During the current era of educational madness, we celebrate every bit of good news.
In Florida, which is under the control of a Tea Party zealot who is under the control of former Governor Jeb Bush whose brain is fixated on defunding public education and testing everything that moves, there is a glimmer of good news.
The state board of education upheld the decision of the Miami-Dade school board to deny an application from three virtual charter schools, which were connected to for-profit behemoth K12.
For now, this profit center is off the radar. But only for now.
At the same meeting of the state board, there was a robust discussion about how to fund merit pay. When the legislature decided it was a great idea, they didn’t appropriate any money to pay for it and told the districts to pay for it themselves, even as their budgets were shrinking. Nowhere in the discussion, at least as reported in the newspaper article, does any board member question the basic idea behind merit pay: Will teachers work harder? If they do, does that mean there will be more teaching to the test? With FCAT in disrepute and so many local boards passing resolutions against it, is this a good idea? Do rising scores mean better education?
Let’s be content to take one small victory at a time.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
That is good news. However, Palm Beach County wasn’t so lucky as five of its charter rejections were overturned.
Teacher 111, can you post a reference for that important information, while it’s fresh in your mind? We need all those specifics when we construct evidence-based arguments
Everybody, please go back over your contributions to this blog, and wherever possible please post any web documentation you know about.
Reporters can use those to anchor investigative journalism in the difficult year ahead of us, and as you know, Diane is about to write a book.
I think Diane just posted a blog with the story about Palm Beach, but here it is anyway.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/local-education/state-panel-overturns-school-boards-denial-of-four/nPw7j/
At that same meeting, the State Board of Ed over-turned Palm Beach County’s decision to deny applications for four (4) charters.
One must understand that Jeb Bush owns Miami. He runs the FL BOE. He controls the Ed Commissioner. The education staff are hand-picked loyalists of Jeb. If Jeb wanted the Miami-Dade charter approved, they would have been approved.
Did I mention that Miami-Dade already has 122 charter schools? 122!
I attended this meeting. I’m an optimist at heart. I missed the glimmer of hope.
Instead I heard impending doom. A lengthy discussion on blended learning which is the Jeb Bush method of introducing more reliance on virtual charters. (ease them into it)
I heard scripted questions come flow from board members with a purpose during a masterfully well-orchestrated Agenda..
I heard the Digital Learning speaker, Deirdre Flynn, discuss 270 students and 6 teachers in blended learning classes. (Oh, did I mention Flynn is Deputy Director for Jeb’s Foundation? No, the Board didn’t mention that either.)
I heard FL BOE member Chartrand request “a Mckinsey study to see if we are doing this blended learning thing right.” (McKinsey education leader, Mike Barber, is the Pearson Education Adviser.)
I heard BOE member Chartrand ask to inject language into a new vision/mission statement which specified “highly effective teachers” only.
Later I spoke at length with FL Commissioner Robinson.
No, not yesterday. I saw no glimmer of hope at the FL BOE meeting. Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings but yesterday was not a hopeful day. Yesterday reinforced how much work we have ahead of us. Yesterday reinforced that we need a new regime at the top.
Oh, too bad! I’ll post this. Sir Michael Barber left McKinsey to advise Pearson.
Here is the article on the denial of the four charters. The discussion by the Board surrounding these denials was particularly repulsive. All they cared about was — how many charters does PBC have? How many children do the charters cover (percentage).
They did not care about the deficiencies in the charter applications. They didn’t want to hear it.
For Chemteacher looking for links – i will return with several links to the doom and gloom meeting of yesterday. including this below.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/news/local-education/state-panel-overturns-school-boards-denial-of-four/nPw7j/
It is so frustrating to fight the jeb-propaganda about charters and virtual schools. Needless to say, they have the financial advantage.
They have used their financial resources in the past to create a smear campaign against teachers. In 2010, while we fought against this so-called “merit pay” bill, we heard jeb’s own voice on a robo-call, calling us teachers a “massive campaign of misinformed”. During the recent parent trigger fight, his foundation emails referred to FL parents and teachers with words such as ‘bitter’ and ‘full of vitriol’.
But, as we have said before, we have heart and hope… and social media. Thanks to that, many of the reporters in FL are listening and reporting the truth now, Plus, Florida school boards recently resolved with us parents and teachers to reexamine high stakes testing. They feel our frustrations. Our FL school boards are also fighting for their local control – for the right to say NO to a failing, for-profit charter school. There is cohesion here between our parents, teachers, admin, school boards…all fighting the policies and propaganda spewed out by Jeb’s ‘Foundation for Florida’s Failure’ (as I like to call it).
Teachers have awaken, parents have awaken, school boards have awaken… It is a fight until the end, but, at least here in FL, folks are waking up.
Many thanks to parents like Rita who spend day after day in these frustrating meetings fighting for our kids. Their keen eyes on the matters help us to focus the spotlight on the ridiculous policy making process.
And, thank you, Diane for bringing it to the forefront.
I sat and watched this meeting second-hand (on the Florida Channel, rebroadcast) and can join in with Rita about the oppressive feeling I had when it was over…if anyone can say that the ed-reform movement is not destined to privatize public education after watching this, our DOE is doing nothing more than coming across like a $2 New Orleans hooker for Pearson and others in the education business…
as for me, at the moment I am quite dejected and weep for the future of Florida’s children and for my profession…
and now the House is going to allow TFA candidates with 5 weeks training become equal to my BS from ETSU and my MEd from UVa…
the really ironic fact is, I have to wonderful chance to teach “intro to teaching” to a class of freshmen as an elective this year (part of the 7 of 7 periods I’m teaching…and the 190 kids I’ll have in classes this year)…
I just had a disturbing talk with my kids’ former elementary school principal (she and I have become friends even though my youngest is a senior in high school this year), so I am also pessimistic. The school dropped for the first time in years from an A to a B and the Principal says lots of parents are dropping by because they are concerned and upset and are considering moving to the brand new Charter school opening down the street. (Apparently teachers in the school were in tears when the grade came out.) Because our county has many more seats in the public system than it needs, a decline in enrollment is scary because the new Superintendent could start closing schools. The Principal told me the school missed an A by 12 points. The decline was caused by a) the change in metrics which the school didn’t know about (which upsets me because they should have been teaching to those metrics despite the FCAT rubric that didn’t include them) and b) because of the ESE Emotionally Handicapped Cluster. In fact, she told me the school grades in our feeder pattern for the 7 elementary schools seemed to be linked to the size of any ESE cluster in that school because this year, for the first time, the performance of ESE kids counts in the school grade. For example, the school with a large autism cluster dropped to a C. Our school, which has a smaller cluster, dropped to a B. The school with the deaf and hard of hearing, where the kids are not academically challenged, remained an A (and in past years our school has even had more points than that school). The school without a cluster remained an A. The Principal is fighting back and is holding 3 parent meetings over the summer to pacify neighborhood parents and she is even more actively putting out the message about our terrific music teacher and the fact that our school has things the charter school does not such as certified teachers, a real library, arts programs, an experienced principal, etc. Unfortunately, most parents don’t understand what the school grade means and don’t understand that it really doesn’t reflect on the quality of the school because the metrics are not broad enough for a true measure. It’s horrible that this school’s very existence depends on the performance of a group of emotionally handicapped kids.
I posted this on your “about” page, but here it is again – a Washington Post column on the FCAT.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/student-video-how-high-stakes-tests-affect-kids/2012/05/09/gIQAsKt6DU_blog.html