The Ridgewood Blog Brings a Free Market Laissez-faire Point of View to Local, New Jersey State and National Issues.
Yeah, reality is we’re not producing competitive, top tier students anymore despite top tier taxes and spending $110 mm a year. Better change the slogan from “Tradition of Excellence” if you don’t think rankings matter. Reality is the best universities aren’t competing for graduates of RHS. Twenty years ago we produced a lot more students matriculating to the best colleges in the country.
file photo by Boyd Loving
Ridgewood schools were ranked nationally in the 1980s and 1990s. No more. As the “CEO” of a school board with a $110 mm annual budget, 10 “offices” and 500 employees, he has overseen the demise of our schools over the past decade. The “product” is in secular decline apart from very niche & expensive “special needs” education. Surely with a budget like that, we can attract world class & innovative leaders and educators that can improve our schools? Instead we get weather updates from Fishbein. If he’s so great, let him destroy another school system instead of ours.
photo courtesy of the Ridgewood Board of Education
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, the Ridgewood School district Welcomes everyone to the 2018-2019 School Year:
Continue reading Welcome to the 2018-2019 Ridgewood School Year
The Board of Ed knew exactly what it was doing when they changed the election date. This totally removed the possibility of voters voting the budget down and released a wild spending spree on the part of the board. They are literally saying, “You can’t stop us. We can charge as much as we want.” If the money was being spent to evaluate some of the teachers, maybe it could be well spent. Years ago we were actually told by a teacher on back to school night–“I’m tenured, I can do whatever I want until I retire.” This was the answer to our question about what she was teaching. And throwing more money is not going to improve our county rankings, much less state and national, any more than it helps the schools in Paterson and Newark to just throw money at them. “Gilding the lily doesn’t make it an any better lily.” Is any of this money going to be used to improve the lunchroom situation? It is neither sensible nor sanitary to have students eating on the floor. The board should be forced to seriously reevaluate this budget and see what they can cut and what is being directed towards actual needs, not frills to make Ridgewood look better.