Education

"States that do not have public charter laws or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools will jeopardize their applications under the Race to the Top Fund"

If you don't have a charter law or your law caps charters, you won't get the money. Don't bother to apply.

RTTT is a trojan horse for education deform.

Regarding your priorities:

6) Agreed. Sadly, the high stakes testing is part of the reason that charter schools and alternative education is considered by many parents.

CHARTER SCHOOL IF THEY ARE PUBLICLY FUNDED HAVE TO DO THE SAME TESTING. Excessive testing is part of the education deform plan, MANDATED by the education deformers, it's not something parents are trying to escape by going to charters. That tracking system RTTT MANDATES is about tracking TEST SCORES, MORE AND MORE TEST SCORES, FROM PRE-KINDERGARTEN TO COLLEGE, what did you think it was for?

7) Agree for the most part, though I don't wish to limit experimentation to public schools.

Private schools are ALREADY quite free to experiment. What I am against is calling privatization of public schools & diversion of public monies "experimentation". There's nothing charters do that can't be done within the existing paradigm of public schooling. NOTHING. AND BETTER.

8) I think we need to experiment and find out what works best in given conditions. We need a scientific approach to addressing the needs of individual students. For example, what schools in high poverty areas are succeeding? Why are they succeeding? What schools have improved? How did they improve? ... The fact that many schools are not serving their students, has to be addressed somehow.

There is at least a hundred years of research. To call for more 'research,' to pretend we don't know the score, is bullshit.

Schools with a high percentage of students in poverty in a culture with significant barriers to getting out of poverty do worse. That has ALWAYS been true, it's true in other countries, it will ALWAYS be true.

There is no royal road to improving education outcomes for all except by improving economic outcomes for all, & I'm sick to death of the hypocritical pretense that there is.

Not saying *you* are a hypocrite, saying that the people designing these policies are.