Wow! Our new Secretary of Education-designate founded a charter school in Massachusetts called Roxbury Prep.
John F. Lerner went to the state website and compiled graphs that show the suspension rates and attrition rates for Roxbury Prep.
Do you think these tactics will close the achievement gaps?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
It’s becoming obvious that corporate Charter schools in the United States are America’s version of the Soviet Union’s Gulags.
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King has wasted his mind.
Gates has wasted his time. Recap of Gates’ interview. Great teachers are good. Period. And that’s basically all we know.
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http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/bill-melinda-gates-political-debate-common-core-standards/
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It’s hard to say who won the lying contest: Bill or Melinda.
I’d call it a tossup.
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Note how Gates deals with the recent ruling by the Washington State Supreme Court that charters are not public (“common”) schools — that to treat them as such for funding purposes violates the State Constitution.
here’s what Gates said:
“We have got 1,200 kids in charter schools whose fate are up in the air. Some people are trying to get those defunded, which is — for those nine schools that are in place, you know, that seems like a bad thing to want to shut those down.’
“Some people are trying to get those defunded”
The 6 out of 9 State Supreme court justices who ruled against charters as “common schools” were not “trying to get those defunded”, but based their decision on a legal reading of the state Constitution.
So Gates is simply misrepresenting the issue: pure deception.
A baldfaced lie.
And to play the “Think of the charter kids” card is just completely disgusting in this case, since he knows full well that it was a legal decision.
If Gates is really so worried about the nine schools closing down, why doesn’t he just fund them. The funds would be a drop in the bucket for him.
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All either of them did was generalize with talking points from 2009. Looking forward to next week on PBS with a prominent public education supporter from Gates’ home state. Looking forward to specifics and relevance.
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King wasted his mind? What mind? Do psychopaths have minds?
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The charter chain school seems less like a school than a boot camp. This boot camp seems less and less like a boot camp than a cult. Long hours without food or sleep, extreme degradation of control, hypnotic following, going to public squares to proselytize for the organization…
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“It’s a small point, but despite his claims King wasn’t a “founder” of Roxbury. Evan Rudall and Michele Pierce wrote the charter application, which was approved in February 1998, according to Rudall’s bio. King wasn’t involved in the charter until April 1999, and Rudall himself says that he “brought in” King as co-director.”
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I will add that when King was at Roxbury the school opened with only 80 students (from his doctoral dissertation, page 116), class size 22 students and no teacher had more than 72 pupils per year (dissertation page 119).
The school is thoroughly described in his doctoral dissertation, which concludes with the recommendation that Mass. write and pass legislation to allow the rapid expansion of charters.
“To make possible the creation of more schools like Roxbury Prep, Academy of the Pacific Rim, and Neighborhood House with the potential to dramatically boost the
performance of low-income students of color, the charter statute could be amended to
either eliminate the cap entirely for districts in the bottom twenty percent of MCAS
performance or to at least allow tuition payments to charters to reach twenty-five percent
of the districts net spending . . .
“At this point in the evolution of the charter school movement, it is unclear what
the tipping point might be at which high-performing charters might drive truly
revolutionary change in districts. This is true in part because authorizers, including the
Massachusetts Department of Education, have under-utilized their authority to close
under-performing charter schools and so there is no model for a school district in which
the charter schools in operation are uniformly high-performing. However, allowing the
number of high-performing charters to grow to twenty-five percent of a district’s
spending could provide a valuable test case. At a minimum, the creation of more schools
like Roxbury Prep, Academy of the Pacific Rim, and Neighborhood House has the
potential to improve opportunity for hundreds of students and families” (dissertation pages 330-1).
King has NEVER been a friend of public education. And he’s never been a public school teacher either except for a few minutes at the beginning of his “career.” You can order a copy of his dissertation at ProQuest, if you like. It’s worth a read, at least for masochists.
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This is pretty funny.
Apparently, John King’s supporters standardize their tweets the way King standardizes his charter schools and the testing that goes on there:
This is from teacher activist Julie Blaha’s twitter at:
Julie Blaha (@julieblaha) | Twitter
——–
JACK: Each of these tweets is not a re-tweet, but each person claiming to be making a tweet / comment of their own original invention.
C’mon guys, don’t be lazy.
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I guess that would make them all mocking birds, right?
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The tweets the thing, wherein we’ll catch the mocking of the King.
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“The charter’s the thing, wherein we’ll catch the conscience of the King”
also works
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