The U.S. Department of Education ruled invalid Pennsylvania’s effort to inflate the scores of charter schools by treating them as local school districts.
Here is a description of what state education secretary Ron Tomalis tried to do.
The state’s charter-friendly education department had decided to treat charters as districts for purposes of NCLB scores, which made their performance look better. But US DOE said that was a no-go and all the charter scores must be recomputed.
Interesting that the announcement was made on the day before the long holiday weekend, which meant that someone decided to bury it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Holding charter schools to the same standards as public ones? It ain’t right, I tell ya!
If they are indeed trying to bury this, you just defeated their efforts. Thank you again Diane!
Isn’t this the same thing Massachusetts has been doing for years?
http://profiles.doe.mass.edu/search/search.aspx?leftNavId=11238
Yes, thanks for shining a light on this outcome. The article states that some local superintendents and a school board association filed a legal brief to push back on the original plan of the charter-friendly state official. Fortunately, the federal agency agreed with the legal argument. But look at the time, effort and money supers and boards must spend to fight back! Thanks to them for doing so. I know here in Georgia a super and school system led the fight against the original state charter commission. They won that legal argument last summer (which abolished the commission that existed at that time, ruling it unconstitutional). Of course then the legislators who are “kept” by ALEC put an amendment on the ballot to make it constitutional, thereby reinstating the commission. And the GA voters who were either:
1) actually in favor of the commission because they are so fed up with issues in the large systems here (read huge cheating scandal in APS and ongoing corrupt, sometimes criminal behavior in DeKalb).
2) fooled by the pro-amendment media blitz and the purposefully misleading language on the ballot
approved the amendment.
They are public schools when they want the district’s money but not when they have to be evaluated.
Remember, PA Republican legislators and Secretary Tomalis still DO NOT require charter school teachers to be evaluated by the same rules as teachers in public, non-charter schools. They are exempt from 50% evaluation based in test scores. No wonder because the charter school and cyber charter school test scores are abominable, even with Tomalis cheating for them. Also remember the PA charter school and cyber charter tuition, which comes directly from public school district budgets, is ridiculous, averaging about $10,000 per regular ed student and $20,000 per special ed regardless of the disability. The anti public school movement is funded from outside sources, for profits, and follows the ALEC script. The governor’s budget secretary still receives a “paycheck” from K-12 Inc., the for profit cyber company and darling to the hedge fund managers.
Louisiana wins the cheating contest. John White just passed a rule through our State Board of Education that allows school districts to simply no longer define or report schools. My guess is he’s planning to leave soon and he wants to be able to finagle some sort of success from the abysmal failure he’s created.
Incidenally, He’s actually planning on having our voucher schools take a test, but the test they are looking at giving our voucher students is the one we administer to our special education students. I’m sure they will simply report the numbers of student scoring basic and above or passing, and not mention the test difference. 🙂
John White is well aware of a number of school districts that have actually built brand new schools and not reported them as schools to the state. (i have some of his responses about this situation) Those districts attract better students with their new facilities and teachers and merge their test scores with the districts failing schools to make them all look better to the state and local parents. His new policy change makes that ok. It also goes further. Now any school can become an unreported alternative school, overnight, and without any restrictions. I think he may have miscalculated on that idea, since that means even the low performing, about to be taken over schools, can call themselves “alternative” and stop reporting separate data and merge their data with the better schools in the districts. If the districts catch on, ironically they might be able to put a halt to the accountability related school closings for a few years – until White and DOE change the policy again or report those types of schenanigans themselves – to stir up resentment against local school disticts. I suppose the possibilities are endless when the media only reports on what you say, not what you do.
It’s a shame no one in authority cares and no one care to report any of this. I finally managed to get a reporter to film the shadow schools, but she can’t release her story due to what sounds like political considerations.