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Saturday, April 12, 2014

Jim Horne has millions of reasons to mislead you.

Jim Horne, the chair of the Florida Charter school alliance thinks we are doing well and since the Florida Legislature has turned the state coffers like piggy banks for the charter school industry, he has millions of reason to think so.

In an opinion column he recently penned about accountability in the Times Union and I bet at least a dozen other papers too, everything he said was a flat out lie or a very charitable characterization of events.  

He talks about how things were a disaster before 1999 but for you that were old enough to remember do you think it was that way? Furthermore do you think this era of high stakes testing where we pretty much just teach kids how to bubble in grids is better?

He talks about how schools started to dramatically improve by 2003 but he doesn’t mention how the original grading formula put schools in a hole and how revisions got them out of it.

Him crediting Florida’s improvement in graduation rates, which have dramatically improved all across the nation and tests, to the accountability measures put in place under him and Bush has as much validity as me saying they held us back from where we should be as an education system and all we need do is look at Alabama.

Alabama did not sell its neighborhood schools to corporations, fail its third graders or grade its schools A-F which really only tells you the medium income of zip codes and they have seen similar improvements.   

It’s Horne’s opinion that the reforms have led to improvements. It’s my opinion that they were used to privatize our schools, demonize our teachers and suck the joy of learning out for our students. What’s your opinion?

1 comment:

  1. State Impact, the Shanker blog and the Tampa Times have also debunked many of the gains Bush and Horne are touting.

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