Thank you, Governor Pat Quinn!
And congratulations to the 18 suburban districts that protected their students.
Governor Pat Quinn signed legislation that enacts a one-year moratorium on virtual charters, allowing time to study their performance. Any impartial study will reveal that online charters get poor results. They have high student dropouts every year, students get low grades and have a poor graduation rate. The beneficiaries of online charters are the corporations that own them. They make huge profits.
Eighteen suburban districts had previously banned the virtual schools, which allegedly wanted to target at-risk students. Online charters have no record of success serving at-risk students. These are the students most in need of human contact with caring teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Let’s hope that Pennsylvania will follow suit.
See this letter to the editor by PA’s Education Law Center Executive Director Rhonda Brownstein……
Letter: The true costs of unchecked charter growth
http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/local//speak-easy/55334-the-true-costs-of-unchecked-charter-growth
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Do we have any data on how the online charter grads score on the SAT and ACT?
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A newspaper article in Appleton , WI printed ACT results for Wisconsin virtual charter schools for the 2010-2011 school year. The results are very limited because there are so few seniors in these schools and a very small percent of those seniors took the test. For those few reported, the average score was 21.1. The statewide average was 22.
The link to the article is http://www.postcrescent.com/ic/assets/virtual/ACTs.pdf
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This is great, now all he has to do is pull rank on Rahm Emanuelle and stop him from running amuck.
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When pigs fly.
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Yes, Quinn is becoming a breath of fresh air here. He is the Chicago politician that Time magazine should have done a cover story on this week, instead of corporate stooly Rahm. Quinn also put the breaks on the mega funding of Juan Rangel’s corrupt UNO charter management organization.
It looks like Quinn has been learning how to follow a moral compass and avoid jail time, unlike his two predecessors as governor of Illinois. We’ll have to see though what he does with people’s pensions…
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