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Monday, September 9, 2019

Rory Diamond has a disastrous appearance on First Coast Connect (draft)

Rory Diamond was on the First Coast Connect radio program today and to say his performance was disastrous would be an understatement. Among other whoppers he said he had been studying education policy for 15 years, which if true it's crazy how uninformed he was.

First he came off as incredible ignorant. He said charter schools that weren't owned shouldn't get any tax payer money. Well friends 19 out of the city's 22 charter schools are leased and that is by design because charters can use capital funds for leases.

Then he said Duval had 22 failing schools in Jacksonville, well friends this past year there were 22 D and F schools in Jacksonville but three of them were charter schools, which means about ten percent of both groups were failing. Now one is to many but he was a bit disingenuous when he said over and over that Jacksonville has 22 failing schools, implying it was just traditional schools that was failing.

Diamond went on to bemoan that many charters didn't have gyms, cafeterias or playgrounds. First they do that so they can build the schools on the cheap. Nobody said they couldn't build those things and the district was criticized mightily for not using the cheaper charter school standards.

Florida grossly under funds its schools, but that's just a coincidence to Diamond, who thinks its an innovation and management problem. Um how are the charter school USA schools innovative again? The truth is very few of the districts charters have any form of innovation.

He did mention that he didn't run for school board that he ran for city council, but it was just normal for the city council to overlook the school boards plans because of checks and balances. Just so we are clear this hasn't happened anywhere else nor in the history of Jacksonville.     

I could really go and on and on but you should probably listen for yourself, where you will find several citizens having their questions on the matter deflected.

https://news.wjct.org/post/91919-councilman-rory-diamond-garden-club-first-coast-heart-walk

Rory Diamond might sound reasonable as he accuses the school board of lying, something he did again, though he quickly followed it up with I don't want to cast aspirations, but he's not, he's a villain of the story doing the bidding of his donors and we shouldn't think that's not what's happening for a second.

1 comment:

  1. Rory cited Wayman Academy as an example of a charter school that is innovative and doing well in a struggling neighborhood. What about all those kids they kick out right before state testing? They don't count against Wayman's scores but they do count against the public schools' grade. If a charter school student leaves halfway thru the school year how much you wanna bet the funding for that student does not follow the.


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