Paul Ryan on Chicago teachers strike: ‘We stand with Rahm Emanuel’
THIS HEADLINE SAYS IT ALL......A TEA PARTY REPUBLICAN STANDS WITH THIRD WAY POLITICIANS IN BRINGING DOWN PUBLIC EDUCATION. THIS ISN'T A BIPARTISAN EFFORT....THESE CORPORATE POLITICIANS ARE NOT DEMOCRATS. I WILL LEAVE THIS SEGMENT ON EDUCATION WITH A CALL TO LOCALITIES TO ORGANIZE AND JOIN WHAT WILL BE AN ONGOING FIGHT FOR THE LOWER/MIDDLE-CLASS. ' PARENTS ACROSS AMERICA' IS ONE NATIONAL GROUP JUST FOR THAT PURPOSE. WHAT YOU SEE IN BALTIMORE IS A VIRTUAL SATURATION OF PRIVATE NON-PROFITS CREATED MOSTLY BY JOHNS HOPKINS SERVING AS CHARTER SCHOOL ADVOCATES. COALITIONS LIKE BALTIMORE EDUCATION COALITION (BEC) LOBBY FOR CHARTERS AND HAVE THE CITY COUNCIL'S VOTE. WE NEED TO COUNTER THAT WITH OUR OWN NON-PROFIT LOBBY. COMBINE PARENTS WITH THE TEACHERS UNION AND YOU HAVE A STRONG LOBBY AGAINST PUBLIC SCHOOL PRIVATIZATION. TEACHERS CANNOT DO IT ALONE.
WE KNOW O'MALLEY LIKES TO TOUT HIS NUMBER ONE STATUS FOR MARYLAND IN EDUCATION WEEK FOR FOUR YEARS IN A ROW. EDUCATION WEEK IS A PART OF ALL THIS CHARTER/PRIVATIZATION PROCESS AND IF YOU ARE ON THEIR LIST....YOU ARE DOING THE RIGHT THING IN MOVING PUBLIC SCHOOLS TO WALL STREET POCKETS. O'MALLEY IS INDEED NUMBER ONE IN THAT AND THAT IS WHY HE HAS BEEN TAPPED TO RUN NATIONALLY.
ALL OF THE TOP POLITICIANS IN MARYLAND ARE IN LINE TO SUPPORT THIS......ANTHONY BROWN, MAGGIE MCINTOSH, DOUG GANSLER, AND RAWLINGS-BLAKE. AS IMPORTANT, YOUR INCUMBENT VOTES ALL THIS POLICY INTO PLACE EACH YEAR. WE KNOW THAT BALTIMORE SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT ALONZO IS ALL READY TO BRING TEACH FOR AMERICA INTO OUR SCHOOLS AND FILL THE SCHOOL BOARD WITH THEM. AS YOU SEE BELOW, THE TEACH FOR AMERICA ORGANIZATION IS SIMPLY A TOOL TO TAKE OVER PUBLIC SCHOOLS FOR WALL STREET.
VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!
THESE ARE THE ISSUES IMPORTANT TO PARENTS PROTECTING PUBLIC EDUCATION IN BALTIMORE:
1) MAYOR RAWLINGS BLAKE CONTROLS THE HANDING OFF OF BALTIMORE'S SCHOOLS TO THE GOVERNOR GIVING HIM THE POWER TO IMPLEMENT THESE POLICIES. SHE MUST BE VOTED OUT.
2) THE LAWS GIVING CHARTER SCHOOLS A 'PUBLIC' DESIGNATION WHILE CIRCUMVENTING LAWS DEFINING PUBLIC EDUCATION ARE OFTEN UNCONSTITUTIONAL.
3) WE NEED THE RIGHT TO VOTE FOR OUR CITY SCHOOL BOARD RATHER THAN HAVE SOMEONE APPOINT THEM.
4) SPECIAL DESIGNATIONS FOR PRIVATE FUNDING, WHETHER FOR STUDENTS OR SCHOOLS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE WHEN SCHOOLS ARE DESIGNATED 'PUBLIC'. GENERAL FUNDS ARE DISTRIBUTED EQUALLY TO ALL SCHOOLS.
5) QUESTION THE DATA!!!! THEY ARE SAYING WHAT THEY WANT BECAUSE THERE IS NO ACCOUNTABILITY ON DATA.
THE BALTIMORE CITY TEACHERS UNION HAS MOST OF THIS ON THEIR WEBSITE AS ISSUES FOR WHICH THEY ARE FIGHTING. JOIN THEM.....TEACHERS WHO GRADUATE WITH EDUCATION DEGREES GENERALLY DO SO BECAUSE THEY HAVE A PASSION FOR TEACHING AND ARE DEVOTED TO EVERY CHILD'S SUCCESS. WE WANT THESE PEOPLE IN OUR CLASSROOMS!
EDUCATION RESOURCE STRATEGIES (ERS) IS AN UMBRELLA GROUP FOR THIS PRIVATIZATION MOVEMENT. AS YOU SEE BELOW THE STRATEGY IS TO FILL EDUCATION SLOTS WITH TEACH FOR AMERICA TO GAIN CONTROL OF POLICY. YOU'LL SEE AS WELL THE NON-PROFIT FOUNDATIONS THAT ARE FUNDING THIS EDUCATION PRIVATIZATION.
Hold’em Informs Education Activists
ERS Updates Monday, July 30, 2012 • Posted by Randi Feinberg
Hold’em Informs Education Activists On Saturday July 28, ERS’ Genevieve Quist Green and I travelled to Washington, D.C. to present at the Leadership for Educational Equity's (LEE) Policy Leadership Academy. LEE is a political organization that mobilizes, supports and trains Teach For America alumni who serve as policy advisors, community advocates and elected officials. Our topic, "Education Funding 101: Using Education Resources Wisely," was well received by the audience of former Teach For America corps members. This group had convened to participate in a series of policy workshops and programs.
Here are the other non-profits funding this hijacking of public education. Let's let them know we don't appreciate their trying to end public education:
Annenberg Institute for School Reform
Education Resource Strategy
Foundation for Educational Excellence ------a Baltimore invention
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Pivot Learning Partners.
_______________________________________________
THIS GROUP WORKS FOR THE RIGHT KIND OF EDUCATION REFORM:
Parents Across America
Parents Across AmericaParents Across America (PAA) is an independent non-partisan, non-profit grassroots organization that connects parents and activists from across the U.S. to share ...parentsacrossamerica.org - What We Believe
WHAT WORKS: Proven Reforms: We support the expansion of sensible, research-based reforms, such as pre-K programs, full-day Kindergarten, small classes, parent involvement, strong, experienced teachers, a well-rounded curriculum and evaluation systems that go beyond test scores.
Sufficient and Equitable Funding: Resources do matter, especially when invested in programs that have been proven to work.
Diversity: We support creating diverse, inclusive schools and classrooms whenever possible.
Meaningful Parent Involvement: Parents must have a significant voice in policies at the school, district, state and national levels. We are not just “consumers” or “customers” but knowledgeable, necessary partners in any effective reform effort.
What Doesn’t Work: Privatization: A strong public education system is fundamental to our democracy. We oppose efforts to privatize public education through the expansion of charters, vouchers or other privately-run programs at the expense of regular public schools.
High-Stakes Testing: Excessive reliance on standardized exams narrows the curriculum, promotes teaching to the test and leads to unfair and unreliable evaluations of students, teachers and schools.
School Closings: Closing schools wreaks havoc on families and communities, and too often fails to deliver on promises to create better opportunities for children. We believe in improving the schools we have, rather than shutting them down.
Ignoring Poverty: The nation’s educational “crisis” is made worse by the widening gap between rich and poor. Along with investing in our schools, we should also be investing in families.
If you agree, please join us, as we fight for children and better schools!
Click here to download a PDF of this statement.
Become a PAA chapter or affiliate!
Parents Across America Chapter/Affiliate Application Form If you share PAA’s overall goals of progressive, positive education reform and a strong parent voice in education decision making, please consider becoming a part of our leadership network. The more of us there are, the stronger our voices will be at every level!
Benefits of chapter or affiliate status include:
A PAA chapter is a new organization you start to promote the mission and goals of PAA in your area. Chapters are usually named “PAA-”city” or PAA “state” (i.e. PAA-NewOrleans, PAA-Seattle).
PAA chapters cannot endorse candidates for elective office. You can do so as an individual, as long as you emphasize that you are not speaking on behalf of PAA or your PAA chapter.
A PAA affiliate is an existing local or statewide education advocacy group that shares our overall goals and wants to join in to promote the mission and goals of PAA in your area (i.e. Chicago’s affiliates PURE and 19th Ward Parents).
Please review our statement, “What We Believe.” If you agree, and want to join in our efforts, please fill in and submit the form below. Thank you!
______________________________________________________
THIS IS A COMPREHENSIVE AND SURPRISINGLY HONEST ANALYSIS OF CHARTER SCHOOL PERFORMANCE. YOU'LL NOTICE THAT THE REPORT WAS RELEASED IN 2009 JUST AS THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION RELEASED ITS RACE TO THE TOP PUSHING FOR MORE CHARTER SCHOOLS. MARYLAND ENTERED THE MARKET IN SUPPORT OF OBAMA'S PROGRAM. I SHOW A FEW CLIPS FROM A LONG ANALYSIS. GO TO THE WEBSITE AND READ THE ENTIRE STUDY. YOU CAN SEE THIS REFORM IS NOT ABOUT QUALITY, IT IS ABOUT ENDING PUBLIC EDUCATION. QUESTION THE DATA!!!!!
© 2009 CREDO
Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO)
Stanford University
Stanford, CA
http://credo.stanford.edu
June 2009
The group portrait shows wide variation in performance. The study reveals that a decent fraction
of charter schools, 17 percent, provide superior education opportunities for their students.
Nearly half of the charter schools nationwide have results that are no different from the local
public school options and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly
worse than their student would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.
These findings underlie the parallel findings of significant state‐by‐state differences in charter
school performance and in the national aggregate performance of charter schools. The policy
challenge is how to deal constructively with varying levels of performance today and into the
future.
Though simple in formulation, this task has proven to be extremely difficult in practice. Simply
put, neither market mechanisms nor regulatory oversight been a sufficient force to deal with
underperforming schools. At present there appears to be an authorizing crisis in the charter
school sector. For a number of reasons — many of them understandable — authorizers find it
difficult to close poorly performing schools. Despite low test scores, failing charter schools often
have powerful and persuasive supporters in their communities who feel strongly that shutting
down this school does not serve the best interests of currently enrolled students. Evidence of
financial insolvency or corrupt governance structure, less easy to dispute or defend, is much
more likely to lead to school closures than poor academic performance. And yet, as this report
demonstrates, the apparent reluctance of authorizers to close underperforming
charters ultimately reflects poorly on charter schools as a whole. More importantly, it hurts
students.
Charter schools are already expected to maintain transparency with regard to their operations
and academic records, giving authorizers full access. We propose that authorizers be expected
to do the same. True accountability demands that the public know the status of each school in
an authorizer's portfolio, and that we be able to gauge authorizer performance just as
authorizers currently gauge charter performance. To this end, we suggest the adoption of a
national set of performance metrics, collected uniformly by all authorizers in order to provide a
common base line by which we can compare the performance of charter schools and actions of
authorizers across state lines. Using these metrics, Authorizer Report Cards would provide full
transparency and put pressure on authorizers to act in clear cases of failure.
The charter school movement to date has concentrated its formidable resources and energy on
removing barriers to charter school entry into the market. It is time to concentrate equally on
removing the barriers to exit.
____________________________________________________________________________________
O'Malley is Bloomberg's mini-me on education and you can see the same manipulation of statistics in Maryland's education data as you do with the crime and police data. Take a look at the charters in this article to see that these 'reformers' are trying their hardest to make these charters look good so as to expand them and eventually replace public schools completely. You can believe that once they succeeded in closing public education down the quality in all charters would drop like a ton of bricks. That will be the end result of privatizing public education.
Getting Past the DOE on the 2012 Test Results
Jul. 23, 2012 by Maisie McAdoo EdWize Blog
[Editor's note: This post was authored jointly by Maisie McAdoo and Rhonda Rosenberg.]
Mayor Bloomberg turned the announcement of the 2012 state test results into a promotional event for his “reforms” on Tuesday, despite the fact that an honest appraisal of the scores showed that city students as a group made only modest progress in both math and ELA. The mayor’s presentation ignored or downplayed results that didn’t fit in with his triumphal narrative, including the fact that the racial achievement gap widened last year in a number of categories.
State officials, by contrast, didn’t even hold a press conference, and said publicly only that the statewide results (which mirrored the city’s) showed “some positive momentum” but left too many students unprepared.
The mayor, however, orchestrated a big press function and handed out a shameless PowerPoint that reported highly selective numbers and featured a comparison of charters and new schools founded during his tenure with “traditional” city schools — i.e. the vast majority of schools in the city system.
But the numbers are there for all to see. “His” charters and new schools combined underperform the average school, in fact (see especially slide 6), and they gained only one to two points more than the “traditional” schools in percentages of students meeting standards in math and less than a percentage point in students meeting standards in English. That, according to the mayor, was conclusive evidence for the success of his reforms.
Please. If these test scores — and remember this was the testing round where 30 questions had to be disqualified, the same round that included the “pineapple” passage — if these scores are evidence of Bloomberg’s triumph as steward of the city school system, then pineapples can speak.
Here are some tables and charts on the 2012 tests that may sober up Hizzoner: More »
DO YOU HEAR ANY OF THIS IN YOUR LOCAL MEDIA......THERE IS A DEAD SILENCE ON THIS EDUCATION REFORM POLICY. TELL THEM TO PROVIDE A BALANCED APPROACH TO PROGRAMMING!!!
THIS HEADLINE SAYS IT ALL......A TEA PARTY REPUBLICAN STANDS WITH THIRD WAY POLITICIANS IN BRINGING DOWN PUBLIC EDUCATION. THIS ISN'T A BIPARTISAN EFFORT....THESE CORPORATE POLITICIANS ARE NOT DEMOCRATS. I WILL LEAVE THIS SEGMENT ON EDUCATION WITH A CALL TO LOCALITIES TO ORGANIZE AND JOIN WHAT WILL BE AN ONGOING FIGHT FOR THE LOWER/MIDDLE-CLASS. ' PARENTS ACROSS AMERICA' IS ONE NATIONAL GROUP JUST FOR THAT PURPOSE. WHAT YOU SEE IN BALTIMORE IS A VIRTUAL SATURATION OF PRIVATE NON-PROFITS CREATED MOSTLY BY JOHNS HOPKINS SERVING AS CHARTER SCHOOL ADVOCATES. COALITIONS LIKE BALTIMORE EDUCATION COALITION (BEC) LOBBY FOR CHARTERS AND HAVE THE CITY COUNCIL'S VOTE. WE NEED TO COUNTER THAT WITH OUR OWN NON-PROFIT LOBBY. COMBINE PARENTS WITH THE TEACHERS UNION AND YOU HAVE A STRONG LOBBY AGAINST PUBLIC SCHOOL PRIVATIZATION. TEACHERS CANNOT DO IT ALONE.
WE KNOW O'MALLEY LIKES TO TOUT HIS NUMBER ONE STATUS FOR MARYLAND IN EDUCATION WEEK FOR FOUR YEARS IN A ROW. EDUCATION WEEK IS A PART OF ALL THIS CHARTER/PRIVATIZATION PROCESS AND IF YOU ARE ON THEIR LIST....YOU ARE DOING THE RIGHT THING IN MOVING PUBLIC SCHOOLS TO WALL STREET POCKETS. O'MALLEY IS INDEED NUMBER ONE IN THAT AND THAT IS WHY HE HAS BEEN TAPPED TO RUN NATIONALLY.
ALL OF THE TOP POLITICIANS IN MARYLAND ARE IN LINE TO SUPPORT THIS......ANTHONY BROWN, MAGGIE MCINTOSH, DOUG GANSLER, AND RAWLINGS-BLAKE. AS IMPORTANT, YOUR INCUMBENT VOTES ALL THIS POLICY INTO PLACE EACH YEAR. WE KNOW THAT BALTIMORE SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT ALONZO IS ALL READY TO BRING TEACH FOR AMERICA INTO OUR SCHOOLS AND FILL THE SCHOOL BOARD WITH THEM. AS YOU SEE BELOW, THE TEACH FOR AMERICA ORGANIZATION IS SIMPLY A TOOL TO TAKE OVER PUBLIC SCHOOLS FOR WALL STREET.
VOTE YOUR INCUMBENT OUT OF OFFICE!!
THESE ARE THE ISSUES IMPORTANT TO PARENTS PROTECTING PUBLIC EDUCATION IN BALTIMORE:
1) MAYOR RAWLINGS BLAKE CONTROLS THE HANDING OFF OF BALTIMORE'S SCHOOLS TO THE GOVERNOR GIVING HIM THE POWER TO IMPLEMENT THESE POLICIES. SHE MUST BE VOTED OUT.
2) THE LAWS GIVING CHARTER SCHOOLS A 'PUBLIC' DESIGNATION WHILE CIRCUMVENTING LAWS DEFINING PUBLIC EDUCATION ARE OFTEN UNCONSTITUTIONAL.
3) WE NEED THE RIGHT TO VOTE FOR OUR CITY SCHOOL BOARD RATHER THAN HAVE SOMEONE APPOINT THEM.
4) SPECIAL DESIGNATIONS FOR PRIVATE FUNDING, WHETHER FOR STUDENTS OR SCHOOLS IS NOT ACCEPTABLE WHEN SCHOOLS ARE DESIGNATED 'PUBLIC'. GENERAL FUNDS ARE DISTRIBUTED EQUALLY TO ALL SCHOOLS.
5) QUESTION THE DATA!!!! THEY ARE SAYING WHAT THEY WANT BECAUSE THERE IS NO ACCOUNTABILITY ON DATA.
THE BALTIMORE CITY TEACHERS UNION HAS MOST OF THIS ON THEIR WEBSITE AS ISSUES FOR WHICH THEY ARE FIGHTING. JOIN THEM.....TEACHERS WHO GRADUATE WITH EDUCATION DEGREES GENERALLY DO SO BECAUSE THEY HAVE A PASSION FOR TEACHING AND ARE DEVOTED TO EVERY CHILD'S SUCCESS. WE WANT THESE PEOPLE IN OUR CLASSROOMS!
EDUCATION RESOURCE STRATEGIES (ERS) IS AN UMBRELLA GROUP FOR THIS PRIVATIZATION MOVEMENT. AS YOU SEE BELOW THE STRATEGY IS TO FILL EDUCATION SLOTS WITH TEACH FOR AMERICA TO GAIN CONTROL OF POLICY. YOU'LL SEE AS WELL THE NON-PROFIT FOUNDATIONS THAT ARE FUNDING THIS EDUCATION PRIVATIZATION.
Hold’em Informs Education Activists
ERS Updates Monday, July 30, 2012 • Posted by Randi Feinberg
Hold’em Informs Education Activists On Saturday July 28, ERS’ Genevieve Quist Green and I travelled to Washington, D.C. to present at the Leadership for Educational Equity's (LEE) Policy Leadership Academy. LEE is a political organization that mobilizes, supports and trains Teach For America alumni who serve as policy advisors, community advocates and elected officials. Our topic, "Education Funding 101: Using Education Resources Wisely," was well received by the audience of former Teach For America corps members. This group had convened to participate in a series of policy workshops and programs.
Here are the other non-profits funding this hijacking of public education. Let's let them know we don't appreciate their trying to end public education:
Annenberg Institute for School Reform
Education Resource Strategy
Foundation for Educational Excellence ------a Baltimore invention
William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
Pivot Learning Partners.
_______________________________________________
THIS GROUP WORKS FOR THE RIGHT KIND OF EDUCATION REFORM:
Parents Across America
Parents Across AmericaParents Across America (PAA) is an independent non-partisan, non-profit grassroots organization that connects parents and activists from across the U.S. to share ...parentsacrossamerica.org - What We Believe
WHAT WORKS: Proven Reforms: We support the expansion of sensible, research-based reforms, such as pre-K programs, full-day Kindergarten, small classes, parent involvement, strong, experienced teachers, a well-rounded curriculum and evaluation systems that go beyond test scores.
Sufficient and Equitable Funding: Resources do matter, especially when invested in programs that have been proven to work.
Diversity: We support creating diverse, inclusive schools and classrooms whenever possible.
Meaningful Parent Involvement: Parents must have a significant voice in policies at the school, district, state and national levels. We are not just “consumers” or “customers” but knowledgeable, necessary partners in any effective reform effort.
What Doesn’t Work: Privatization: A strong public education system is fundamental to our democracy. We oppose efforts to privatize public education through the expansion of charters, vouchers or other privately-run programs at the expense of regular public schools.
High-Stakes Testing: Excessive reliance on standardized exams narrows the curriculum, promotes teaching to the test and leads to unfair and unreliable evaluations of students, teachers and schools.
School Closings: Closing schools wreaks havoc on families and communities, and too often fails to deliver on promises to create better opportunities for children. We believe in improving the schools we have, rather than shutting them down.
Ignoring Poverty: The nation’s educational “crisis” is made worse by the widening gap between rich and poor. Along with investing in our schools, we should also be investing in families.
If you agree, please join us, as we fight for children and better schools!
Click here to download a PDF of this statement.
Become a PAA chapter or affiliate!
Parents Across America Chapter/Affiliate Application Form If you share PAA’s overall goals of progressive, positive education reform and a strong parent voice in education decision making, please consider becoming a part of our leadership network. The more of us there are, the stronger our voices will be at every level!
Benefits of chapter or affiliate status include:
- Support and advice on building your organization.
- Help promoting your local events and reaching out to recruit potential members in your area.
- Space on our blog to share your viewpoint and experience.
- Alerts about key legislative and other campaigns.
- Policy and research resources.
- Collaborative leadership with a fast-growing network of parent activists.
- An opportunity to have a positive impact on public education in your community and across the U.S.
A PAA chapter is a new organization you start to promote the mission and goals of PAA in your area. Chapters are usually named “PAA-”city” or PAA “state” (i.e. PAA-NewOrleans, PAA-Seattle).
PAA chapters cannot endorse candidates for elective office. You can do so as an individual, as long as you emphasize that you are not speaking on behalf of PAA or your PAA chapter.
A PAA affiliate is an existing local or statewide education advocacy group that shares our overall goals and wants to join in to promote the mission and goals of PAA in your area (i.e. Chicago’s affiliates PURE and 19th Ward Parents).
Please review our statement, “What We Believe.” If you agree, and want to join in our efforts, please fill in and submit the form below. Thank you!
______________________________________________________
THIS IS A COMPREHENSIVE AND SURPRISINGLY HONEST ANALYSIS OF CHARTER SCHOOL PERFORMANCE. YOU'LL NOTICE THAT THE REPORT WAS RELEASED IN 2009 JUST AS THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION RELEASED ITS RACE TO THE TOP PUSHING FOR MORE CHARTER SCHOOLS. MARYLAND ENTERED THE MARKET IN SUPPORT OF OBAMA'S PROGRAM. I SHOW A FEW CLIPS FROM A LONG ANALYSIS. GO TO THE WEBSITE AND READ THE ENTIRE STUDY. YOU CAN SEE THIS REFORM IS NOT ABOUT QUALITY, IT IS ABOUT ENDING PUBLIC EDUCATION. QUESTION THE DATA!!!!!
© 2009 CREDO
Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO)
Stanford University
Stanford, CA
http://credo.stanford.edu
June 2009
The group portrait shows wide variation in performance. The study reveals that a decent fraction
of charter schools, 17 percent, provide superior education opportunities for their students.
Nearly half of the charter schools nationwide have results that are no different from the local
public school options and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly
worse than their student would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.
These findings underlie the parallel findings of significant state‐by‐state differences in charter
school performance and in the national aggregate performance of charter schools. The policy
challenge is how to deal constructively with varying levels of performance today and into the
future.
Though simple in formulation, this task has proven to be extremely difficult in practice. Simply
put, neither market mechanisms nor regulatory oversight been a sufficient force to deal with
underperforming schools. At present there appears to be an authorizing crisis in the charter
school sector. For a number of reasons — many of them understandable — authorizers find it
difficult to close poorly performing schools. Despite low test scores, failing charter schools often
have powerful and persuasive supporters in their communities who feel strongly that shutting
down this school does not serve the best interests of currently enrolled students. Evidence of
financial insolvency or corrupt governance structure, less easy to dispute or defend, is much
more likely to lead to school closures than poor academic performance. And yet, as this report
demonstrates, the apparent reluctance of authorizers to close underperforming
charters ultimately reflects poorly on charter schools as a whole. More importantly, it hurts
students.
Charter schools are already expected to maintain transparency with regard to their operations
and academic records, giving authorizers full access. We propose that authorizers be expected
to do the same. True accountability demands that the public know the status of each school in
an authorizer's portfolio, and that we be able to gauge authorizer performance just as
authorizers currently gauge charter performance. To this end, we suggest the adoption of a
national set of performance metrics, collected uniformly by all authorizers in order to provide a
common base line by which we can compare the performance of charter schools and actions of
authorizers across state lines. Using these metrics, Authorizer Report Cards would provide full
transparency and put pressure on authorizers to act in clear cases of failure.
The charter school movement to date has concentrated its formidable resources and energy on
removing barriers to charter school entry into the market. It is time to concentrate equally on
removing the barriers to exit.
____________________________________________________________________________________
O'Malley is Bloomberg's mini-me on education and you can see the same manipulation of statistics in Maryland's education data as you do with the crime and police data. Take a look at the charters in this article to see that these 'reformers' are trying their hardest to make these charters look good so as to expand them and eventually replace public schools completely. You can believe that once they succeeded in closing public education down the quality in all charters would drop like a ton of bricks. That will be the end result of privatizing public education.
Getting Past the DOE on the 2012 Test Results
Jul. 23, 2012 by Maisie McAdoo EdWize Blog
[Editor's note: This post was authored jointly by Maisie McAdoo and Rhonda Rosenberg.]
Mayor Bloomberg turned the announcement of the 2012 state test results into a promotional event for his “reforms” on Tuesday, despite the fact that an honest appraisal of the scores showed that city students as a group made only modest progress in both math and ELA. The mayor’s presentation ignored or downplayed results that didn’t fit in with his triumphal narrative, including the fact that the racial achievement gap widened last year in a number of categories.
State officials, by contrast, didn’t even hold a press conference, and said publicly only that the statewide results (which mirrored the city’s) showed “some positive momentum” but left too many students unprepared.
The mayor, however, orchestrated a big press function and handed out a shameless PowerPoint that reported highly selective numbers and featured a comparison of charters and new schools founded during his tenure with “traditional” city schools — i.e. the vast majority of schools in the city system.
But the numbers are there for all to see. “His” charters and new schools combined underperform the average school, in fact (see especially slide 6), and they gained only one to two points more than the “traditional” schools in percentages of students meeting standards in math and less than a percentage point in students meeting standards in English. That, according to the mayor, was conclusive evidence for the success of his reforms.
Please. If these test scores — and remember this was the testing round where 30 questions had to be disqualified, the same round that included the “pineapple” passage — if these scores are evidence of Bloomberg’s triumph as steward of the city school system, then pineapples can speak.
Here are some tables and charts on the 2012 tests that may sober up Hizzoner: More »
DO YOU HEAR ANY OF THIS IN YOUR LOCAL MEDIA......THERE IS A DEAD SILENCE ON THIS EDUCATION REFORM POLICY. TELL THEM TO PROVIDE A BALANCED APPROACH TO PROGRAMMING!!!
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