Why We Are Considering Home Schooling

Yesterday, Ruth Ann and I met with out daughter Erin’s school assistant principal to discuss serious concerns we have with what has been going on during the recently completed school year.  As Amistad is a dual language school, Erin has been studying both English and Spanish and up until this year her English and Spanish work has been graded separately.  This year, her English and Spanish grade has been combined.  This violates every logical grading standard I know.  Even though Amistad is a English/Spanish dual language, English and Spanish are separate languages and have to be graded separately.  You can grade Math, Science Social Studies and other subject based on performance in both languages, but the languages themselves must be evaluated based on performance in those languages.  Conflating the two is not acceptable.  Then there is the unit that studied world religions.  The students were required to debate each other trying to convince the other that their assigned religion was better than the other.  This is completely unacceptable in a New York City Public School.  In addition, when my daughter informed her teacher that Jews don’t worship the Messiah, we worship God, she was told she (and I, a Jew) are wrong.  Therefore, since the school stands by their policies and procedures, we are beginning the process of removing her from Amistad and home schooling her.  I will not consider a charter, especially a Moskowitz charter, where subjects are taught along the lines of, “The correct answer to question 4 is C.”  The only way our public schools will be saved is for parents to remove their children from them so that they lose per-head funding.  Maybe then administrators will listen to us and start teaching our children properly.