage who
thought to have some difficulty and might not do well on the
test, to not take the test.]
But the reality is that, if 95% of the students enrolled do not
take the test, the school gets cited for that reason.]
Again, that was a piece of information that was out there, but
is not correct in terms of the need for students to take the
test and a requirement that they do take the test to prevent a
school from being cited for having low performance.]
]
>> I had parents really eloquently talk about the stress that
that test has on the little fourth graders.]
That's good to have a mom say, listen, my daughter had nothing
to worry about on that test, and she was a mess for two weeks.]
And a couple of young teachers talking about, we just suspend
everything he will as curriculum, and we just prep for that
test.]
We have to get little kids used to sitting for 45 minutes or an
hour or an hour and a half sometimes.]
]
>> Filling in little bubbles.]
]
>> Just seat time, just accustoming themselves to the testing
conditions.]
]
>> Yeah, people in my group were really very cynical about the
tests.]
They thought that the tests were -- that we did a lot of
coaching to the tests, and that the stress on students was very
unfair and much too high, and that a lot of things were left
out of the curriculum.]
We actually had one young man who was a recent graduate of the
Rochester city schools, Rochester-area schools, anyway, and he
talked about how teachers would say, Oh, I can't cover that,
that's not on the test, and all that classic stuff about, you
know, the tests beginning to control the curriculum.]
Well, in New York, we've been doing that for a long time, and
it's getting worse.]
]
>> The area league of women voters brought together that group
of educators.]
Another community partner, Rochester cares, also helped spread
the discussion around.]
This organization chose people affected by the state of
education, that's young professionals and those who want to
make education meet the needs of the workforce.]
They met in the boardroom of Paetec communications after the by
the people event.]
You often hear that Rochester needs to keep young families, a
state of education that means everything to those making such a
decision.]
You also hear how education must train the next generation of
workers.]
In this discussion, the question posed is, what is the role of
the schools in developing community life?]
]
>> I would love to see at least a state legislator locate her
or his office in a school.]
The kind of things that need to be happening are things that
are going to get the community to embrace the school, not just
see the school as that to which their tax dollars go and the
glitter on their lawn, whatever, and that's certainly not
characterizing every sit zerning but that's a pervasive view
out there.]
Things that get people into the school and students that
children have a chance to see other people functioning in the
work setting in other ways that make them realize they're going
to be part of the community where their school is located.]
]
>> I think we still have to come back to the true purpose of
our schools is education.]
Because of our society being what it is, we've expanded the
things that happened within that context, but let's think about
it, is it really a responsibility of the school or is there
another organization, social services, that's responsible for
delivering that and as long as we haven't had the kids within
facility where we can reach and connect with them, you know, we
should take advantage of that.]
But should it be the charge of the school to see that this
happens?]
]
>> That was also brought up in discussion, should schools be
teaching puppets?]
The moral is don't steal, how to share things and all that, and
I agree that the school should be there to teach.]
If there are other social services that help clothe the
student, help teach the student, help mentor the student, but
the school should get to be about education.]
The other things should be a separate entity.]
]
>> Having been the daughter of a teacher, I really believe that
in every aspect of the world, it does take a village to raise a
child.]
And for somebody to spend so much time in an area where it's
the only place we might have access to it in the case of a city
child, for example, is the only place that they might have
access to learning about basic life skills is an absolute
necessity that they do learn them in school.]
It's something that I strongly advocate, and in particular
being a business owner, I don't see a lot of students coming
out of school having those basic life skills.]
There's a national program out there called microsociety, which
essentially teaches children in the elementary school to take
certain pieces of life and transform their education into an
actual micro society.]
My mother happened to run one at churchville, where I went to
school, and they took a wing of the school and created a
restaurant, they created a court system, they created a retail
location, a number of different banks they had, so a number of
different places where, for an hour a day, the students would
have to actually travel between these different things, and
some students were managers, some students were employees.]
They had to learn how to write checks, balance a checkbook,
which, in all of that, it's to say that they're learning the
necessities of living.]
And my favorite quote personally is from mark Twain, I never
let my schooling interfere with my education.]
And that is truly -- school encompasses both school and
education, so there's got to be a balance.]
]
>> I was just thinking that, I've been always told that you
learn best by experience and practice.]
What experiences can the schools provide?]
How many experiences can schools provide if it's during the
school programs, you know, bringing in other communities or
businesses, and they are teaching them different experiences,
how to balance a checkbook and whatnot.]
Just how many different experiences can we expose to children
in the school in order for them to learn?]
]
>> Roche Lochians on the -- Rochesterians on the state of
education, part of the national by the people project.]
Transcripts of these interviews can be found on our website,
wxxi.org.]
Now let's move to the business section with the "Democrat and
Chronicle."]
]
>> Joining us is Ellen rosen, business editor for the "Democrat
and Chronicle."]
Hi, Ellen.]
]
>> Hi, juli.]
]
>> Starting off with the Rochester top 100.]
What is that?]
]
>> It's a put put together by the Rochester business alliance.]
It's self-nominated, and it ends up ranking the top 100 fastest
growing private companies.]
Now, how they determine fastest growing is the companies have
to submit their revenues.]
They have to be companies that have a million dollars in
revenue for each of the last three years, and it's ranked on
percentage growth.]
Kpmg compiles the statistics and comes out with its list.]
]
>> OK.]
Now, local business and government leaders have really been
talking up the high-tech industry, but this list showed there's
lots of other industries that make up these growing companies.]
]
>> Oh, definitely.]
High-tech continues to be a growing presence on the top 100
list.]
It's listed in its 19th year.]
There are also some things, like manufacturing did very well on
the list this year.]
The manufacturers tell us they found niches that manufacturing
isn't dead, that if you find the right niche, the right thing
that you can manufacture, that you can be successful.]
Construction also had a very good year this probably, probably
with those things going on.]
]
>> E.M.A., design ought makes mission, it has been the winner
for two years in a row.]
Tell us about their success.]
]
>> It's been the winner for two years in a row.]
The C.E.O. of that family-run business, he runs it with his
wife, and he basically said last year his goal was to win two
years in a row.]
This year at the luncheon, there were about 1,450 people at the
convention center, he got up with last year -- he brought last
year's statue the, and he took this year's and announced plans
to come back next year and get a third one.]
]
>> And Nancy will have to come with him and carry the third
one.]
]
>> Yeah.]
]
>> Finally, do you see any companies that once depended on the
Xeroxes and Kodaks for their business, and they found another
-- they were suppliers, and now they found another way to
survive and thrive?]
]
>> Well, we talked to Kodak and Xerox suppliers over time in
the past.]
We reported that they really have seen things coming, so they
decided to diversify and they had some success.]
One company that shows up consistently is F.M. resources, which
is a top minority supplier for Kodak, but has managed to
diversify its customer base and continues to be successful.]
]
>> Seeking of Kodak, a little bit of good news for that company
this week.]
]
>> Well, it's a little bit of good news.]
Kodak had to restate its earnings for most of 2005.]
It had to do with sarbanes-Oxley kicking in.]
Basically, what it comes down to, they miscalculated severance
for one employee, which threw off all of the earnings by $15
million.]
The way this ends up working out, and the good news piece is
their losses for the year are slightly less than they would
have been otherwise.]
]
>> And they also came out again on top of the U.S. digital
camera market.]
]
>> They D. the company that tracks that says that they are on
top of the U.S. digital camera market, the top seller.]
]
>> So that -- ]
>> Forty quart near row.]
But the flip side that they expect the digital camera market to
really be slowing down in the coming year, not as many cameras
to be sold worldwide, and Kodak has taken that into account,
and they're actually going to be manufacturing fewer this
year.]
]
>> In this day and age, we think of hospitals being big money
losers, but strong memorial hospital actually came out fairly
well this time around.]
]
>> Strong memorial just reported today they released their
financials for the last fiscal year, and they actually had
probably their best year ever.]
They had a surplus of 4.9%.]
These are nonprofit hospitals, so they don't really report
earnings or losses, like hospitals do, like profit companies
do.]
They report the surplus instead.]
The state looks for healthy hospitals, a surplus between 3% and
5%.]
Most hospitals don't make that.]
Strong was close to the 5%, which makes a really good showing.]
]
>> Could you update Delphi?]
]
>> They reported earnings this quarter, $788 million loss for
the third quarter am they continue to blame high wage costs.]
]
>> A real concern for people here.]
]
>> It's going to be something we're going to watch.]
>> Thanks so much, Ellen.]
We need to know your views on our report.]
You have two ways to do it.]
Emaim us at needtoknow@wxxi.org, or call our response line.]
That number is 258-0250.]
]
>> And that concludes our report this week.]
Next week, we'll take a look at a stuttering attempt at
economic development in our region.]
Join us then.]
]
>> Local support for wxxi's by the people effort is provided by
MacNeil/Lehrer productions and by the William and flora Hulett
foundation, Rockefeller brothers fund, and the corporation for
public broadcasting.]
Support also provided by the Rochester institute of
technology.]
[captioning made possible by U.S. department of education]]
Captioned by the]
National Captioning Institute]
--www.ncicap.org--]