Regardless of whether this legislation is overturned by the courts on
technicalities, as may happen in the next few months, several bills in this
year’s session have been filed to dilute reform measures’ impacts and will be
pushed. And if reform laws are overturned, parts of or even all of the measures
may face votes again, where opponents will advance any argument, no matter how ludicrous or fact-impaired, in order to serve the special interests that have benefitted from
the unreformed, underperforming system and now are threatened by reform.
But the poverty of their assertions will become more obvious as a
result of data about the Recovery School District’s New Orleans charter schools
in a National Journal piece. It reviews
metrics since the hurricane disasters of 2005 and a couple of passages in
particular are instructive:
Before Katrina, the passing rate on state tests was 35 percent; now
it’s 60 percent. The graduation rate has climbed from 55 percent to over 75
percent, surpassing the national average. Before the storm, three-fifths of the
city’s students attended a failing school; now fewer [sic] than one-fifth do,
even as standards got tougher. And parents are 40 percent more likely to send
their kids to a school other than the one closest to their home…. At this rate,
within five years New Orleans will become the first major city in the country
to exceed its state’s average scores….
Teachers offer another paradox. Their quality has improved in the
aggregate. But they're not an experienced group, and they’re often not part of
the community they teach…. Teach for America instructors are now only about
one-fourth of the city’s teacher corps, but they still outnumber veteran local
educators of the kind laid off after the storm.
(The “paradox” remark is telling, in failing to understand
cause-and-effect and thereby labeling it paradoxical. To experience an excellent explanation
of this tendency, read here.)
To summarize: with open enrollment, far fewer restrictions on how to
operate, including the increased ability for individual schools to jettison low
performers based upon evaluation instruments largely based on testing outcomes
and for the district to penalize, if not evict, low performing school
operators, and with staffs significantly populated by untenured junior
educators of whom many are molded outside of the traditional professional ranks,
the district is taking a system where 85 percent of students qualify for free
meals – exactly the environment where union goons, educrats, and politicians whose
ideology is vested in the protection of these interests say it’s impossible to make
improvements without huge infusions of money into the unreformed bureaucratic structure
they control – are getting what the article terms “amazing” results precisely because
of changes permitting these policies to flourish.
Which is why those losing their power and privilege under the new statewide
reforms for public elementary and secondary traditional schools hate them so, because
the reforms simulate the same environment that has brought success to the
RSD-NO. These new rules also value teacher performance, compensation, and
advancement significantly on the basis of demonstrated student achievement and
make seniority a minor consideration; allow for greater latitude in rewarding
and punishing on the basis of these evaluations; and the scholarship voucher
program allows for a kind of open enrollment fostering competition that forces
better performance.
1 comment:
I have to wonder what you wanted to do with your life, Professor. The open angry contempt for public education you ooze at all times must mean you didn't intend to end up in that field. I have to wonder what type of person "shoots" their own, as you do. Sorry you didn't reach your goal, but most in public education are happy about their role and find your low, childish attacks on anyone and anything that supports public ed a sad,sad situation.
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