In this post, Jan Resseger surveys the war against public schools in Florida.
Sue Legg summarized the abject failure of Jeb Bush’s A+ Plan here.
The drive to privatize public schools was masterminded by Jeb Bush, with the help of Betsy DeVos, a compliant Republican Legislature (including some who own or operate charter schools), and a zest to give public money to entrepreneurs and grifters.
Asshe points out, recent legislation requires school districts to share their tax levies with charter schools over which they have no control.
Privatization and school choice are rooted in the desire for profit and segregation.
Despite Jeb Bush’s propaganda campaign, his A+ Plan deserves an F-.
Bush, that educational genius, invented the idea of labeling schools with a single letter.
Floridians now treat school grades as normal, but only 15 states require them, mostly low-performing. states.
I have said it before and I was say it again: School grades are stupid. They are idiotic. Under Bloomberg as mayor, NYC had school grades for a few years. They were meaningless. The public school in my Brooklyn neighborhood was rated A one year; the Mayor and Joel Klein made a ceremonial visit to the school to congratulate the principal and staff. The next year it got a grade of F. Nothing had changed. Same principal, same staff.
If your child came home with a report card that had only one letter, you would be incensed. Why then should anyone accept a single letter grade for an institution with hundreds of staff and students and multiple programs?
School grades deserve an F. A truly dumb idea. No state should use them.
Education in Florida is a mess that is designed to benefit privateers and harm public schools.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is ridiculous. How much grading is enough to satisfy the needs of Indiana’s Republican dominated Congress and governor? Former Gov. Mitch Daniels followed the Jeb Bush plan. Glad I’m retired. People who know nothing about education are making teaching much harder than it needs to be. No wonder Indiana has a teacher shortage. Millions of dollars have been put in the state budget for merit pay.
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What’s the system for rating teachers? Based on the outcome of the evaluation, teachers are placed into one of four categories: highly effective, effective, improvement necessary and ineffective. Scoring “improvement necessary” or “ineffective” ratings on evaluations gives a district the option to get rid of a teacher. While the exact requirements for getting rid of teachers vary by experience level, a district can typically fire a teacher after two “ineffective” ratings.
How do the evaluations turn into a pay scale? The local district makes those decisions. Like the evaluation criteria, the district can determine how much years of experience, degrees earned, student performance data, evaluation results and professional roles factor into its merit-based pay scale. Some school districts are offering merit pay in the form of bonuses. Other districts have revised their pay scales to reflect evaluation data.
Indiana schools’ 2018 A-F grades were released Wednesday, and most schools have two grades this year.
One grade is the usual annual rating from the state, which is mainly based on test scores and how much scores improve. These ratings can trigger intervention for schools receiving F grades several years in a row.
The other grade, which is new this year, comes from new federal standards under the Every Student Succeeds Act. This rating looks at how public schools serve students of color, students from low-income families, English learners, and students with disabilities.
The state measured schools more generously than the federal standards: Nearly two-thirds of schools received As or Bs under the Indiana system. About a third of schools received a higher letter grade in the state system than under federal standards.
https://chalkbeat.org/posts/in/2018/11/14/search-for-your-indiana-schools-2018-a-f-grades/?utm_source=email_button
“The state measured schools more generously than the federal standards:”
No the state didn’t measure the schools. They (those workers at the state dept of ed) have assessed, evaluated, judged and/or otherwise made a statement about those schools using a completely invalid method.
Why would we listen to and accept such crap?
I certainly don’t!
There is Dumb and there is also Dumber.
Ohio’s system produces a single grade from dubious weightings of many other grades… as if the weightings of this plus that, minus that, and a percentage of something else were “objective” and irrefutably so. Here is sample report card for a Oyler, a preK-12 public school in Cincinnati in an Urban Appalachian community. Look at the metrics behind each of the six “report cards” contributing to the single grade for this school, named Oyler. https://reportcard.education.ohio.gov/school/overview/029009
This school, Oyler, is one of about seven in Cincinnati with wraparound services provided by an intermediary “Community Learning Center Institute.” Oyler is named as the beneficiary of a recent $50,000 grant to the Institute, from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. This grant, like many others from CZI, is for “integrated academic, physical, mental, and social-emotional interventions.”
More about the intermediary here: https://oyler.cps-k12.org/about/partners
good opening line : there is dumb and there is also DUMBER.
HORRORS! This is exactly what the DEFORMERS want and of course FOR PROFIT.
All the so-called “schools of hope” will do is make it easier to create segregated schools for poor students while continuing to further undermine the public schools. Florida can barely afford a public system. More poorly funded, weakened schools will not result in more equity for poor students, just separate and unequal schools. These laws also take any decisions about establishing charters schools out of the hands of the local school boards. The state will decide where these “hopeless” schools will go, but the local tax dollars have to fund them. I hope local districts revolt.
The intent, in Florida is to wipe out public schools and vastly increase the number of private schools with these new scholarship programs. Because, Florida Man. . . .
Students are not failed by a school; students are part of the makeup of a school. It’s dumb to think students and schools have anything other than a two-way relationship. I can’t believe we still hear people mendaciously repeating the line that students need charters and vouchers to “escape from failing schools,” still, even after the widespread support for #red4ed we all witnessed, trying to turn public schools into the boogeyman. Oh well, repeating dimwitted lies is what the Bush family and friends do, as W said in this 2005 Bushism, “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.” The Bush family and good grades don’t always go together.
Public schools were largely founded on the notion that it was important to have as many of the members of the vulgate (immigrants and non-white males) as possible become apt at basic reading, writing and numbers in order to facilitate visible evidence of a democratic process of leadership selection. The children of the elìte have never attended public schools in significant numbers. Segregation of the “classes” has been a part of the reality since public education began.
Private charter schools make segregation worse. We could work to integrate schools as Harris pointed out when she made Biden seem out of touch. We need the political will to do it.