Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic governor of Virginia, signed a law repealing the A-F letter grades for schools. As Lindsay Wagner of NC Policy Watch reports, this action takes place at the same time that North Carolina learned that the letter grades are highly correlated with the proportion of disadvantaged students in the school. Thus, the report card serves to stigmatize schools with high poverty levels, making it harder for them to recruit teachers and setting them up for takeover and privatization.
The A-F letter grades are Jeb Bush’s idea. As State Superintendent Tony Bennett showed in Indiana, the formula for the letter grades can be manipulated to protect campaign donors who own charter schools. Mainly they stigmatize schools that serve the neediest children.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I don’t understand this. “Thus, the report card serves to stigmatize schools with high poverty levels, making it harder for them to recruit teachers and setting them up for takeover and privatization.”
I thought that the lower the performance of a school, the easier it is to take it over since usually the lowest performing schools are taken over.
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-They want to take over a structure that is intact and functional, not an empty shell, unless it is a new building and it is available at one half the market value. It is all about not having to do much work in order to maximize profits.
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There is also some degree of political maneuvering in these designations. In Florida the realtors got them to pass a law stating that a school could only drop one letter grade in year. This was done to stabilize the real estate market in a community. Realtors did not want a mass exodus in a given neighborhood. It is more smoke and mirrors.!
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
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I find it sad that as one state repeals the law the short-sighted Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dandy Dan Patrick is trying to cram this law down the throat of the state senate. Special.
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What goes around comes around…the last I checked Jeb Bush wasn’t doing that greatly running for President of the U.S. I think he made too many enemies. It was his way or the highway…now he will finally pay the price for his dictatorship ways. I rate him an F.
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Well, here is Florida, I mean Colorado the beat goes on – read this to see how convoluted all this testing, ranking, and rating has become!!
http://co.chalkbeat.org/2015/03/23/heres-how-denver-schools-are-going-to-be-evaluated-this-year/
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As a 30+ year teacher from Indiana, I celebrated when Bennett lost in 2012 and I was delighted when he resigned from Florida. The fact that he “cooked the books” for DeHaan Charter school is proof enough to me that the A-F system should be dumped. As I posted here long ago,
Bennett tried to claim that the A-F system had flaws in it, so he massaged the numbers to make it more fair. If it had these flaws, why wasn’t the A-F system pilot tested to iron out these problems BEFORE it was ever passed into law?
Just like his buddy (current) Governor Pence, Bennett would rather push a mistaken, unfair, or unjust law because he had the momentum and the (majority) vote, rather than a good law that is agreeable to all parties.
Just this week, the GOP supermajority legislature in Indiana voted on the so-called “Religious Freedom Restoration Act,” which Pence said he would sign. Many businesses and civic leaders spoke out against this bill.
http://news.yahoo.com/indiana-house-passes-controversial-religious-freedom-bill-210228540.html
According to another article today, Pence’s office is no longer accepting phone calls. My guess is that so many calls came in opposing this measure that his staff could not handle the volume. Either that, or he made up his mind already and wouldn’t deign to listen to voters any longer.
Had there been lots of calls to the Governor’s office (either under Pence or former-guv Daniels), I wouldn’t be surprised if they simply shut them down so they wouldn’t be troubled by the dissent.
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