Angie Sullivan teaches in an underfunded Title 1 school in Las Vegas where many students are impoverished and don’t speak English. She frequently writes blast emails to Nevada legislators and journalists.
Margaret Raymond once joked that Nevada has the worst charter sector in the nation. From Valerie Strauss’s Answer Sheet blog in 2015:
“Be very glad that you have Nevada, so you are not the worst,” charter researcher Margaret “Macke” Raymond said of Ohio. Raymond, from the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, conducts research on charter schools and issued a report late last year that said Ohio charter school students learn 36 days less math and 14 days less reading than traditional public school students — conclusions she drew from crunching data obtained from student standardized test scores.
Nevada charter schools continues to be a failed sector, but the money keeps flowing. Even Andre Agassi’s much-celebrated charter school, the Andre Agassi Academy, ended up on the list of the state’s lowest performing schools and was turned over to New York City-based “Democracy Prep.” The Agassi charter had plenty of money but run through multiple principals and staff, and the school was noted for disorder, not for accomplishment.
Angie Sullivan writes:
This is the Nevada Charter Authority.
Charter Authority folks openly discussing giving money to “priority providers”?
Millions to friends? Acquaintances? Friends of friends?
Priority is someone with great “scores”? And the testing protocol is what exactly? What is in place to prevent cheating?
How exactly does one become a priority provider?
You have to “know someone” and have “scores”?
Several of the applicants cannot fill out the application completely & on time.
If they miss deadlines, the rules are bent because they are “special” in some other way?
There was a discussion with a warning from the attorney to not accept folks and give them millions if they cannot fill out the form.
Seems “priority folks” do not have the ability to follow directions, wait their turn, or behave.
If you google the “priority person” and they are followed by lawsuits and scandals are they still priority?
Let me be clear.
There are NO clean hands in Nevada Charters. Not a single Nevada charter has three years of academic data by campus. Not a single charter has clear money trails that can be followed. The Nevada Tax Payer cannot see what charter campuses are doing.
Zero academic or financial accountability.
A referral from anyone running or involved in a current Nevada charter – is a bad referral.
$350 million plus is actually passed around by a handful of folks – including legislators or former legislators or prospective legislators.
For-profit Academica must expand to cash in. Is that body a “priority”?
How nice of the Charter Authority to record themselves discussing how they will be passing out millions to their friends and bending rules to do it?
This is disgusting.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Did we watch the same meeting? What looks like what happened is they discussed the possibility of having a fast track application for “priority” applicants who already had a proven track record and that proposal was tabled until it could be better defined.
I mean, looking at the source of this editorial it doesn’t surprise me that she is jumping to conclusions. Looking at her twitter she has before tweeted that charters are a failure because Nevada Connections Academy had to be forced to close their elementary school and that charters are a failure because it is impossible to close a failing charter school. Which is it? There isn’t a single data point that Ms. Sullivan can’t find a way to twist to her agenda.
The first step to any reform needs to be honest and unbiased discussion of where things currently stand, and this article definitely isn’t unbiased and I question if it is honest.
MJ,
Why do you think that Margaret Raymond of CREDO said that Nevada has the worst charters in the nation?
Honestly, I have no idea. The quote is from four years ago and the links you provided don’t actually bring you to that quote. The second one goes to a “page not found” and the first one goes to an article that only has a citation that goes to “page not found”.
With nothing to go by aside “Be very glad that you have Nevada, so you are not the worst”, it could be that she is taking advantage of the fact that Nevada in general was ranked number 50 at the time. Maybe she was referring to test results. Maybe she was referring to high school graduation. Maybe she was referring to Nevada County California. It is hard to provide an opinion on one sentence of a quote without any other context.
Here is a link. It is not dead. It refers to charters in the state of Nevada as the worst in the nation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/06/12/troubled-ohio-charter-schools-have-become-a-joke-literally/
How is the Agassi charter doing?
Yes, I saw the link to the Washington Post article… the link works to get to the Washington Post article, but their citations include a broken link also.
Oh, and conveniently, the NSPF ratings for Agassi have been published.
http://nevadareportcard.nv.gov/DI/nv/achievement/democracy_prep_at_agassi_elementary/2019/nspf/
The elementary was two stars, which admittedly isn’t good, but it did better than the district average on a few measures (ELA proficiency by almost 10 points).
http://nevadareportcard.nv.gov/DI/nv/achievement/democracy_prep_at_agassi_middle/2019/nspf/
The middle school got 5 stars, improving their score by 9 points from last year
http://nevadareportcard.nv.gov/DI/nv/achievement/democracy_prep_at_agassi_high/2019
The high school wasn’t rated, which makes things difficult, but with the data that is provided, it doesn’t have a great composite ACT score, but it is doing better than Western High School, comparing the safety to Western, the total of all categories reported was 17, Western had multiple categories that went above that much (including 99 incidents of violence against other students).
Without a rating, it is hard to give a concrete answer on how it is doing, but as a parent, I’d rather send my kid to the school with only 17 total safety incidents, none of which involved violence against other students, compared to 99 incidents of violence against other students and that not even being the largest line item.
Democracy Prep is NOT the Agassi school. The Agassi school failed and was handed over to a NYC charter. Liars are booted out here.
So, you’re saying that one management organization wasn’t able to meet their obligations, so a new management organization was brought in and it appears that they are improving it… that sounds a lot like the system working. Does it really matter how the school has become higher performing, it is now higher performing. You asked how Agassi is doing, and in terms of how the students that attended Agassi are doing (which, really is what is important, the outcome for the students), the students seem to be doing well.
After the horror stories I’ve heard from parents of students in Washoe County, I could only hope that someday the school districts could follow the charters’ lead on getting rid of failing management and bringing in new management.
Agassi’s school failed and was given to a NYC charter, Democracy Prep. Did you know that?