Indiana has been in the forefront of pushing school choice and ignoring the needs of its public schools.
Indiana was once known nationally for its great public schools, but now it is known as a national leader in vouchers and charters and high-stakes testing.
The news from Fort Wayne, the second largest city in the state, does not bode well for the rightwing reform agenda of Governor Mitch Daniels (soon to be president of Purdue) and his superintendent Tony Bennett.
When the state scores were released, Fort Wayne’s three charter schools were among the lowest performing schools in the state. Two of them are managed by the for-profit Imagine corporation. One of the three saw its scores go up; one went down; the other was flat. All had huge achievement gaps between black and white students.
But, say the reformers, these schools are a silver bullet. They are fonts of innovation. They will save our youth.
Do you believe they still say these things? When will they admit that they don’t have any answers, just hype and spin? How many more years will we endure their false claims?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
And here I thought Tony Bennett was a jazz singer…
Yes, he’s among the 11 “Chiefs for Change”:
http://www.excelined.org/Pages/Excellence_in_Action/Chiefs_for_Change.aspx
Expect every one of these nine states to be in the news.
Indeed they are. On a regular basis.
The scary part is that Tony will probably elected because people thought that he was a singer. He’ll likely be reelected because he has received a ton of out-of-state money from the Walton family and others for his war chest.
Interesting post on School Finance 101
The Gulen Charter School Teacher Supply Problem
There’s been some increased interest in recent months in what are often referred to as Gulen Charter Schools, or those schools affiliated with Fethullah Gulen. I’ve tried to stay off of this topic for the most part because I don’t like to write about “conspiracy theories” or even potentially inflammatory religious/cultural issues – at least on this blog. Here are a few recent video clips/new stories:
From Ohio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qDbELO12uo
From 60 Minutes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4OtHpUCqy0&feature=related
New York Times article on Texas Gulen Schools: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/education/07charter.html
There are also a handful of websites that provide additional highly critical information on these schools.
What has intrigued me when I’ve watched these news clips and when I’ve read other news stories, is that when these schools’ leaders are challenged as to why they hire so many teachers on visas from Turkey, their standard response is that there just aren’t enough qualified applicants for their schools from U.S. resident citizens.
Full post: http://schoolfinance101.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/the-gulen-charter-school-teacher-supply-problem/
And how many more students will be lost?
If I were the real Tony Bennett, I would be very upset that his guy is using my name.
I doubt his parents named him “Tony” and not some longer form of the name such as: Anthony, Antoine, Anton, etc.
If I’m right, is it more than a coincidence that this guy chose “Tony” instead of what his full name is?
When your name is that close to a household celebrity name you would either want to distance yourself from it by using a different version of the name or you’d want to capitalize on the celebrity.
Speaking as a teacher in Indiana, I can tell you that Mr. Bennett is not a popular man among educators. Unfortunately, this is a red, red state. To understand part of the reason he defends charters, you just need to know what job his wife holds.
http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20110207/EDIT07/302079998/1021/EDIT
So it’s more and more apparent that the charter school camp is more of a close-knit, good ol’ boys (and girls) club than some of us might have thought. The plot thickens.
At first I was going to guess Tony Bennett’s wife was a cocktail waitress at the Copacabana where he headlines…
I’m hoping that we can open up some dialogue about charter schools here in Ft. Wayne. As a former Imagine teacher, the educators there are trying their hardest, but they seem to have their heads stuck in the sand. They don’t seem to acknowledge that students’ needs are not being met because profits are the most important factor. No one is overseeing the school. Ball State is the authorizer and I’m not sure they even care about the quality. The test scores are one thing, but if anyone took a hard look at the programs, resources, and opportunities available at the school, they would realize that students and families are being duped to believe it’s “better.” No school counselors, no music classes, no school library, no active PTO or PTA, too much testing (NWEA, ISTEP, DIBELS, mClass, Stanford 10)….
My blog today starts to address this: http://ateachersfight.blogspot.com/2012/08/we-need-to-talk.html
Those of us who are educators in the Southeastern part of the state know that Bennett is a fraud. Many of us worked for or with him, and he was exactly the kind of “bad” teacher he has railed against in the media for the past four years. The key for all of us is to convince our students’ parents, who are fed up with the increased meaningless standardized testing and the teacher-bashing, to vote him out of office despite their Republican-leaning tendencies. I’ve already made my family members promise not to vote for him. It’s an uphill battle to get him voted out, but it’s not insurmountable. However, it will take every Indiana teacher working to spread the truth.