The Education Wars

It's back to the past with Las Vegas schools, as the district's are becoming more and more segregated.

Same is true up north.
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You better believe Arne Duncan is an embarrassment, but unfortunately what he espouses is the future of public education, which is going down a shithole by design:

Duncan also ignored the fact that there has been a significant increase in the number of students discharged from our high schools each year, who disappear from the rolls without ever being counted as dropouts.

In the class of 2007, the latest figures available, more than 21 percent of those who had entered high school four years earlier were discharged, about 20,000 in all. The discharge rate for first year high school students has doubled since the year 2000. Yet not one of these students was counted as a drop-out. Since a report on this disturbing phenomenon was released in April, co-authored by Jennifer Jennings and me, the DOE has ceased releasing discharge figures.

Duncan's praise for the questionable accomplishments of our Republican mayor have now been plastered all over Bloomberg's campaign literature, sent multiple times to every household in the city. Over the course of his campaign, Bloomberg has already spent more than $37 million of his personal fortune on his re-election, on the road to spending $100 million -- breaking all previous records, including his own.

The NYC school district, called the "board of education," is the worst, most corrupt school district in the entire country. When you have the likes of Arne Duncan singing its praises, you KNOW public education is in deep doo-doo.

Nobody should even entertain the thought of being a public school teacher.
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A mind-boggling stupid superintendent, which is typically par for the course, tries to backtrack after insulting the hell out of his district's teachers:

In a letter to staff released Tuesday afternoon, Johnson wrote: "The past and current research shows that the teacher in the classroom is the single most important factor in the education of a student."

In a phone interview this evening, Johnson said "teachers are doing great.

"How are we doing as a system to help teachers to be able to understand this challenge and improve their skill set to be able to do that? We're not doing so great," he said.

The letter was a departure from the grant proposal, released last week, which on page 10 listed only 30 percent of teachers as being effective.

The district defined an effective teacher as one whose students improved academically by an average of 1.3 years during the course of a school year, which Johnson acknowledged today as a lofty goal. The 30 percent figure was reached by calculating the performance of math and language arts teachers using their students' FCAT scores.

That figure was chosen because it would allow a student who is a year behind to catch up over three years, said Marc Baron, chief of performance accountability. The point of the Gates grant is to improve teaching overall, which will ultimately result in better student performance.

Teachers are not currently evaluated based on that measure and had not been told that it was a goal.

"I cannot tell you the hundreds of emails I have received from people who are just plain angry," said Robert Dow, president of the teachers union.

Johnson is only sorry he got caught.
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