NYS commissioner and education irony

Letter to Editor July 17

NYS Ed Commissioner Needs Perspective

I read with some disbelief the Buffalo News front page article of July 12, 2013 that reported the NYS Commissioner’s recent suggestion that students from two Buffalo Public Schools attend the BOCES program. As with many of my colleagues, I mostly choose to ignore bombastic political types that put down Buffalo schools and I simply continue working as hard as I can to get students a good education. However, the striking irony of the suggestion that students should attend BOCES program could not escape a response. Buffalo Public Schools were known for the excellent vocational programs for better part of the 20^th century. Programs in the skill trades, architectural engineering and even aeronautics were premier programs from which large numbers of Buffalo people can trace their training and graduation. In the last two decades the State Education Department has promoted the idea that every student should take courses that prepare them for college. As the volume got turned up on this idea, vocational tracts became less viable to the point where the Buffalo Vocational Program is a skeleton of it’s former self. The irony is self-evident. Now in 2013, the commissioner wants to advocate for these vocational programs in a way that smacks of politics and would be an impractical logistical nightmare. This seems to be the usual NYSED rhetoric that keeps creating the self-fulfilling negative stereotype of Buffalo, distances itself from the problem, doesn’t think creatively about how to work with stakeholders for the good of Buffalo students, is ill-informed (see John Hopkins response in the same Buffalo news article), has lost self-reflective abilities and most of all perspective.