Senator Kathleen Vinehout revealed a plan hatched behind closed doors to close 5% of thestate’s schools every year and turn them over to private corporations.
She wrote:
“The latest version of the bill was crafted behind closed doors; unlike three years ago when a wide-ranging group developed a system to test and report the progress of all students attending school with public money. Private school advocates publically agreed to the same public school accountability standards but privately lobbied for something different.
“The bill reversed current law requiring all students be tested using the same type of exam. This bill allowed private schools to choose their own type of assessment and even choose the students who took the test – allowing them to game the system.
“Concealed in the bill was a way to gradually close more and more public schools or turn them over to independent private charter operators.
“For the next several years, 5% of public schools must be named as failing – even if those schools weren’t failing by current standards. With few exceptions, schools that failed for three years would be required to close or be operated by an independent private charter management company with a minimum five-year contract. Local school boards would have little authority over this company for five years. For Milwaukee, this change would apply to schools that failed for just one year.”
She said the bill is “a dream for out-of-state charter management companies.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I just became very sick…how could anyone write something like this – it’s writing into law inequality. Why do charter schools say they accept more accountability for their latitude while they lobby (and receive) less?
Why are these unfunded mandates being passed down to public education that seem clearly set up for students to fail, while money is siphoned to charter schools, and then we don’t care what happens in the charter school?
The system seems so corrupt, I don’t see how one can even argue that it’s a free market – it seems like it’s prime to be manipulated by the rich and politically connected as in this case- that is not an even playing field at all. It doesn’t mean the best educational model will rise to the top, it means those who are the best at gaming business models will.
This sounds like what they are doing in Michigan with the EAA.
How do these people sleep at night? I hope they overdose on ambien.
“For the next several years, 5% of public schools must be named as failing – even if those schools weren’t failing by current standards.”
This has Bill Gates written all over it. It’s the exact HR policy that led to Microsoft’s “Lost Decade”. Microsoft gave it up because it was a failed policy. Why would it work for education?
Yes this is the Jack Welch strategy – getting rid of the bottom performers every year, the pool that once was in the top eventually gets their opportunity in the bottom, it’s a russian roulette of firing people in this case closing schools.
Must be ALEC, because Michigan has the same law.
“Why do charters schools say they accept more accountability for their latitude while they lobby for (and receive) less?”
Because they lie about virtually everything.
They claim to be public schools, but only when it comes to accepting taxpayer dollars. When it comes to governance, oversight and teacher unionization, they suddenly morph into private entities.
They claim to be public schools, except when it comes to accepting English Language Learners, Special Education and homeless students at anywhere near the same numbers as real public schools.
They claim to be public schools, but accept far fewer students receiving free lunch than real public schools located in the same neighborhoods.
They claim to be public schools, except when they “counsel out” troubled students or those who might bring their testing statistics down. Their student (and teacher) attrition rates are sky high, but unlike real public schools, the students who leave charter schools are seldom replaced, thus juicing their stats. Take a look some time at how many students enter the likes of KIPP in the ninth grade, compared to the number who actually graduate at the end of twelfth. Thus, all those constantly-repeated lies about “miracle” graduation and college acceptance rates.
They claim to be “laboratories of innovation” when in fact the overwhelming majority of them, especially the chains that stand to gain from plans such as those in Wisconsin, impose punitive, regressive, arguably racist practices on their students.
Separate out the naifs and opportunists, and the so-called reformers lie to the public about everything. The overwhelming majority of them lie to themselves, as well.
Let’s now wait for Joe Nathan to inform us that “some” charter schools actually accept ELLs and special ed students, and that “some” of them accept students who otherwise would attend alternative schools.
Like
Michael Fiorillo: simple truths in plain English.
But wait for a defense based on outliers. For numbers/stats, it would be like putting 9 teachers and Bill Gates in Pink Slip Bar & Grille and proclaiming that the average [mean] wealth of those ten people was in the billions of dollars. *The “average” as in “mean” would consist of adding up the wealth of all ten people and dividing it by the number of people, i.e., ten. It would be precise—and devastatingly inaccurate and misleading.*
Sure, there are some admirable charters and some admirable staff members in charters.
But that is not the “pattern on the rug.” The big players, those setting the tone for the biggest sectors of the charterite/privatization movement, are in it for varying combinations of lucre, vanity and power.
This latest example deals a fatal blow, as far as I am concerned, to the moral foundation of the whole charterite/privatizer movement. The casual double standard exhibited in this instance should—if the leaders and followers of the “new civil rights movement” of our time had even a smidgeon of moral grounding—bring hordes of condemnation on this blog by those self-same defenders of charters/privatization/vouchers.
Instead, we have THE SILENCE OF THE TROLLS [derivative movie] and a short story [derivative as well] THE SHILLS THAT DIDN’T BARK IN THE NIGHT.
But none of this is unexpected when $tudent $ucce$$ makes up at least 98% [thank you, Bill Gates!] of cage busting achievement gap crushing CCommon ₵ent¢.
“Honesty is for the most part less profitable than dishonesty.” [Plato]
Those old dead Greek guys knew the type even before there were $1 billion worth of iPads and VAM and school letter grades.
Figures.
😎
The Silence of the Trolls. Very funny, Krazy!
However, when the trolls are silent, beware. That means they are in their troll-caves plotting a public-private partnership.
From the Rheformish Lexicon:
public-private partnership. n. the deal; more generally, any useful mechanism for subverting or circumventing democratic processes
Joe Nathan, the Trojan horse of education reform, the smiley face of education Rheeform, whoopee.
She said the bill is “a dream for out-of-state charter management companies.”
Great point! Never discussed in ed reform circles, but great point.
One of the many, many things that hasn’t been debated about ed reform is how we’re collecting education funding locally and paying it out to national charter operators.
I think public school supporters should discuss this aspect of ed reform in their communities, because taking money out of communities and sending it to national management companies has an impact within our communities.
I also think that if this were widely known (by the general public not just parents, because parents aren’t the only people affected when public schools and communities are undermined by pulling public funding out and sending it elsewhere) it would be very unpopular in midwestern states like Wisconsin.
I’d also like some information on how the national charter chains treat education funding. Is this money treated as fungible? If I’m funding a charter EOM in Ohio, am I also contributing to the expansion of that EOM in other states?
A for-profit company called “Leona” operates charter schools in Ohio. They also operate charter schools in MI, and they’re expanding to other states. Is ed money collected in Ohio being used to fuel the expansion of charter schools in MI? Shouldn’t people in Ohio who are paying for this know that?
Has this bill passed, or in the process?
http://www.northjersey.com/news/NJ_education_chief_Chris_Cerf_stepping_down.html
And the ed reform public/private revolving door keeps swinging:
“The commissioner said he remained deeply committed to the value of public education. Some education advocates have warned of the dangers of for-profit entities influencing policy in schools, or being hired to run them. But Cerf called such claims “propagandistic,” and emphasized his view that “public schools should be run by and accountable to public authorities.”
He says as he takes a position as CEO of a private company that will heavily lobby public schools to buy his product. He’ll join the ed reformer from NY, who also cashed in on his public job. Ka-ching! So long kids! Good luck with that mess I left you!
Will Klein and Cerf continue to be presented as education experts instead of salespeople for these products? They have a conflict. They’re selling product.
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé.
Wisconsin is currently totally controlled by the GOP.
Did you know that the GOP controls 8 of the 10 states with the worst supported and performing public schools?
The Democrats, for comparison, control 8 of the 10 states with the best supported and performing schools.
http://www.edweek.org/ew/qc/2014/state_report_cards.html
I raised two daughters, now both in their 30’s. In all of the time I had with them (and still do to some extent), I have been judicious in my telling them how to live their lives. However, one exception: I have gone out of my way to get this message across….”Don’t ever vote Republican.” ….with many reasons provided, if they had not already figured it out.
Jamie: you are exactly right.
This is forced ranking/stack ranking/rank-and-yank/burn-and-churn. A la Microsoft. A monumentally failed strategy by the ex officio Secretary of Education, Bill Gates.
[start quote]
At the center of the cultural problems was a management system called “stack ranking.” Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees. The system—also referred to as “the performance model,” “the bell curve,” or just “the employee review”—has, with certain variations over the years, worked like this: every unit was forced to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, then good performers, then average, then below average, then poor.
“If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, two people were going to get a great review, seven were going to get mediocre reviews, and one was going to get a terrible review,” said a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”
[end quote]
Link: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-steve-ballmer
Note also the built-in double standards of forced ranking. Only those occupying the lower rungs of the hierarchy [i.e., those doing the actual work] are subject to this cruel hazing ritual—just like the charterites/privatizers now want to openly institute a two-tiered “accountability” system. Charters get a pass, public schools get the lash.
And remember the “new” charterite/privatizer math: taking all students from the 13th percentile to the 90th is Rheeally possible; 100% graduation rates (when you leave out cohort attrition from 9th to 12th grade); 98% of teachers allegedly get a meaningless “satisfactory” on their evaluations. And for a very recent example, a supposedly unanticipated shock that 70% of NY students failed to pass a high-stakes standardized test.
For the last, go to this link: https://dianeravitch.net/2013/11/21/what-i-told-educators-on-long-island-about-common-core/
As far as the 5% death sentence: isn’t bigger better? Why not up the percentage to 10%? 20%? 50%? Finish off public schools more quickly so “choice” can prevail…
The key is getting the general public to agree to eviscerate public schools by one standard so that charterites/privatizers can meet their target goals of $tudent $ucce$$ by another.
In this endeavor the self-styled “education reformers” will demonstrate an agility that defies the ordinary limits of mental, moral and logical limits. That is why they proclaim with total sincerity, for example, that the scores of high-stakes standardized tests are a sacred measure of everything educational—until it applies to them.
Not surprising, though, because as always they are zealously determined to abide by their Marxist principles:
“The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” [Groucho Marx]
😎
This bill will legalize piracy.
This is horrible, but does it mean if all schools go private and/or corporate owned that we no longer have to pay taxes towards education. Will our real estate taxes go down? What will we use our excess lottery money for? I know, I’m kidding, they will still take just as much money but to what end and when do WE get to say enough? Who decides if we pass a referendum to raise taxes for educational funding?
We should NOT just be handing our hard earned tax dollar over to every Tom Dick and Harry who wants to open a school. Where did our rights go?
Since we’ve had the push for privatization in Ohio longer than Wisconsin has, I would urge people there to pay careful attention to language.
Don’t be fooled by any language that involves an “authorizer”. Review of an authorizer is NOT review of a charter. Instead, the authorizer grants the charter, and in Ohio they use this process to evade local control.
The mayor of Cleveland learned this too late, so it’s a mistake even sophisticated parties (elected leaders as opposed to ordinary people who live in these communities) can make.
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2013/09/cleveland_mayor_frank_jackson_12.html
“Mayor Frank Jackson’s not sure if state officials pulled a slick move on him last year when they left charter schools with an easy way to skirt his new school quality control panel.
Jackson says he thought that the Transformation Alliance had that power, even if limited, when the state legislature voted to create the Alliance in the summer of 2012.
But three new charter schools started in Cleveland this fall, without any Alliance review, using a legal process that caught Jackson by surprise. On Monday he said he feels “burned” that his negotiations with legislative leaders over creating the Alliance left such a “gaping hole” in its authority.
And he said he’ll find out quickly if the legal openings were just an oversight, or if they were intentionally left. Though Jackson and the Alliance never mentioned the company by name, all three schools at issue are run by the controversial, for-profit White Hat Management, which is a well-known political donor.”
These are complex contracts, multi-level: there’s the state law that creates the capacity for charters, then the agreement between the authorizer and the charter, then another agreement between the charter and the management company who will be running the school. You need an advocate at the table, and if your elected leaders are not acting in that capacity, you’ll have to unravel this by yourself.
Michael Fiorillo – My understanding is that something like 2 million children attend charter schools. All of them are there by the deliberate choice of their parents. No one is compelled to put their children in charter schools. Parents whose children attend charter schools are often expected to make “voluntary” contributions or provide transportation to these schools on their own.
Obviously some parents ( of course not all by any means) must fhink that charter schools offer some kind of advantage. What do you think the perceived attraction of charter schools is?
Jim,
I’d say there are a number of things going on.
First and foremost, charter schools are about marketing and the Big Lie. Here in NYC, the Success Academy chain spends almost one million dollars a year on marketing, money that should be spent in the classroom, money that public schools can only fantasize about having. That does not include the millions in de facto marketing power created by credulous free media hype about charter schools.
Second – and I’m speaking primarily about NYC here, about which I’m most knowledgeable – parents seek alternatives to the public schools because in reality there are troubled neighborhood public schools -usually located in troubled/economically stressed communities -whose difficulties have been made worse over the years by disinvestment, instability and the siphoning of resources.
So-called reformers, using their marketing acumen, have also had some success promoting an “everyone for themselves” attitude among some parents, who are unaware of or indifferent to the institutional consequences of privatizing the schools. All too often, the charter school parents who are bussed in by the so-called reformers to counter opposition to public school closings and charter school expropriation of public school facilities are encouraged to have an “I’ve got mine, you get yours” attitude. Unfortunately, it’s worse than that, something closer to, “To get mine, I’ll take yours.”
That is, unless and until it’s their child who gets counseled out of that “miracle” charter school.
So-called reformers insist on making the false argument that if you oppose the privatization of the public schools and the busting of the teacher’s unions, then you automatically hate kids and support some mythical status quo. That’s doubly false, since high stakes tests, public school closings and privatization have been the REAL status quo for years now. In NYC, we are only now (hopefully) beginning to emerge from a dozen Nightmare Years under Bloomberg and his apparatchiks, and the teachers and schools were under attack for years before that. We are essentially talking about a heavily financed disinformation campaign about public education that goes back thirty years, to the “A Nation at Risk” report on 1983.
At the risk of speaking for many who comment here, I think that the overwhelming majority of teachers, especially in high poverty urban districts, recognize the need for real reform of the public schools. There does need to be more flexibility for teachers and parents; the cruel irony is that so-called education reform/”choice” (which does not include the choice of an adequately resourced neighborhood public school) in practice restricts the public schools from making the changes needed, since they are constantly under threat and forced to abide by bad faith directives and mandates that undermine them.
Most teachers recognize the need for reform, but as we’ve seen, they’ve been consciously excluded from the discussion. The very terms of discussion and premises of debate have been hijacked by those who seek to destabilize public education, privatize as much of it as possible, reconfigure teacher labor relations, and monetize the kids.
When politicians close neighborhood public schools to make way for charters, as my mayor has done despite the protests of thousands of parents, then parents no longer have the choice of a neighborhood school and they are compelled to enroll their kids in charter schools. That’s forced choice, not personal preference.
Lloyd Lofthouse – A long time ago I lived for a few years in Wisconsin. It’s a beautiful state although with very long cold winters. I thought the people of Wisconsin were among the nicest people I had ever met.
Wisconsin may be controlled by the GOP in the state government, but almost 53% voted for Obama and only 45.89% for Romney in the last presidential election.
In addition, in 2008, Wisconsin went for Obama with 56.22% of the vote and only 42.31% for McCain.
Looking at the history of Political party strength in Wisconsin, it’s obvious that the majority of voters lean progressive.
What changed?
That was all in the first year.
Lloyd – The people of Wisconsin at the time I lived there certainly didn’t strike me as being poorly educated.
I’ve always wondered how one person can form a judgement of a country, state or city when, for instance, Wisconsin covers 65,497.82 square miles with more than 5.7 million people.
If you spend time with a few literate and educated people, that doesn’t mean everyone is literate and educated.
But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any literate and educated people in the state.
“Home to a world-class university, several colleges and technical colleges, and a renowned K-12 school system, the Madison Region boasts an incredibly well-educated population.
More than 60% of adults in the region hold an Associate Degree or higher, while 28% hold a Bachelor’s Degree or higher, greater than both the state and national averages.
Within Dane County, a full 38% of adults have a Bachelor’s Degree or higher, compared to 25% nationally. In fact, in the City of Madison, three-quarters of adult residents have attended college, a proportion that few other U.S. markets can match.”
It makes one wonder why the state needs to improve their public schools. After all, the adults are a reflection of the public schools they attended.
And here’s a piece that offers “Statistics and Facts About Wisconsin’s Great Schools”
http://www.weac.org/about_weac/Stats_About_WI_Schools.aspx
Proving that the privatization movement doesn’t care if the public schools are working or not—they are going to shut them down and replace them, suck the tax payer dry and then spit the kids out dumber than ever.
This is a clear case that a bunch of robber barons (nothing but pirates) are out to tap into that one trillion dollars the states spend annually on public education.
Have you seen the Wolf of Wall Street? A great example of the mindset and goals of some of the people behind the privatization movement. Others—fundamentalist Christians—want to teach creationism and throw science out. And some want to create the first country in history with a libertarian form of government.
“If you spend time with a few literate and educated people, that doesn’t mean everyone is literate and educated.”
In 2012, only 30.94% of Americans over the age of 24 had a four-year college degree. –U.S. Census Bureau
And most if not all of the 30.94% of Americans over the age of 24 with a four-year college degree probably don’t live anywhere close to a barrio or ghetto where poverty festers.
For instance, the town where we live today is an upper middle class community with 80% of parents college educated. When we picked this area to live, we checked the school report cards to make sure the socioeconomic profile revealed that the street gangs that often come with communities mired in poverty weren’t anywhere close.
In fact, when on the road, most college graduates probably speed by those communities on freeways with tall noise abatement walls blocking their view in addition to acting as a way to stop bullets from hitting cars on the urban freeways.
For thirties years, I taught in a community that was dominated to poverty and violent street gangs; about 60 – 70% of the students were on the reduced or free breakfast and lunch program.
Who, in their right mind would want to live in an area like that if they had the option not to. From my classroom doorway, I witnessed a drive by shooting as school was letting out, and this wasn’t the only incident. Usually, a week wouldn’t by without hearing of gang killing taking place in the community that fed kids to the high school where I taught. One weekend, two cars were racing down the street in front of the high school shooting at each other until one of drivers lost control and hit a telephone pole killing everyone in the car.
When another teacher at the same high school got married, he checked crime reports from local police departments in several communities to determine where it was safest to buy a home. Where you find poverty, you usually find street gangs, crime and violence.
well said, Lloyd!
In the first school in which I taught, one of my students–a 14 year old– had a gun taken away from him in the hallway. He had another kid up against a locker with the gun pointed at the kid’s head and was yelling, “I’m going to blow your f–g brains out.” Another of my students, a 13 year old, was prostituting herself for cigarette money. Another, a 14 year old, stole his father’s car, in which he and his girlfriend ran away to another state. Another, who had just turned 13, got pregnant and had to drop out. Another, one day, didn’t like a comment made by a classmate, so he got up, picked up HIS DESK, and threw it across the room at the kid. Another, a 14 year old girl, got into a fight on the school lawn, knocked the girl she was fighting with to the ground, and then kicked her repeatedly in the head, giving her a concussion. Another was caught slashing a teacher’s tires in the school parking lot. The kids talked continually about alcohol and drugs, and most smelled of cigarette smoke. This was a one-factory town, and those of the kids who were lucky enough to have parents who were working were latch-key kids, and their parents made barely over minimum wage. Many had single parents who were unemployed alcoholics, drug addicts, sex workers, petty criminals, etc. Homework? I don’t know. Maybe one of the mother’s johns could have helped like Kimmie with that. At 13 and 14, many of these kids were already hardened, had already checked out, and were biding their time until they could drop out. On parents nights, no one showed up.
But hey, giving them standardized tests would have fixed all that. Deformy Magic–NCLB and son of NCLB, CC$$, would have made all that go away.
Sounds like where I taught.
I had—but he didn’t attempt to learn; never did any work including reading but he was there every day—one kid in 8th grade before transferring to the high school who had killed several rival gang members and had a price on his head. He had a goofy laugh and he laughed at everything. I never heard him say a word.
A half dozen members of a rival gang came for him one day when he was in my English class but another teacher saw then and went after them with a bat and chased them off campus before they reached my room.
One girl, 16, was caught in the boys restroom at the HS having sex with a boy. A special ed kid walked in with an RR pass, saw what was going on and went back to tell his teacher. It took three of our campus cops to pull the couple apart because they refused to stop. When the girl’s mother was called by the principal. the mother called him a liar.
One of our CPO’s chased a kid off campus at lunch one day. The kid was on expulsion and shouldn’t have been on campus. Out in the street, the kid pulled a revolver and aimed it at the CPO and then the kid smiled one of those make my day smiles. The CPO turned around and walked back on campus.
Our CPO’s weren’t allowed to carry firearms because the district feared a law suit.
One time, I had a girl show up twenty minutes tardy—she was always tardy so were many of the other students. I asked for her tardy slip. She lifted her leg high and aimed a loud fart at me; then sat down and refused to leave. That ended the lesson.
I had to call the office and have the CPOs come and get her. She was back in class the next day. Never did any work. Never brought a book to class.
The same girl knocked out one of the other teachers, a woman, because the teacher dared to attempt breaking up a fight during class between that girl and another girl.
The student bathrooms were often closed for repairs. After fifteen thousand was spent to fix one of the boys RRs to be damage proofed, some kid dragged a full trash can full of paper into the RR and set it on fire. That so called kid proof RR was closed the rest of the year. The district said they didn’t have the money to fix it again. It wasn’t open even a week before it was closed again.
I think we could go on for pages with what we saw and experienced.
And all of these kids show up on standardized bubble test day.
savage inequalities
I grew up in Wisconsin. In Wisconsin, rummage sales always have plenty of books for sale. In Texas, not so much.
Despite being the epicenter of educational testing, with Texas being so conservative, education hasn’t changed that much. Thank goodness.
Like much of the US, Wisconsin can be politically bipolar: home of Fightin’ Bob LaFollette, as well as Tail Gunner Joe McCarthy, Russ Feingold and Scott Walker.
Michael – If there is no benefit to attending charter schools to justify the expense and trouble of getting one’s children into them then they will disappear pretty shortly since there is no coercion to force people to try to get their children into them.
The benefit has been that the public schools have been stripped of resources to fund charters. So public schools have struggled to perform with less and less. So charters disappear eventually if they do not perform. Maybe if their authorizers decide to not support them. What takes their place? What do the kids who attended them do? Why they go back into those public schools that have been systematically weakened already.
The idea of doing this kind of triage, year to year, has a version for teachers cooked up by a group of economists and statisticians at a major think tank. The first step is to use the value-added (VA) score for an entire district to determine the most effective teachers, irrespective of the subjects and grade-levels they teach. Advocates of this proposal (citation below) assume that the VA scores are so highly correlated with “non-value added” measures that a district can decide who keeps teaching and who gets fired by just looking at the VA scores. “For instance, we would assume that the correlation between observationally-based ratings of teachers and value-added (scores) in math would be the same in history, where value-added measures are not available” (Para 5).
This policy proposal would make all teacher evaluations “comparable” without any distinctions in grade level, or subject, or conditions under which teachers work.
The policy further articulates principles for dismissing up to 25% of teachers in a district, on the assumption that this action plan would increase test scores and be “fair” to every teacher. (The only exceptions to this sweeping set of principles might of for teachers of exceptional children.)
This policy proposal for arbitrary dismissals sounds like the idea of arbitrarily closing 5% of public schools.
Source Croft, M., Glazerman, S., Goldhaber, D., Loeb, S., Raudenbush, S.,Staiger, D., & Whitehurst, G.R. (2011). Passing Muster: Evaluating Teacher Evaluation Systems The Brookings Brown Center Task Group on Teacher Quality, Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2011/04/26-evaluating-teachers
This is the worst of a few new accountability bill version under discussion by the GOP legislature, none of them good for students and communities. The forced closure of the lowest 5% scoring schools is brutally arbitrary and of course there is every reason to expect going down that road would lead to worse educational opportunities for students.
The one useful contribution to this variant is that is has attracted front page discussion and moving from general statutory language to a plain 5% rule has allowed for an equally plain discussion of what the actual results would be. Sorting the most recent round of school report cards shows many high schools. Charter operators have an unimpressive track record overall and an extremely poor history of being able to provide quality comprehensive high school options. There at fourteen comprehensive urban high schools with an enrollment of 1,000 or higher in the bottom 5%. There are also two small rural high schools in extremely sparsely populated areas of northern Wisconsin in the bottom 5% as well. These are community anchor institutions and are unlikely to be served by a charter operator due to their remote location. Virtual education is only a good fit for some students. We will see if this shocks the conscience of moderate Republicans. It has certainly surprised some editorial boards and independents.
There is also a recovery district option being discussed in the background as well. Hopefully the controversy on the 5% bill keeps a recovery district bill on the sidelines.
2old2teach – If charter schools receive more funding than other public schools does this mean that they can provide a superior education? If they provide a superior education then this would help explain their appeal. But if their assumed higher level of funding does not result in a better education then there is still no reason for anyone to take the trouble to get their children enrolled in them.
The comments about charter schools I come across on this blog are so negative that if they are the whole truth they I am puzzled why parents would make any effort to get their children enrolled in them. Yet obviously a significant number of parents do want their children enrolled in them. Charter schools in general must have some value to some parents or they would have disappeared long ago.
Maybe this 2009 report out of Stanford will explain why
Click to access National_Release.pdf
Or this from the LA Times on an update of Stanford’s 2009 study
“The most compelling aspect of the new report isn’t the results but how this improvement came about. It’s not that existing charter schools improved much, the authors said. It’s that some of the worst ones closed.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/15/opinion/la-ed-charter-schools-stanford-study-20130713
Read the research, Jim. Charters on the whole do no better than public schools. A significant portion do worse. There are outstanding public schools and charter schools, but neither should be determined by their test scores alone. It should be significant that charter schools in general are not held to the same standards as public schools nor are they subject to the same oversight.
I think it is worthwhile to think about a family’s decision. It is not between public schools and charters on the whole. It is between one particular public school (if they are in a traditional school system) and a small number of charter schools. Mean levels of performance don’t matter.