Wednesday, November 05, 2014

So Why Did The State Board Hold Up Release Of A-F School Grades Until Day After Election?

Congratulate LaNier Echols, your newest IPS board member, for her D performing charter school
It's no secret that the State Board of Education is populated by a bunch of puppets for the education profiteers who masquerade themselves under the banner of education reform. The latest A-F grades for the state's schools were belatedly released today after they were supposedly held up to allow some under-performing charter schools an opportunity to re-calculate their grades upward, and they show modest improvements for IPS schools. A little over half of IPS' schools are still under-performing, but the grades are moving in the right direction. The ChalkBeat's Scott Elliott describes the results:
Indianapolis Public Schools was an example of a district that saw a shift toward better grades. The district has been among the state’s most troubled with a majority of schools earning a D or F.
That’s still true: 54 percent of IPS schools rated a D or F this year, according to the data released today. But that was down from 59 percent last year.
At the lowest end of the scale, IPS saw the most progress. While more than a quarter of the district’s schools rated an F (28 percent), that’s a big improvement from more than a third of schools last year (36 percent), the data showed.
Those same newly-released grades show that 40% of Mayor Greg Ballard's city-sponsored charter schools received a D or F. "A majority (55.2%) of Indianapolis/Marion County charter schools are low performing; similar to the 54.7% of IPS schools that are 'low performing,'" Amos Brown observes.

One charter school that caught my eye in particular was the Carpe Diem school whose dean of students, LaNier Echols, was one of those three so-called school reform board candidates the out-of-state education profiteers pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the election to buy their seats. Echols defeated incumbent board member Michael Brown. The grade for her school was a D. She ran on a pledge to reform Indianapolis public schools and she can't even earn better than a D for the school she's in charge of running? It looks to me like the grades were deliberately held up by the politically-run State Board of Education in order to promote their agenda of convincing the public that IPS schools were headed in the wrong direction and to aid these so-called reform candidates who were elected for the sole purpose of feathering the nests of their own masters.

Somebody needs to be asking how much was funneled to the consulting firm owned by Jennifer Wagner, wife of state education board member Gordon Hendry, to help elect the so-called education reform IPS candidates. One hand washes the other.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Over the past few years, I’ve measured the cost-effectiveness of a K-12 school by taking the total dollars spend for all things (e. g. paperclips, salaries & bricks) divided by the number of high school graduates. The results might surprise your readers if they try it on their own K-12 school. Last time I checked on IPS, it looked like they spend an average of about a half million dollars for every high school graduate. Do your own math. Maybe the new IPS board can do a better job and not just come up with better excuses. Probably not.

It hurts because over half of our state and local tax dollars are spend on schools.

Anonymous said...

Wagner is despicable. She used to run some blog where she was this big lib. It was all just B.S. so she could get herself part of the payoff mafia.

She believes in one thing: politics as an avenue to personal enrichment.

Anonymous said...

Wasn't Gordon Hendry behind the effort to revise Carpe Diem's D grade upward at today's board meeting?

Anonymous said...

Wasn't Gordon Hendry the only state board of ed member to vote against delaying the release of the grades at the Oct 15 meeting? Oh, yes.

Unigov said...

accidentalmayor...

LamLawIndy said...

As long as govt runs schools, this pay-to-play morass will continue, with ISTA, educrats & edu-teers all wanting a piece of the multimillion dollar pie. An absence of market forces will be filled by rent-seeking. The only antidote is a 100% voucher, parental choice model.

Anonymous said...

How on earth would a 100% Voucher system work? So ok, say you have 6000 bucks for each child you have. You have two children. So you get 12,000 dollars. So that means that somewhere you've got to find someone to educate your two children in math, reading, writing, social studies, science, art, music, and gym. And they've got to have a building for your children to go to unless you are one of those folk who want your kid to sit in front of a screen all day. Then also for that 12,000 bucks they have to have a bus to get them there. Oh and wait, if your child has a disability, especially one that's severe, good luck finding someone to even take in your child. Oh and what if your child needs a speech clinician or a counselor of some sort? Tell me who is going to do that? Seriously, who is going to do that for 12,000 bucks a year? So ok, maybe you band your child together with 200 or so other kids and you have enough money to pay your teachers and other staff and for programs- then what happens when all you parents disagree on what you want taught or how you want it taught. How you going to keep those other folks who financially support your school from taking a walk because they disagree with you? Really, I'm curious as all heck how you think this could possibly work. But never mind all that, what about parents who don't really care if their child gets an education or not. They get their 6000 bucks and blow it on crack or something. What are you going to do about those people? What's going to happen to those kids? Really, there are so many flaws in your privatized voucher plan, I'm just getting started poking the holes in it.