One of Jeb Bush’s signature initiatives–and possibly the stupidest–was giving schools letter grades of A-F.
Schools are complex institutions with many individuals engaged in their work, some doing better jobs than others, some essential, some not. No complex institution should be graded A-F. No individual child should be graded with a single letter, A-F. Imagine if your child came home with a report card that held only one letter, A-F. As a parent, you would be outraged. You would know that she was good at this, not so good at that, that there were many ways of describing her efforts and abilities and skills and work. How dumb it is to grade an entire school with a single letter.
Yet the Florida model of testing, accountability, choice, punishments, and rewards goes wherever there are rightwing zealots who want to destroy public education.
New Mexico had the misfortune of electing a Republican governor who wanted to be just like Jeb. She hired a non-educator, Hannah Skandera, as the state’s commissioner of education (Skandera had worked for Jeb), and she tried to import the Florida model. After seven years, Skandera left, and New Mexico saw zero improvement in education by any metric.
Fortunately Susana Martinez was replaced by a Democratic governor, former Congresswoman Michelle Lujan Grisham, who has been removing every trace of the Florida model. In January she eliminated the state’s disastrous teacher-evaluation system and the hated PARCC tests, which had been imposed by Martinez’s executive orders.
Yesterday, with the stroke of a pen, she repealed the state’s A-F grading system. The state’s Public Education Department must now devise a new accountability system to comply with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act. The bill now under consideration in the legislature calls for a “dashboard showing how each of the state’s public schools are faring in terms of graduation rates, student proficiency outcomes, reliance on federal Title I funds and the progress of English-language learners.”
Of course, this too appeals to the idea that parents are consumers, not citizens bound to work together for better public schools.
New Mexico has extremely high levels of child poverty, the second worst in the nation after Mississippi. Standards, accountability, and choice doesn’t cure that. It also ranks at the very bottom of NAEP, close to the other poor states. The Florida Model pretends that poverty doesn’t matter. Skandera’s failure proved that it does.
The state currently grades schools on a complex range of measures, including graduation rates, student performance on standardized tests, student attendance and parental involvement in schools. Advocates believe these grades provide a clear picture of how schools are performing and encourage communities to help struggling schools. Critics say the formula is so confusing that the grades are of little use. They also complain that the system relies too much on standardized test scores.
Several years ago, a group of Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists said even they struggled to make sense of the complicated grading system.
The only explanation needed to make sense of JB’s insane way of grading schools is that it was a weapon designed by extreme right libertarian oligarchs to destroy community-based, democratic public education where the teachers belong to democratically organized teacher labor unions.
How can I make such an accusation?
We only have to look at all the really failing corporate charter schools that are judged behind closed doors in secret to see a double standard that was implemented with one goal: destroy community-based, democratically run public schools.– the kind of schools both Adams and Jefferson agreed the U.S. needed if it was to survive as the Constitutional Republic with democratic elements built into the system of governance.
The only people that do not want transparency for corporate charter schools are con-men, frauds, liars, and crooks.
Koch brothers libertarians must see democracy American style that is support by the U.S.Constituion as a form of socialism or communism to hate it all that much.
The oligarchy of the Koch brothers and that of Stalinist Russia seems not that different. It is just a different set of rules that allow certain people to wear the fancy clothes. Do the Koch brothers really hate communism? Or do they just say this so that certain segments of the public will join them in the attempt to create their own peculiar oligarchy?
The Koch brothers’ father worked for Stalin and helped build Russia’s oil industry. When their father came back to the U.S. flush with Russian gold, he bought up lots of oil land and founded the Koch empire. I’ve read that he was also a founding father of the John Birch Society.
Irony meets conspiracy
Communism, Capitalism and Libertarianism
The isms an excuse
For what amounts to pillage
You have to be obtuse
To swallow all the swillage
“Several years ago, a group of Los Alamos National Laboratory scientists said even they struggled to make sense of …”
I was talking to a New Mexico friend of mine who is in education out there a couple of years ago. Apparently there was a discussion in the middle school where a friend taught brought about by the complaint from one of the Los Alamos mathematical heavyweights that the middle school population might get out of the eighth grade without sufficient mathematical skills needed to understand equations related to thermodynamics.
This is a perfect example of what happens when those who are not in the classroom daily weigh in on problems associated with education. Whether they be brilliant at what they do or lunatics raving at supposed philosophical outrages, those not in the classroom always forget the reality that is in the daily interaction between student and teacher, between student and learning. This interaction is so much more complex than thermodynamics that a single equation for it has never been suggested. That Jeb Bush would have an understanding of public policies related to education is so laughable that it almost seems like satire. That the worth of a school would have a formulatic expression is such a preposterous assertion. That modern journalism accepts these ratings without question is criminal.
“That Jeb Bush would have an understanding of public policies related to education is so laughable that it almost seems like satire.” SO MUCH of what has been imposed onto schools in the name of test-score “accountability” has been surreal — so terribly and terrifyingly illogical that it boggles the mind to see it continue year after year after year…
There is simply no such thing as a failing school. There is no such thing as a high achieving school. Grading schools is like saying there are failing or high achieving trees because one cannot see the forest. A school is a living community, not a monolithic object. (Jeb Bush, on the other hand, is an object, an ossified, inanimate object.) Students and families cannot be consumers of a product when they are very much part of the product. You don’t consume education; you contribute to it. You get out of it what you put into it.
Jeb Bush doesn’t get enough credit. He is the puppet master of Disruption and Ed Reform.
Indeed, Diane. This is the 20th ‘anniversary’ of Florida’s school grades. That disruption immediately set up the good-vs.bad schools system, creating a pathway for high-end developments in good school districts and Title I remediation/state takeovers for bad—read poor, minority—schools. No wonder school board members here in Jax are now vetted through the Chamber of Commerce and the Northeast Florida Builders Association.
I have trouble thinking that Jeb Bush is a credit to anything education related. He has been pulling the strings in Florida behind the scenes for years. It seems to me Bush deserves more blame than credit.
I didn’t give him credit. I said he is the puppet master of every vile scheme that the reformers trot out.
The whole Bush clan does not get enough credit for screwing up our country.
It’s a genetic experiment gone bad.
SomeDAM Poet: The Bush clan, Reagan and Trump. Can’t the US do better than that?
I have a friend that told me Reagan was the best president ever. She is a retired school teacher and worked in a district that had a union. Reagan, the union buster, did not accomplish much. She also told me that ‘government is the biggest corporation’ that does damage. Right. Private corporations give the top CEO’s and investors ever more money and screw the workers.
This is the belief of an educated person. She is also a Fox watcher. How is one to get through to these people?
All K-12 teachers are not Democrats, liberals, or progressives. A significant number are registered Republicans and conservatives.
Here are the results of one survey conducted by Ed Week.org (I’ve seen similar results from other sources):
A few key findings:
• Forty-one percent of respondents described themselves as Democrats while another 30 percent said they were independents. Just 27 percent were Republicans.
• Half the respondents voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election. Another 29 percent voted for Trump. Thirteen percent selected a third-party candidate.
You might want to click the link and see what the rest of that survey says about the political beliefs of K-12 public teachers.
https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/12/13/survey-paints-political-portrait-of-americas-k-12.html
Lloyd Lofthouse: I’ll never understand why any educated person will support Trump. He is a pathological liar who has alienated our allies and bows to dictators. He is a racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, narcissistic bully who wants loyalty above doing what is best for this country. He is appointing judges who will put this country back decades.
Maybe there are teachers who put their Evangelical worship above everything else and want abortions abolished or immigrants to be put in tent cities and freeze. Trump is their new ‘god’.
Maybe they have been indoctrinated by Fox or Sinclair. Anything told often enough becomes the new ‘fact’.
Lloyd Lofthouse: Any lie told often enough becomes a fact, especially if it makes money for Fox.
……………………………
6 Takeaways From The Times’s Investigation Into Rupert Murdoch and His Family
BY LIAM STACK APRIL 3, 2019
Using 150 interviews on three continents, The Times describes the Murdoch family’s role in destabilizing democracy in North America, Europe and Australia.
When Sean Hannity of Fox News appeared onstage at a rally with President Trump — and called the press corps “fake news” from the podium — it was the culmination of the network’s shift from its “fair and balanced” founding days to a post-Ailes MAGA messaging machine.
…During the 2016 campaign, the Fox News host Sean Hannity advised the president’s former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, to be on the lookout for ex-girlfriends or former employees of Mr. Trump lest they cause him trouble, according to two people who know about the interactions (Hannity denies offering such advice)….
I wanted to read that NYT’s piece about how Murdock is manipulating and changing the world toward something he wants instead of the type of world most people would prefer to live in — but when I tried to read it I ran into a paywall.
I’m finding that more and more of the traditional media is putting their stories behind paywalls while the real fake media that promotes lies, misinformation, and outrageous conspiracy theories is not only free but is repeated by thousands of robot-sites to spread their crap as far and fast to repeatedly spread this alternate fake reality.
Any changes that come about built on a massive foundation of lies cannot be good.
I for one cannot afford to subscribe to traditional media sites like The New York Times and The Washington Post just so I can read a few of their stories. These subscriptions add up and allow access to everything they publish but most individuals are not interested in reading the daily paper from front to back like many Americans did back in the 1940s through the 1980s.
I might pay one fee to one service that allowed me to read one story from one source and another story from another source. That way I’d be reading from more than one tradigital source and they’d get paid for me reading one story at a time. If they charged like twenty-five cents or less for each piece I read, I’d be able to keep more informed from more reliable media sources.
These paywalls from the traditional media will only benefit the extreme Alt-Right’s (made up of neoliberals, neoconservatives, tea party conservatives, fundamentalist-evangelical fake Christians, and Koch brothers libertarians) agenda to subvert the US Constitutional Republic and its democratic institutions and turn the US and probably the world into a dystopian nightmare world for everyone but the billionaires and the minion-puppets that serve their evil masters.
Lloyd Lofthouse: I agree with what you are saying.
I finally signed up for the NYT and am paying $4.00 a month for a year. I figured I could afford that. I wrote the date to unsubscribe slightly before one year is up.
WaPo has a digital special of $50. for the year.
I went a number of years before giving them any money. I know that newspapers are loosing money and many are firing journalists. This is not good for the country. Too many are getting lousy ‘news’ from Fox.
I try to give parts of each article so that people who hit a pay wall can get some idea of what has been written.
Yes, Jeb’s contributions are massive, but this thread doesn’t mention his brother, who was ruining education long before Jeb’s mischief began. W brought us the Phonics First manipulation that was primarily a marketing scheme – and a mighty profitable one at that – and many other really dumb ideas.
I do not think using the word “contribution” fits the damage that Jeb Bush and his family have done to this country.
the words “loss or subtraction” might fit better.
The Worst of all possible worlds
In all the multiverse
One never could do worse
Where everything unfurls
It’s worst of all the worlds
Now get rid of grades for kids too and we’ll begin to have an intelligent approach to education.
I have long decried the negative impact of giving students grades. Children become focused on the wrong goal early in life. Instead of wondering whether they are really learning and valuing the idea of their education, they worry about their grade. When the foot is removed from the accelerator, they coast rather than press on. How to get past something like grades has been a problem I have considered for a long time.
And parents PAY their children for their grades on report cards.
HOW INSANE.
“I have long decried the negative impact of giving students grades.”
I’ve said this before but as a student who came from a poverty level home with severe emotional and mental abuse, which came from my mother, I had to have grades in order to achieve.
My father, who gave no emotional support, was proud of my grades. I worked to please him.
Most people who come from homes like mine, according to my therapist, become bag ladies or drug addicts. I wouldn’t have survived that.
I do not decry grades. Without that motivation I probably wouldn’t have gotten very far in school. I graduated with high honors when I got my Master of Music Education degree.
Working to get grades is what motivated me. I did get therapy for five years but that wasn’t until I was in my early 50’s.
I’m sure there are some students who are in the same hole that I was in. Grades to us DO matter.
Or at least get rid of those supervising the grades, & let the teachers use them as they see fit. I’m looking at you, adminimals, who want to see a bell curve. I was schooled when teachers were the professionals in charge. Some wouldn’t test until they were satisfied everyone grasped the concept, & expected to see all A’s. Different teachers, different grading systems, but systems & expectations were made clear. Meanwhile those who got the concepts early were encouraged to work ahead. It’s standardized curriculum & measurements that are the culprit—not grades.
What you write is true, but grades are not useful in any important way. They are like Bill Barr’s summary of the Mueller report: Inadequate to characterize complex individuals, and too easy to misuse. They skew motivational systems in children and generally measure the least important outcomes in the least interesting way.
School report cards are required under ESSA. These report cards are real beasts with multiple measures. New Mexico is not doing anything extraordinary by getting rid of A-F.
Some of the measures in ESSA are new. ESSA does not require a reduction of all of these measures into a single A-F grade. If anything ESSA requires parents to encounter multiple data-dashboards with multiple performance measures. In theory these are easy to decipher and planned with a parents-as-customers view of education.
The following measures are required by ESSA. Others could be added in approved state plans for ESSA.
ESSA requires that State and district report cards includeinformation on the following.
EDUCATION SPENDING
• How much is spent per student for every school.
• How much money per student comes from federal sources
• How much money per student comes from state and local sources.
• The average amount of money the state, a district, and a school spends for each student.
(For the first time, ESSA requires each states to publish ONLINE the per-pupil spending for each school and district. Expenditures must include actual teacher salaries, not average salaries. The reasoning is this: Actual teacher salaries may reveal inequitable distributions of more experienced teachers across a district, as these teachers often earn higher salaries. The reasoning comes from the major provider of technical help on ESSA, the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, directed by Dr. Marquerita Roza, also a finance expert for the Center for Reinventing Public Education, not a friend of public schools). https://edunomicslab.org/our-research/student-based-allocations/
STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT
• The results of the annual statewide tests in reading/language arts, math, and science
• The percentage of all students and each subgroup of students who participate in the State’s math, reading/language arts, and science tests
• The number and percentage of students with significant cognitive disabilities who take an alternate test
• Information about how the district’s test results compare with the State as a whole and how each school’s test results compares with the district average and the statewide average
• State results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and math assessments in grades four and eight
GRADUATION RATES
• Graduation rates of all students and of each subgroup of students who receive a regular diploma or higher credential within four years
• Graduation rates for students who receive a diploma after more than four years
• Rates of postsecondary enrollment for every high school in the State, if they are available
4.STATE ACCOUNTABILITY/PERFORMANCE MEASURES
• Schools identified for improvement and support.
• State accountability indicators, such as educator engagements or chronic absenteeism
SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT
• In-school suspensions
• Out-of-school suspensions
• Expulsions
• School-related arrests
• Referrals to law enforcement
• Chronic absenteeism
• Incidents of violence (including bullying and harassment)
TEACHER QUALIFICATIONS
• Number and percentage of inexperienced teachers, principals and other school leaders
• Number and percentage of teachers teaching with emergency or provisional credentials
• Number and percentage of teachers who are not teaching in the subject or field for which the teacher is licensed
• Number and percentage of teachers by qualifications with comparison between high-poverty and low-poverty schools.
Click to access parent-guide-state-local-report-cards.pdf
These are categories were identified up for the benefit of parents. State plans actually require a lot more disggregation of data by subgroups. Ohio’s Data dashboard throws so many color coded metrics derived from other metrics that few parents will have the time or patience to discern how they are being played in the name of “accountability.” The per-student expenditures are sure-fire gotcha for getting rid of “expensive teachers” and outsourcing instruction plug and play software.
Indiana is an embarrassment. Grade schools and middle schools will still get A-F ratings but a new way of grading is being proposed for high schools. It would depend upon following up on what decisions students make after graduation. “It suggests the state board use metrics like how many students are “college and career-ready” and how many students complete a semester of college, earn a work certificate or enlist in the military.”
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Indiana could overhaul how it grades schools. That’s news to us, graders say.
2019/02/07
House Bill 1404 is proposing a philosophical change in the way schools are graded on the state’s A-F accountability system.
State would stop grading high schools based on standardized testing
At its core, House Bill 1404 is proposing a philosophical change in the way schools are graded on the state’s A-F accountability system. The amendment considered Wednesday largely leaves elementary and middle schools alone, which was something McCormick asked for, but makes substantive changes to how high schools will be measured.
Current state law requires student performance on standardized testing to be given substantial weight in the grading system. The bill would stop grading high schools based on how students perform on state tests and start looking more at how well students do after they graduate. It suggests the state board use metrics like how many students are “college and career-ready” and how many students complete a semester of college, earn a work certificate or enlist in the military.
The A-F letter grades awarded to schools are important. Not only can they impact the way teachers, students and communities feel about their schools, years of failing grades can lead to serious consequences like state takeover or caps on enrollment…
There are also questions about how well schools will be able track students once they graduate and if schools should be held accountable for decisions students make once they leave them.
“School corporations shouldn’t be held accountable for life circumstances and decisions these adolescents make after leaving high school,” said Terry Spradlin, executive director of the Indiana School Boards Association.
Check out this story on IndyStar.com: https://www.indystar.com/story/news/politics/2019/02/07/indianas-school-grading-system-could-change-drastically/2791109002/
“metrics like how many students are “college and career-ready”
Yuh – what metric is that? Oh, yeah, the state govt is going to somehow accurately track each hisch grad to find out whether they successfully either completed a year of college or a year in a job. Hahaha, when students get that questionnaire in the mail, they’ll round-file it. Or maybe IN proposes to track every hisch grad into their postgrad life via Soc Sec No ? Colleges, & the IRS might have something to say about that!
bethree5
States do track students after they leave high school. The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) collects data from postsecondary institutions in the United States (50 states and the District of Columbia) and other U.S. jurisdictions.
IPEDS defines a postsecondary institution as an organization that is open to the public and provides postsecondary education or training beyond the high school level as one of its primary missions. IPEDS includes institutions that offer academic, vocational, and continuing professional education programs. IPEDS excludes avocational (leisure) and adult basic education programs.
IPEDS provides basic statistics regarding tuition and fees, number and types of degrees and certificates conferred, number of students enrolled, number of employees, financial statistics, graduation rates, and student financial aid. The Higher Education Amendments of 1992 make submission of data to IPEDS mandatory for any institution that participates in or is an applicant for participation in any federal financial assistance program authorized by Title IV of the Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended.
As a result of this mandate, IPEDS response rates are nearly 100 percent. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013293.pdf see also https://nces.ed.gov/statprog/outcomemeasures/
The main obstacle to even greater surveillance of students after high school is the federal law restricting the use of personally identifiable information (PII) for each student ( Think SS number as an example.
The Gates Foundation has been trying to get that restriction lifted and for at least twelve years. He has recruited others to that cause as you can see here. http://www.aplu.org/news-and-media/News/aplu-statement-on-us-department-of-educations-new-ipeds-outcome-measures-survey and in this 2017 statement from the American Educational Research Association
http://www.aera.net/Statement-by-AERA-Executive-Director-Felice-J-Levine-on-the-New-Expansion-of-IPEDS-and-the-Need-for-Lifting-Restrictions-on-Federal-Data-Collection
Be clear, this is a wish for a NATIONAL system of data gathering on individual students who enter publically funded schools and vocational programs plus some tracking of those students into any workplace (Gates wants that as part of his “Data Quality Campaign.”
The use of PII for postsecondary tracking will creat a national database ripe for exploitation in many ways, including a “social credit score” analogous to that in China.
Unfortunately, the claimed need for “transparency” has been helped by criminal abuse of the student loan system and the general demeaning higher education as of little worth beyond the income received by graduates of a program.
Hi Laura thanks for the links. The cite I was criticizing came from the linked article at Santa Fe New Mexican, but link doesn’t work anymore & I can’t find article. My concern was about trying to grade schools and teachers on what students accomplish after graduating high school. Per your links, fed ed collects performance et al data from post-secondaries, but not from the secondaries that supply their students. Linking that up would be a horrendous power grab & privacy invasion by fed in name of “accountability.” As you say, we’ll have to stand firm against the infomongers like Gates who would love to see it happen.
Race to the Top required states to create a longitudinal database for all students, including personally identifiable information. Simultaneously, Arne Duncan weakened the federal privacy law that protects students (FERPA) so this data could be shared without parental consent.
I din’t know this about RTTT
Congrats to the state of New Mexico for beginning to undo the extraordinary damage done by “thought leader” Hannah Skandera, who led thought about education in the state off a cliff.
Sorry, there’s no “h” in Hannah. I’m not yet proficient in Goblish.
the Florida model of testing, accountability, choice, punishments, and rewards goes wherever there are
rightwingzealots who want to destroy public educationZealotry knows no political leaning or party.
Without a doubt, Barack Obama did more damage to public education in eight years than Jeb Bush and other Republicans governors could ever do in their wildest dreams.
And Andrew Cuomo is certainly doing a bang up job on public education.
When you actually listen to and value teachers’ input, and have a Lt. Governor with a sped background guiding PED rule making, educational policy that makes sense is far more likely to be put in place. Corporate crapiola be gone!!!!
Subject: Sign the petition! U.S. Congress: Sign the petition: Urge Congress to support the Rebuild America’s School Act
I signed a petition on Action Network telling U.S. Congress to Sign the petition: Urge Congress to support the Rebuild America’s School Act.
Despite being one of the wealthiest countries in the world, public schools across the U.S. remain underfunded. Teachers across the country report stagnant wages, overcrowded classrooms, and ripped textbooks. Teachers and students deserve better school conditions in order to thrive.
At the beginning of the year, Democratic Virginia Rep. Bobby Scott–Chair of the House Education & Labor Committee–introduced the Rebuild America’s School Act. If passed, the Act would address crumbling school infrastructure in low-income neighborhoods by investing $100 billion in public school infrastructure, with $70 billion for direct grants to building renovations and upgrades and $30 billion going towards tax-credit bonds for schools.
Low-income public school students deserve clean, updated schools — it is Congress’ duty to ensure they have equal facilities to those of middle and high income public school students.
Sign the petition to urge Congress to pass this important legislation for students across the country.
Can you join me and take action? Click here: https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/sign-the-petition-urge-congress-to-support-the-rebuild-americas-school-act?source=email&
Thanks!
My wife is a real estate professional. When a public school is excellent, and the families/students are satisfied with the school, word gets around and fast. The housing in the areas with excellent schools becomes more in demand. And on the flip side, when a public school is not delivering an adequate education to the students, the reputation gets around even faster.
Assigning letter grades to a public school, is superfluous and unnecessary. If you want to find out about a public school, just ask a real estate professional.
It is really a simple equation, Charles.
When the cost of real estate is high, the kids live in families with a high income. Duh.
High income neighborhoods have more money to spend on schools and fewer kids with disabilities and more kids who are privileged.
You are confusing causation and correlation.
The phenomenon you describe is not about education. It is not about schools “delivering” anything. It’s about money. Schools are deemed “good” because they have relatively affluent families whose children are advantaged in many ways. The so-called “good” schools make property values rise, thereby further elevating the affluence in the neighborhood. It is a circular, self-fulfilling prophecy and is not meaningful, except that those schools then have relatively greater resources, further yet advantaging the advantaged families.
It is widely believed that certain neighborhoods have “good” schools, when the truth is that certain schools have “good” neighborhoods. It’s an important distinction.
The alleged trouble with public schools is not an education problem. It is a economic justice problem.
That is exactly the point I am making. When a neighborhood has excellent schools, families with children gravitate there. This pushes property values up, and tax revenues as well. This starts a virtuous cycle.
As long as our nation funds public schools, with property taxes, this phenomenon will continue. Jonathan Kozol wrote about it in his classic, “Savage Inequalities”.
Charles: “When a neighborhood has excellent schools, families with children gravitate there.”
Not all families gravitate there. Only the ones with enough money to purchase expensive homes will ‘gravitate’ in that direction.
The poor will remain in their underfunded neighborhoods because they don’t have the money to move. These poverty schools should receive more funding since these children need all sorts of wraparound services and small class sizes.
This is why all public schools need to be funded equally, irrespective of letter grades and other similar crap, which don’t motivate schools better, but certainly make them unequal.
You still misstate the cause and effect by writing, “When a neighborhood has excellent schools.” The schools are not excellent. The neighborhood is “excellent.”
It is, to be sure, a subtle point, but in my book I refer to my own public high school. It was “rated” among America’s best. Graduates went to college at high rates and won prizes of all kinds. The orchestra was considered among the 2 or 3 best in the country. But the teachers and classes were dull and uninspired. The orchestra was good because the kids were privileged and studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music. The parents were either affluent or in higher education or medicine or both.
The community did not have excellent schools. The schools had an excellent community.
The schools in the adjacent, poverty-riddled neighborhood were just as good in terms of dedicated teachers and curriculum. The community? Not so lucky.
Excellent explanation, Steve.
Virtuous or vicious?
Since when is gentrification “virtuous”?
When “gentrification” comes to town people who do not earn enough are usually driven out.
“In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report Health Effects of Gentrification defines the real estate concept of gentrification as “the transformation of neighborhoods from low value to high value. This change has the potential to cause the displacement of long-time residents and businesses.”
“Gentrification Has Unintended Consequences for Urban Poor.”
https://www.aafp.org/news/blogs/freshperspectives/entry/20180928fp-gentrification.html
And are you aware of this example of your alleged “virtuous”, make a profit, gentrification?
From Tennessee, this sounds like fiction.
dystopian science fiction
By dystopian, I mean: “an imaginary society that is as dehumanizing and as unpleasant as possible. George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” for example, describes a dystopian society in which Napoleon, a pig, represents Joseph Stalin in a farmyard satire on Stalinist Russia and how power corrupts.”
Orwell had no idea he was not writing about a future Stalinist Russia but a future United States led by someone like the deplorable anti-hero MAGA Man Donald Trump and his putrid fart-bag (explaining all those artificial smiles … no one knows she does that every time she breaks wind) of a sidekick Betsy the Brainless.
School “tuition support” sounds like vouchers to me. This article comes from the The Times of NW Indiana. So there is money for vouchers but teacher pay hikes are dependent upon local control and providing money would ‘impede the collective bargaining process”. There is also money for grants to teachers who are ‘effective’ or ‘highly effective’. Good grief, this state is a disaster.
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Senate budget tops House, governor on school spending, but increases not earmarked for teacher pay hikes
9 min ago
For example, the Senate budget boosts tuition support for elementary and high school students by $535 million, to $14.9 billion for the 2019-20 and 2020-21 school years, an increase of $74 million compared to the House budget and $103 million more than Holcomb sought.
That new money is not specifically earmarked for teacher pay hikes, since Senate Republicans believe that would infringe on local control of education spending decisions and impede the collective bargaining process.
Instead, the Senate budget increases to $90 million the two-year allocation for Teacher Appreciation Grants, up from $60 million in the current budget, and requires all teachers rated “effective” or “highly effective” to receive a grant, with at least one-third of each district’s total grant distribution reserved for teachers with less than five years experience.
“What I hear is that we have a hard time keeping new teachers, and so what I heard from members is that they wanted to do something for newer teachers,” said state Sen. Ryan Mishler, R-Bremen, the Appropriations Committee chairman…
State Sen. Karen Tallian, D-Ogden Dunes, the top Democrat on the committee, suggested that Mishler’s plan stashes too much cash in the state’s bank accounts at the expense of schools, teachers, retired teachers and other critical programs for Hoosiers.
“I think they’ve got too much money still in reserves. We’re at 12.5% instead of 11. So we could still free up money,” Tallian said…
https://www.nwitimes.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/senate-budget-tops-house-governor-on-school-spending-but-increases/article_1b9d69f7-804d-5a8b-ba84-93d08f24f98e.html?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=user-share
“School “tuition support” sounds like vouchers to me. ”
In TN vouchers are called “education savings accounts”.
The charter school and voucher vampires are very creative with labels and terms to seduce public money into their bank accounts away from where it should flow.
Greed and corruption know no limits.
The etymology of vouchers is curious. There are so many terms used to obscure that a voucher is a means of transferring public money—that should go to public schools—to religious and private and privately managed schools.
Vouchers are called “Opportunity Scholarships,” “Empowerment Scholarships,” “tuition tax credits,” “Education Savings Accounts.” and many other deceptive labels.
Why are Voucher advocates ashamed to call a voucher what it is?
I think most people are not in the loop, so they won’t recognize a voucher bill if it’s called education saving accounts. At least in TN this ESA bill is going fast through the legislature before people start recognizing it.