Published on Thursday, May 22, 2008 by New York Daily News
New York 8th-Graders Boycott Practice Exam But Teacher May Get Ax
by Juan Gonzalez
Students at a South Bronx middle school have pulled off a stunning boycott against standardized testing.0522 03 1
More than 160 students in six different classes at Intermediate School 318 in the South Bronx - virtually the entire eighth grade - refused to take last Wednesday’s three-hour practice exam for next month’s statewide social studies test.
Instead, the students handed in blank exams.
Then they submitted signed petitions with a list of grievances to school Principal Maria Lopez and the Department of Education.
“We’ve had a whole bunch of these diagnostic tests all year,” Tatiana Nelson, 13, one of the protest leaders, said Tuesday outside the school. “They don’t even count toward our grades. The school system’s just treating us like test dummies for the companies that make the exams.”
According to the petition, they are sick and tired of the “constant, excessive and stressful testing” that causes them to “lose valuable instructional time with our teachers.”
School administrators blamed the boycott on a 30-year-old probationary social studies teacher, Douglas Avella.
The afternoon of the protest, the principal ordered Avella out of the classroom, reassigned him to an empty room in the school and ordered him to have no further contact with students.
A few days later, in a reprimand letter, Lopez accused Avella of initiating the boycott and taking “actions [that] caused a riot at the school.”
The students say their protest was entirely peaceful. In only one class, they say, was there some loud clapping after one exam proctor reacted angrily to their boycott.
This week, Lopez notified Avella in writing that he was to attend a meeting today for “your end of the year rating and my possible recommendation for the discontinuance of your probationary service.”
“They’re saying Mr. Avella made us do this,” said Johnny Cruz, 15, another boycott leader. “They don’t think we have brains of our own, like we’re robots. We students wanted to make this statement. The school is oppressing us too much with all these tests.”
Two days after the boycott, the students say, the principal held a meeting with all the students to find out how their protest was organized.
Avella on Tuesday denied that he urged the students to boycott tests.
Yes, he holds liberal views and is critical of the school system’s increased emphasis on standardized tests, Avella said, but the students decided to organize the protest after weeks of complaining about all the diagnostic tests the school was making them take.
“My students know they are welcome in my class to have open discussions,” Avella said. “I teach them critical thinking.”
“Some teachers implied our graduation ceremony would be in danger, that we didn’t have the right to protest against the test,” said Tia Rivera, 14. “Well, we did it.”
Lopez did not return calls for comment.
“This guy was far over the line in a lot of the ways he was running his classroom,” said Department of Education spokesman David Cantor. “He was pulled because he was inappropriate with the kids. He was giving them messages that were inappropriate.”
Several students defended Avella. They say he had made social studies an exciting subject for them.
“Now they’ve taken away the teacher we love only a few weeks before our real state exam for social studies,” Tatiana Nelson said. “How does that help us?”
jgonzalez@nydailynews.com
22 May 2008
15 May 2008
05 April 2008
clean that s***
From Plenty Mag
Green spring cleaning: the bath
Washroom, loo, powder room, toilet—whatever you call the bathroom, it's probably most people's least favorite room to clean. While scrubbing away soap scum and stains won't ever put a smile on our faces, we do enjoy using green products that won't harm our health or the environment.
For instance, conventional bathroom cleaners often rely on chlorine bleach, which is caustic to inhale or touch and turns into toxic organochlorines in our waterways. If combined with ammonia, which gives off acrid fumes and is highly poisonous if swallowed, chlorine produces toxic chloramine gas. Hey, accidents could happen in a cleaning frenzy, so best to avoid these ingredients.
Spring is the perfect time to buy greener cleaners or mix your own. Do remember, though, to ventilate well and wear gloves as you work.
Glass and surface cleaners (including windows, mirrors)
For quick grime removal and sparkle, we recommend this easy all-purpose recipe: Mix ¼ cup white vinegar and a few drops of plant-based liquid soap with a quart of warm water. Shake in spray bottle, spritz and wipe with a clean rag.
Porcelain and tile
For more persistent dirt, a good D.I.Y. soft scrub is baking soda moistened with liquid soap and white vinegar. To toughen, add washing soda, a natural mineral product found in supermarket laundry aisles. Or, dip half a lemon in Borax, another mineral-based laundry cleaner, and rub the encrusted lemon face on tubs and tiles. Scents your bath with natural fragrance, too!
To buy, the following powders and soft scrubs work well and are healthily free of ammonia, chlorine, and potentially hormone-disrupting petrochemicals such as alkyphenol ethoxylates (APEs), phthalates (added to synthetic fragrances) and glycol ethers.
We also like the following companies because they freely list their active ingredients even though they are not required to disclose these so-called “trade secrets” by law. The Velvet Hammer, Ecover, Seventh Generation, Naturally Yours, and Bon Ami all-mineral scouring powder or soft scrub, found in most household supply and drug stores.
Mildew busters
Spray with a slightly stronger vinegar mixture, say, up to 1 cup with a quart of water and some liquid soap. Leave on for at least 2 hours, and wipe clean. Add baking soda for extra scouring. This removed four years’ worth of mildew on the "Honu" (green sea turtle) shower curtain with which our son will never part. Or use a vinegar-based product such as Eco Friendly Window Kleener, sold at drug and natural foods stores, or here.
The toilet bowl
Last but not least, the toilet can always benefit from a little brightening. A green chemist we know recommends a “two-step method”: Use a toilet bowl cleaner and brush to scrub off stains and mineral deposits with baking soda or one of the commercial powders or soft scrubs above: spray toilet seat, rim and lid with a cleaner containing hydrogen peroxide, let stand for five minutes, and wipe off with a sponge. Hydrogen peroxide, which is registered by the EPA as an antimicrobial pesticide—really, see for yourself!
That’s if you’re terribly worried about germs. In most cases, a wipedown with white vinegar should suffice for the lid and seat.
Now that your bathroom’s green and clean, treat yourself: Be the first to enjoy the facilities!
Green spring cleaning: the bath
Washroom, loo, powder room, toilet—whatever you call the bathroom, it's probably most people's least favorite room to clean. While scrubbing away soap scum and stains won't ever put a smile on our faces, we do enjoy using green products that won't harm our health or the environment.
For instance, conventional bathroom cleaners often rely on chlorine bleach, which is caustic to inhale or touch and turns into toxic organochlorines in our waterways. If combined with ammonia, which gives off acrid fumes and is highly poisonous if swallowed, chlorine produces toxic chloramine gas. Hey, accidents could happen in a cleaning frenzy, so best to avoid these ingredients.
Spring is the perfect time to buy greener cleaners or mix your own. Do remember, though, to ventilate well and wear gloves as you work.
Glass and surface cleaners (including windows, mirrors)
For quick grime removal and sparkle, we recommend this easy all-purpose recipe: Mix ¼ cup white vinegar and a few drops of plant-based liquid soap with a quart of warm water. Shake in spray bottle, spritz and wipe with a clean rag.
Porcelain and tile
For more persistent dirt, a good D.I.Y. soft scrub is baking soda moistened with liquid soap and white vinegar. To toughen, add washing soda, a natural mineral product found in supermarket laundry aisles. Or, dip half a lemon in Borax, another mineral-based laundry cleaner, and rub the encrusted lemon face on tubs and tiles. Scents your bath with natural fragrance, too!
To buy, the following powders and soft scrubs work well and are healthily free of ammonia, chlorine, and potentially hormone-disrupting petrochemicals such as alkyphenol ethoxylates (APEs), phthalates (added to synthetic fragrances) and glycol ethers.
We also like the following companies because they freely list their active ingredients even though they are not required to disclose these so-called “trade secrets” by law. The Velvet Hammer, Ecover, Seventh Generation, Naturally Yours, and Bon Ami all-mineral scouring powder or soft scrub, found in most household supply and drug stores.
Mildew busters
Spray with a slightly stronger vinegar mixture, say, up to 1 cup with a quart of water and some liquid soap. Leave on for at least 2 hours, and wipe clean. Add baking soda for extra scouring. This removed four years’ worth of mildew on the "Honu" (green sea turtle) shower curtain with which our son will never part. Or use a vinegar-based product such as Eco Friendly Window Kleener, sold at drug and natural foods stores, or here.
The toilet bowl
Last but not least, the toilet can always benefit from a little brightening. A green chemist we know recommends a “two-step method”: Use a toilet bowl cleaner and brush to scrub off stains and mineral deposits with baking soda or one of the commercial powders or soft scrubs above: spray toilet seat, rim and lid with a cleaner containing hydrogen peroxide, let stand for five minutes, and wipe off with a sponge. Hydrogen peroxide, which is registered by the EPA as an antimicrobial pesticide—really, see for yourself!
That’s if you’re terribly worried about germs. In most cases, a wipedown with white vinegar should suffice for the lid and seat.
Now that your bathroom’s green and clean, treat yourself: Be the first to enjoy the facilities!
14 December 2007
i'm the worst
and have been gone oh-too-long. but, here is a great article released yesterday:
Published on Thursday, December 13, 2007 by Earth Policy Institute
Bottled Water Boycotts: Back-to-the-Tap Movement Gains Momentum
by Janet Larsen
From San Francisco to New York to Paris, city governments, high-class restaurants, schools, and religious groups are ditching bottled water in favor of what comes out of the faucet. With people no longer content to pay 1,000 times as much for bottled water, a product no better than water from the tap, a backlash against bottled water is growing.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors, which represents some 1,100 American cities, discussed at its June 2007 meeting the irony of purchasing bottled water for city employees and for city functions while at the same time touting the quality of municipal water. The group passed a resolution sponsored by Mayors Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, Rocky Anderson of Salt Lake City, and R. T. Rybak of Minneapolis that called for the examination of bottled water’s environmental impact. The resolution noted that with $43 billion a year going to provide clean drinking water in cities across the country, “the United States’ municipal water systems are among the finest in the world.”
While the Mayors Conference fell short of moving to stop taxpayer money from filling the coffers of water bottlers, a growing number of cities are heading in that direction. Los Angeles, which has restricted the purchase of bottled water with city funds since 1987, now has more company. By the end of 2007, purchasing bottled water will be off-limits for San Francisco’s departments and agencies, saving a half-million dollars each year and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. St. Louis is poised to ban bottled water purchases for city employees in early 2008.
At the launch of Corporate Accountability International’s “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign in October, Mayor Anderson of Salt Lake City described the “total absurdity and irresponsibility, both economic and environmental, of purchasing and using bottled water when we have perfectly good and safe municipal sources of tap water.” He urged city government departments and restaurants to stop buying bottled water.
In November, the city council of Chicago, beleaguered by swelling landfills and a stretched budget, placed a landmark tax of 5¢ on every bottle of water sold in the city in order to discourage consumption. That same month, Illinois state agencies were banned from purchasing bottled water with government funds. With 86 percent of used water bottles in the United States ending up as garbage or litter instead of being recycled, switching from the bottle to the tap helps to alleviate the trash burden.
New York City is urging residents to drink tap water, which is naturally filtered in the protected Catskill forest region. In Kentucky, the Louisville water utility hands out free bottles for residents to fill with “Pure Tap.” Dozens of other local governments are talking up tap water and are looking into banning the bottle. (See list of other cities and initiatives.)
Tap water promotional campaigns would have seemed quaint a few decades ago, when water in bottles was a rarity. Now such endeavors are needed to counteract the pervasive marketing that has caused consumers to lose faith in the faucet. In fact, more than a quarter of bottled water is just processed tap water, including top-selling Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani. When Pepsi announced in July that it would clearly label its Aquafina water as from a “public water source,” it no doubt shocked everyone who believed that bottles with labels depicting pristine mountains or glaciers delivered a superior product.
Despite the less-frequent quality testing and sometimes commonplace origin of the product, bottled water consumption has soared. Annual consumption in the United States in 1976 was less than 2 gallons for every man, woman, and child; some 30 years later, Americans on average each now drink about 30 gallons of bottled water a year. (See data.)
All this hydration costs Americans more than $15 billion a year. The price of individual bottles of water ranges up to several dollars a gallon (and more for designer brands), while tap water is delivered directly to homes and offices for less than a penny a gallon. People complaining about $3-a-gallon gasoline may start to wonder why they are paying even more per gallon for bottled water.
With sales growing by 10 percent each year, far faster than any other beverage, bottled water now appears to be the drink of choice for many Americans-they swallow more of it than milk, juice, beer, coffee, or tea. (See data.) While some industry analysts are counting on bottled water to beat out carbonated soft drinks to top the charts in the near future, the burgeoning back-to-the-tap movement may reverse the trend.
In contrast to tap water, which is delivered through an energy-efficient infrastructure, bottled water is an incredibly wasteful product. It is usually packaged in single-serving plastic bottles made with fossil fuels. Just manufacturing the 29 billion plastic bottles used for water in the United States each year requires the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of crude oil.
After being filled, the bottles may travel far. Nearly one quarter of bottled water crosses national borders before reaching consumers, and part of the cachet of certain bottled water brands is their remote origin. Adding in the Pacific Institute’s estimates for the energy used for pumping and processing, transportation, and refrigeration, brings the annual fossil fuel footprint of bottled water consumption in the United States to over 50 million barrels of oil equivalent-enough to run 3 million cars for one year. If everyone drank as much bottled water as Americans do, the world would need the equivalent of more than 1 billion barrels of oil to produce close to 650 billion individual bottles.
Concerns about this high energy use and the associated contribution to climate change, along with worries about waste, are driving many groups back to tap water. The United Church of Canada is one of the religious groups abandoning bottled water for moral reasons. The Berkeley school district no longer offers bottled water. And after watching 3,000 empty bottles pile up each week, the Nashville law firm Bass, Berry, & Sims has stopped stocking bottled water.
Europeans have long led the world in per person consumption of bottled water. Italy tops the list worldwide, with Italians drinking 54 gallons per person in 2006. Italy is closely trailed in per capita consumption by the United Arab Emirates and Mexico, followed by France, Belgium, Germany, and Spain. (See data.)
Yet even in Western Europe the bottle is starting to lose clout. Rome, a city of many historic fountains, is promoting its tap water. Florence’s city council, schools, and other public offices offer only city water. In the United Kingdom, the Treasury and the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have ceased offering bottled water at official functions. Bottled water sales in Scandinavia are projected to fall because of growing environmental concerns.
Even France, home to Evian, is seeing a sales slowdown. During a 2005 tap water promotion campaign in Paris, the water utility handed out refillable glass carafes. Now Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë serves only tap water at official events and encourages others to do the same. Total bottled water sales in France fell in 2004 and 2005, but rebounded in 2006.
Slowing sales may be the wave of the future as the bottle boycott movement picks up speed. With more than 1 billion people around the globe still lacking access to a safe and reliable source of water, the $100 billion the world spends on bottled water every year could certainly be put to better use creating and maintaining safe public water infrastructure everywhere.
Published on Thursday, December 13, 2007 by Earth Policy Institute
Bottled Water Boycotts: Back-to-the-Tap Movement Gains Momentum
by Janet Larsen
From San Francisco to New York to Paris, city governments, high-class restaurants, schools, and religious groups are ditching bottled water in favor of what comes out of the faucet. With people no longer content to pay 1,000 times as much for bottled water, a product no better than water from the tap, a backlash against bottled water is growing.
The U.S. Conference of Mayors, which represents some 1,100 American cities, discussed at its June 2007 meeting the irony of purchasing bottled water for city employees and for city functions while at the same time touting the quality of municipal water. The group passed a resolution sponsored by Mayors Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, Rocky Anderson of Salt Lake City, and R. T. Rybak of Minneapolis that called for the examination of bottled water’s environmental impact. The resolution noted that with $43 billion a year going to provide clean drinking water in cities across the country, “the United States’ municipal water systems are among the finest in the world.”
While the Mayors Conference fell short of moving to stop taxpayer money from filling the coffers of water bottlers, a growing number of cities are heading in that direction. Los Angeles, which has restricted the purchase of bottled water with city funds since 1987, now has more company. By the end of 2007, purchasing bottled water will be off-limits for San Francisco’s departments and agencies, saving a half-million dollars each year and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. St. Louis is poised to ban bottled water purchases for city employees in early 2008.
At the launch of Corporate Accountability International’s “Think Outside the Bottle” campaign in October, Mayor Anderson of Salt Lake City described the “total absurdity and irresponsibility, both economic and environmental, of purchasing and using bottled water when we have perfectly good and safe municipal sources of tap water.” He urged city government departments and restaurants to stop buying bottled water.
In November, the city council of Chicago, beleaguered by swelling landfills and a stretched budget, placed a landmark tax of 5¢ on every bottle of water sold in the city in order to discourage consumption. That same month, Illinois state agencies were banned from purchasing bottled water with government funds. With 86 percent of used water bottles in the United States ending up as garbage or litter instead of being recycled, switching from the bottle to the tap helps to alleviate the trash burden.
New York City is urging residents to drink tap water, which is naturally filtered in the protected Catskill forest region. In Kentucky, the Louisville water utility hands out free bottles for residents to fill with “Pure Tap.” Dozens of other local governments are talking up tap water and are looking into banning the bottle. (See list of other cities and initiatives.)
Tap water promotional campaigns would have seemed quaint a few decades ago, when water in bottles was a rarity. Now such endeavors are needed to counteract the pervasive marketing that has caused consumers to lose faith in the faucet. In fact, more than a quarter of bottled water is just processed tap water, including top-selling Aquafina and Coca-Cola’s Dasani. When Pepsi announced in July that it would clearly label its Aquafina water as from a “public water source,” it no doubt shocked everyone who believed that bottles with labels depicting pristine mountains or glaciers delivered a superior product.
Despite the less-frequent quality testing and sometimes commonplace origin of the product, bottled water consumption has soared. Annual consumption in the United States in 1976 was less than 2 gallons for every man, woman, and child; some 30 years later, Americans on average each now drink about 30 gallons of bottled water a year. (See data.)
All this hydration costs Americans more than $15 billion a year. The price of individual bottles of water ranges up to several dollars a gallon (and more for designer brands), while tap water is delivered directly to homes and offices for less than a penny a gallon. People complaining about $3-a-gallon gasoline may start to wonder why they are paying even more per gallon for bottled water.
With sales growing by 10 percent each year, far faster than any other beverage, bottled water now appears to be the drink of choice for many Americans-they swallow more of it than milk, juice, beer, coffee, or tea. (See data.) While some industry analysts are counting on bottled water to beat out carbonated soft drinks to top the charts in the near future, the burgeoning back-to-the-tap movement may reverse the trend.
In contrast to tap water, which is delivered through an energy-efficient infrastructure, bottled water is an incredibly wasteful product. It is usually packaged in single-serving plastic bottles made with fossil fuels. Just manufacturing the 29 billion plastic bottles used for water in the United States each year requires the equivalent of more than 17 million barrels of crude oil.
After being filled, the bottles may travel far. Nearly one quarter of bottled water crosses national borders before reaching consumers, and part of the cachet of certain bottled water brands is their remote origin. Adding in the Pacific Institute’s estimates for the energy used for pumping and processing, transportation, and refrigeration, brings the annual fossil fuel footprint of bottled water consumption in the United States to over 50 million barrels of oil equivalent-enough to run 3 million cars for one year. If everyone drank as much bottled water as Americans do, the world would need the equivalent of more than 1 billion barrels of oil to produce close to 650 billion individual bottles.
Concerns about this high energy use and the associated contribution to climate change, along with worries about waste, are driving many groups back to tap water. The United Church of Canada is one of the religious groups abandoning bottled water for moral reasons. The Berkeley school district no longer offers bottled water. And after watching 3,000 empty bottles pile up each week, the Nashville law firm Bass, Berry, & Sims has stopped stocking bottled water.
Europeans have long led the world in per person consumption of bottled water. Italy tops the list worldwide, with Italians drinking 54 gallons per person in 2006. Italy is closely trailed in per capita consumption by the United Arab Emirates and Mexico, followed by France, Belgium, Germany, and Spain. (See data.)
Yet even in Western Europe the bottle is starting to lose clout. Rome, a city of many historic fountains, is promoting its tap water. Florence’s city council, schools, and other public offices offer only city water. In the United Kingdom, the Treasury and the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs have ceased offering bottled water at official functions. Bottled water sales in Scandinavia are projected to fall because of growing environmental concerns.
Even France, home to Evian, is seeing a sales slowdown. During a 2005 tap water promotion campaign in Paris, the water utility handed out refillable glass carafes. Now Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë serves only tap water at official events and encourages others to do the same. Total bottled water sales in France fell in 2004 and 2005, but rebounded in 2006.
Slowing sales may be the wave of the future as the bottle boycott movement picks up speed. With more than 1 billion people around the globe still lacking access to a safe and reliable source of water, the $100 billion the world spends on bottled water every year could certainly be put to better use creating and maintaining safe public water infrastructure everywhere.
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