Welcome to the Coatesville Dems Blog

Public Corruption in Chester County, PA

I believe an unlikely mix of alleged drug trafficking related politicos and alleged white nationalist related politicos united to elect the infamous “Bloc of Four” in the abysmal voter turnout election of 2005. During their four year term the drug business was good again and white nationalists used Coatesville as an example on white supremacist websites like “Stormfront”. Strong community organization and support from law enforcement, in particular Chester County District Attorney Joseph W. Carroll has begun to turn our community around. The Chester County drug trafficking that I believe centers on Coatesville continues and I believe we still have public officials in place that profit from the drug sales. But the people here are amazing and continue to work against the odds to make Coatesville a good place to live.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

New Math in “The Wire” - Japanese schools - Common Core - Why do Americans Stink at Math?


In the HBO series “The Wire” Officer Roland Pryzbylewski can't make it as a Baltimore Police. Prezbo has an ability in math that shined when he developed algorithms for tracking drug dealers as a Baltimore City Police. He realizes his true calling is teaching, teaching math. 

Mr. Pryzbylewski is having the same difficulty teaching math as the other teachers trying to teach for the test.  Mr. Prezbo is watching students playing a card game and gets their attention by using basic math to predict what is in someone’s hand. When he discovers that dice is the game the kids usually play he he uses that interest to develop his relatable math curriculum. 

Mr. Prezbo discovers brand new math books stored in the school basement along with brand new computers. As explained in the New York Times Magazine article "Why do Americans Stink at Math” the new materials are not being used because the teachers were never trained how to use them. 

In his way Mr. Pryzbylewski is teaching the same “New Math” that Akihiko Takahashi did in Japan and now teaches in Chicago.



"When Akihiko Takahashi was a junior in college in 1978, he was like most of the other students at his university in suburban Tokyo. He had a vague sense of wanting to accomplish something but no clue what that something should be. But that spring he met a man who would become his mentor, and this relationship set the course of his entire career. 
Takeshi Matsuyama was an elementary-school teacher, but like a small number of instructors in Japan, he taught not just young children but also college students who wanted to become teachers. At the university-affiliated elementary school where Matsuyama taught, he turned his classroom into a kind of laboratory, concocting and trying out new teaching ideas. When Takahashi met him, Matsuyama was in the middle of his boldest experiment yet — revolutionizing the way students learned math by radically changing the way teachers taught it. 
Instead of having students memorize and then practice endless lists of equations — which Takahashi remembered from his own days in school — Matsuyama taught his college students to encourage passionate discussions among children so they would come to uncover math’s procedures, properties and proofs for themselves. One day, for example, the young students would derive the formula for finding the area of a rectangle; the next, they would use what they learned to do the same for parallelograms. Taught this new way, math itself seemed transformed. It was not dull misery but challenging, stimulating and even fun. 
Takahashi quickly became a convert. He discovered that these ideas came from reformers in the United States, and he dedicated himself to learning to teach like an American. Over the next 12 years, as the Japanese educational system embraced this more vibrant approach to math, Takahashi taught first through sixth grade. Teaching, and thinking about teaching, was practically all he did. A quiet man with calm, smiling eyes, his passion for a new kind of math instruction could take his colleagues by surprise. 'He looks very gentle and kind,' Kazuyuki Shirai, a fellow math teacher, told me through a translator. 'But when he starts talking about math, everything changes.' 
Takahashi was especially enthralled with an American group called the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, or N.C.T.M., which published manifestoes throughout the 1980s, prescribing radical changes in the teaching of math. Spending late nights at school, Takahashi read every one. Like many professionals in Japan, teachers often said they did their work in the name of their mentor. It was as if Takahashi bore two influences: Matsuyama and the American reformers. 
Takahashi, who is 58, became one of his country’s leading math teachers, once attracting 1,000 observers to a public lesson. He participated in a classroom equivalent of 'Iron Chef,' the popular Japanese television show. But in 1991, when he got the opportunity to take a new job in America, teaching at a school run by the Japanese Education Ministry for expats in Chicago, he did not hesitate. With his wife, a graphic designer, he left his friends, family, colleagues — everything he knew — and moved to the United States, eager to be at the center of the new math. 
As soon as he arrived, he started spending his days off visiting American schools. One of the first math classes he observed gave him such a jolt that he assumed there must have been some kind of mistake. The class looked exactly like his own memories of school. 'I thought, Well, that’s only this class,' Takahashi said. But the next class looked like the first, and so did the next and the one after that. The Americans might have invented the world’s best methods for teaching math to children, but it was difficult to find anyone actually using them. 
It wasn’t the first time that Americans had dreamed up a better way to teach math and then failed to implement it. The same pattern played out in the 1960s, when schools gripped by a post-Sputnik inferiority complex unveiled an ambitious “new math,” only to find, a few years later, that nothing actually changed. In fact, efforts to introduce a better way of teaching math stretch back to the 1800s. The story is the same every time: a big, excited push, followed by mass confusion and then a return to conventional practices. 
The trouble always starts when teachers are told to put innovative ideas into practice without much guidance on how to do it. In the hands of unprepared teachers, the reforms turn to nonsense, perplexing students more than helping them. One 1965 Peanuts cartoon depicts the young blond-haired Sally struggling to understand her new-math assignment: 'Sets . . . one to one matching . . . equivalent sets . . . sets of one . . . sets of two . . . renaming two. . . .' After persisting for three valiant frames, she throws back her head and bursts into tears: 'All I want to know is, how much is two and two?”

MORE AT:
The New York Times 
Magazine

by Elizabeth Green July 23, 2014 

Saturday, July 26, 2014

SECTION 8 HOUSING, REAGAN, COATESVILLE AND DRUG DEALERS

The allowance for Section 8 housing is a fixed amount and is the same anywhere in Pennsylvania. 

Coatesville has the lowest real estate values in Chester County and the lowest cost rental housing.  So most Section 8 housing is here. 

Section 8 housing was designed to allow low-income people to be integrated into middle class areas. 

Reagan saw to it that low-income people were segregated into ghettos thus making it much easier for organized crime to prey on poor people to run their narcotics industry.  

In Pennsylvania a qualified family can get a subsidy of $1234.00 for a 3-bedroom apartment. If Reagan didn't cut that in half it would be $2,468 and a low-income family could live in almost any area of Chester County.    

In Chester County I believe there are links between Section 8 housing (HUD), landlords, (some of those landlords non-profit organizations) and the organized crime drug business in Chester County.

Chester County Commissioners, State Rep. Hennessey and HUD proudly spent $6 million refurbishing Roymar Hall, a Section 8 apartment building in Coatesville.

I believe there is an effort to keep real estate values in Coatesville low, to concentrate low income people, especially black low income people in the City of Coatesville and sustain the illegal drug industry in Chester County, PA. 


Thursday, July 24, 2014

HATE SYMBOLS DATABASE

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has a new 2014 database of hate symbols.  It’s useful to identify potential terrorists.
“Introduction 
Symbols are powerful communication tools. They convey considerable meaning in an immediately recognizable form, and the power they can have is tremendous. Consider the reverence or passion that the American flag, the Star of David, and the Christian cross evoke, and the impact of symbols is readily apparent.  
Unfortunately, symbols can convey negative connotations as well as positive ones. Some symbols are meant to evoke feelings of hate or anger, or to spark fear and insecurity. Hate symbols, for instance, can be found scrawled on the outside walls of synagogues, churches and schools; tattooed on the bodies of white supremacists; or displayed on jewelry and clothing. Extremists use these symbols because it gives them a sense of power and belonging, as well as a quick way of identifying others who share their beliefs.  
This database provides an overview of many of the symbols most frequently used by a variety of white supremacist groups and movements, as well as some other types of hate groups.”
The database can be searched by category:

  • Any
  • General Hate Symbols
  • Hate Acronyms / Abbreviations
  • Hate Group Symbols / Logos
  • Hate Slogans / Slang Terms
  • Neo-Nazi Symbols
  • Numeric Hate Signs
  • Racist Prison Gang Symbols


Hate on Display™ HATE SYMBOLS DATABASE  IMAGE VIEW


Monday, July 21, 2014

Construction timeline – Lenfest Center – Coatesville Train Station

Below is a time-lapse slideshow of progress photos of the Lenfest Center.
It's interesting because well, it's the Lenfest Center. But it also demonstrates part of the construction timeline.
This is only physical construction work in the slideshow.
If the construction timeline was a clock, 59 minutes would be legal and planning, 55 seconds would be demolition and landscaping and 5 seconds would be constructing the building. That's the construction timeline, from a skyscraper to a single-family home.
Right now the new Coatesville Train Station demolition is nearly complete.




It took Don Pulver of Oliver Tyrone Pulver Corporation 11 years to begin construction of the Coatesville Marriott Hotel. That’s a long time for a Pulver project.  But:
As Don Pulver said, “People were trying to stop us every day. You had to fight to do the work.” 
FROM:
Mr. Pulver, “Everything’s touch and go today. Everybody’s trying to stop us every inch of the way. But we refuse to be stopped.”
FROM:

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Some progress at the new Coatesville Train Station site

More demolition

Most of the structures on the north side of Fleetwood street are torn down.


Fleetwood Street is now a 2 way street between 3rd and 4th Avenues. Notice the painted over wrong way signs in the photo. In Plan the Keystone Option A – It was proposed that Fleetwood Street be changed from one way east to a two way street to facilitate easy access to the train station. 

In the Plan the Keystone PDF below some structures were presumed to be on Fleetwood Street. Nearly all structures on Fleetwood Street are demolished. Only a few houses remain.