Melissa Harris-Perry did this review of the Tony Bennett grade-fixing scandal in Indiana. This is the kind of mainstream media attention that is helping to unravel the corporate reform narrative.
Archives for category: Indiana
The emails unearthed by Tom LoBianco of the Associated Press show that Tony Bennett was desperately trying to rig the system to raise the grade of one charter school from a C to an A.
That charter happened to be the charter held by a major donor to GOP campaigns, including Bennett’s, which received $130,000 from her.
As a side benefit of the new formula, the grades of all charters were raised. As this morning’s editorial in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette shows, “The scramble to inflate Christel House’s grade also was successful in pushing more than half of the state’s charter schools to a letter grade of C or better, a claim Bennett couldn’t make before the formula was massaged.”
The editorial notes with alarm that Bennett’s rigged formula is still in place. Schools across the state will get phony grades. Will the state board of education allow Glenda Ritz to impose some integrity to this deeply flawed system?
To quote the editorial:
“The disclosure settles the question why educators well-versed in test scores and evaluation systems couldn’t make sense of it.
“(I)t is not criterion based, it does not statistically make sense, it does not account for standard measure of error, it is unexplainable and difficult to understand, and it fails to comply with current law and administrative code,” Superintendent Chris Himsel of Northwest Allen County Schools told legislators in a letter last November.”
After the release of emails showing that Indiana State Superintendent Tony Bennett manipulated the grading system to favor a charter school belonging to a big GOP donor, a furor erupted about his ethics. He is now State Superintendent in Florida following his election loss in Indiana last fall, a transition arranged by Bennett’s mentor Jeb Bush. Bennett was head of Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change.
Florida’s Governor Rick Scott is facing an uphill battle for re-election in 2014, and some political insiders are wondering if Bennett will drag down Scott, who remained silent and pretended he had not read the stories about his education commissioner.
The question now is whether Bennett will be sacked. Not surprisingly, the loudest voice supporting him was Jeb Bush’s chief of staff.
A friend in Indiana had this to say about the Tony Bennett grade-fixing scandal:
“For those of you who are not from Florida or Indiana, you have no idea how this feels for us who are. This is early birthday, Christmas in July, karmic, happy dancing joy for those of us who have lived with the disastrous policies that the Bennett (Daniels/Jeb Bush) juggernaut has foisted on us.”
Karen Francisco, the editorial page editor of the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, had this to say in an editorial called “How Much for an A?”
” I never doubted that the grading rubric was changed to make some schools look better, but I wouldn’t have guessed it was all about making one charter school look good….Indiana voters dispatched Bennett without knowing of his behind-the-scenes manipulation of school data. Now voters should realize the lengths public officials will go to keep the biggest donors happy. The nonsensical grading system foisted on Indiana schools was designed to punish public schools and advance the choice agenda.
“The question for lawmakers listening to hours of testimony over last spring’s ISTEP+ computer meltdown is not whether the scores are valid. It’s how much longer will the lawmakers themselves continue to support a charade designed and maintained to please wealthy donors?”
Should we call it GradeGate?
Here is Jersey Jazzman’s inimitable take on Tony Bennett’s latest imbroglio.
Check out that graphic!
According to the latest reports from Indiana, the Associated Press obtained emails showing that State Superintendent Tony Bennett (then of Indiana, now Florida) changed the grading system to make sure a particular charter school got an A.
The school belongs to a major GOP donor, who has contributed more than $2.8 million to Republicans since 1998, including a contribution of $130,000 to Tony Bennett’s campaign.
Bennett denies it.
“Emails obtained by The Associated Press show Bennett and his staff scrambled last fall to ensure influential donor Christel DeHaan’s school received an “A,” despite poor test scores in algebra that initially earned it a “C.”
“They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work,” Bennett wrote in a Sept. 12 email to then-chief of staff Heather Neal, who is now Gov. Mike Pence’s chief lobbyist.
The emails, which also show Bennett discussed with staff the legality of changing just DeHaan’s grade, raise unsettling questions about the validity of a grading system that has broad implications. Indiana uses the A-F grades to determine which schools get taken over by the state and whether students seeking state-funded vouchers to attend private school need to first spend a year in public school. They also help determine how much state funding schools receive.
A low grade also can detract from a neighborhood and drive homebuyers elsewhere.”
Ten years ago, I wrote a book about the censorship of textbooks and tests by groups from every extreme of the political spectrum. Every group had its own political agenda, and the mechanism that made them successful was the state textbook adoption process. When the state board has the power to make publishers rewrite language that someone opposed. Texas and California were the worst offenders, because they had the most active pressure groups.
State textbook adoption is an entree to censorship and political meddling.
A social studies teacher in Indiana writes:
“During the last textbook adoption cycle for Social Studies, Gov Daniels and his State Supt. Tony Bennett originally refused to approve any text for US History except for one book, William J. Bennett’s America: The Last Best Hope. A copy was sent to our school to review and adopt as our new text. One of the reporters who uncovered this story needs to dig a little deeper.”
As Mitch Daniels was leaving the governorship of Indiana, he was named president of Purdue–a major research institution–by a board that he had appointed. Since Daniels was a politician with no scholarly credentials, the appointment must have raised some eyebrows.
The release of emails during Daniels’ governorship shows him to be petty, vindictive, opinionated, and intolerant of views he does not share.
He loathes Howard Zinn and his leftist history of the U.S.
In one email to state education officials, he wrote:
“”This terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away,” Daniels wrote, referring to Zinn. “The obits and commentaries mentioned his book ‘A People’s History of the United States’ is the ‘textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country.’ It is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page. Can someone assure me that it is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?”
When he learned that it was indeed used in a university course, he wrote: “”This crap should not be accepted for any credit by the state. No student will be better taught because someone sat through this session. Which board has jurisdiction over what counts and what doesn’t?”
Daniels demanded an audit of a professor who repeatedly criticized his policies.
The story concludes with assurance that Daniels is now a changed man, and all’s well.
Indianapolis has developed a plan that they call “neighborhoods of educational opportunity.” Every child in the future will go to a high-quality school, which is sure to be a charter school that destabilizes the neighborhood and excludes students who are not likely to get high scores.
It is the usual Reformy con job. Promise the moon, shutter public schools, hand the money off to private operators who are free to set their own admission policies and discipline policies.
At some point soon, the American public will stop buying pie-in-the-sky promises and ignore these hucksters who want to privatize our nation’s public schools.
In an earlier post, Karen Francisco (editorial page editor of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette) lamented that failing charters escape accountability by turning into voucher schools or shopping for an authorizer with low standards. When challenged by a reader, Francisco explained what happened in Fort Wayne.
She wrote:
“In fact, the two failed Imagine Inc. charter schools in Fort Wayne are being converted to voucher schools. The local charter board has been dismissed, loans forgiven and Indiana taxpayers will continue to pay Bakke’s company to operate two underperforming schools. In addition, an out-of-state real estate investment trust — EPT Properties — will continue to collect about $1 million a year for the charter school lease. Instead of through the charter board, the tax dollars now will be funneled through low- and middle-income families to a religious organization and, in turn, to the REIT.”
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