The Kansas State Department of Education has money to burn (but not on tezchers’ Salaries), so it burned $270,000 to hire three inexperinced temporary teachers from TFA. The three will be gone in two years or so, meaning this was a very unwise expenditure.
Mercedes Schneider explains the folly here.
The real winner in this bad deal is TFA and its recruiter.
Note to state education departments: Don’t do stuff that makes you look foolish.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Ed reformers in Ohio drop charter scandal report the day before Thanksgiving and 2 weeks after the election:
“Lack of oversight, a haphazard internal investigation, inexplicable emails that don’t say who sent or received them, a stonewalling state superintendent and a failure to secure data are highlighted in a years-long investigation into a charter-school evaluation scandal at the Department of Education that was released Tuesday.
The problems erupted three years ago when it was discovered that the man in charge of the state’s charter-school office excluded poorly performing e-school scores from new charter-sponsor results, allowing them to avoid having the low scores reflect badly on their overall evaluations. The move related to the state’s effort to obtain a $71 million federal charter-school grant.”
https://www.dispatch.com/news/20181120/new-audit-shows-2015-charter-evaluation-scandal-even-worse-than-thought
There will be another huge charter scandal in Ohio. No one was held accountable for this one and all the same people are in charge.
The entire state government apparatus in Columbus is captured by the charter lobby- from governor to auditor and attorney general. It’s exactly the same people who protected ECOT from prosecution.
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As bad as this example is, Oakland Unified somehow always finds a way to take first prize in the Throw Money Down A Hole category. Our district managed to fritter away more than $1M for a quasi-math tutoring program called Blueprint Math. The consultants sold it to the district with a bunch of highly questionable “improvement” stats. The students didn’t really improve, but then at the end of the program, our board was told the program’s goal was to incubate teachers via its Americorps-recruited Math Fellows. Out of 12 original fellows, how many were actually retained at OUSD as teachers? Two, and I can’t even be sure that these two are still employed there. You can’t ask for a worse investment in teacher recruitment.
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a symbolic farce repeated in so many ways across the nation
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