The Pennsylvania Secretary of Education rejected eight applications for new cyber charters.
The state already has 16 cyber charters, with 32,000 students, all drawing from the entire state. The 12 cyber charters that have been around long enough to be rated all failed to make adequate yearly progress.
The eight that were rejected hoped to enroll another 10,000 students, wgphich would have cost the state $350 millions over the next five years.
This might be good news, a ray of hope, but cynics think that the rejected schools will reapply and some will be approved.
Cyber charters have terrible records: high attrition rates, low test scores, low graduation rates.
But they invest in lobbying and once they get authorized, they are very profitable.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I notice Bill Gates has been busy in the last week promoting his education “philanthropy” on several talk shows and in the press. Could the corporate reformers be worried people are catching on to their game?
This rejection of eight cyber charters was done by the right-wing Secretary of Education Tomalis in Pennsylvania. He was caught recently trying to skew the state test scores to make it appear the state’s charter schools are better than they actually are.
Keep shining the light of truth on the corporate reformers Diane. They can’t stand the truth!
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One more thing about Bill Gates, he can’t be too happy about this:
Gates Foundation’s MET Study Fails to Solve the Teacher Evaluation Challenge
from the National Education Policy Center
Boulder, CO – A review by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) of a newly released and long-awaited study on teacher evaluation strongly questions the spin that has been put on the findings.
The Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, released its final set of reports this month. Those reports are supposed to advise schools and districts about how to design teacher evaluations.
However, a careful look at the MET research – an ambitious, multi-year study of thousands of teachers in six school districts – finds that the study’s results were inconclusive and provide little usable guidance.
http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2013/01/review-MET-final-2013
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Reblogged this on Black History 360* and commented:
“Cyber charters have terrible records: high attrition rates, low test scores, low graduation rates. But once they get authorized, they are very profitable.”
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Can’t comment on the applications, as I have not seen them. But one of the central ideas of the charter movement is that people have no automatic right to set up a school. There is an organization called an authorizer that reviews the application and determines if it is solid.
Many applications have been rejected, as they should be. As Diane has written very critically in the past about how some progressive educators misinterpreted John Dewey’s ideas, I would think she’d agree that not everyone who thinks they know how to run a good school has the skills needed to do so.
People do have a chance to revise their proposals, just as good teachers sometimes give students a chance to revise their essays. But even a revised essay is not always a great essay, and even a revised proposal does not always merit being approved.
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If charter schools have a history of “counseling” out students with academic and emotional challenges, which will affect their performance grade and stats, I am curious why the cyber charter schools didn’t use the same method of “cyber counseling” them out. Their progress shows that they have high attrition rates, low test scores, low graduation rates.
Or is it because Gates’ “pernicious” move is to create all these “cyber” schools where no union has access to his “cyber teachers”. Gate was unsuccessful with the small school movement – stat shows it. The “Gates Foundation’s MET Study Fails to Solve the Teacher Evaluation Challenge from the National Education Policy Center.”
Why should failure stop Gates. Another scheme brought to you by the ill-policy-pushers of the Gates Foundation, where public education is on “HISWORD” On-line Learning, version 3.
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Actually Zulma, Gates continues to support small schools. It has stopped funding the creation of small schools in large buildings.
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