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.
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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