The Central Falls, RI Turnaround: Fire All the Teachers
The most constant and reliable predictor of standardized test scores is the income level of student families. Central Falls, RI has lots of families in poverty, almost 3 times the state average (30.1% compared to 12%). The percentage of families with income below 50% of poverty is more than twice the state average (12.5 to 5.2 percent). These numbers were from before the Wall Street banksters ruined us.
Central Falls has only high school, Central Halls High, and it has been on the NCLB "Needs Improvement" list for several years now. It is one of those schools that Arne Duncan has sworn to turn around, despite the fact that he nor anyone else plans to do anything about the grinding poverty that is the primary reason for the schools' low scores to begin with.
And so it is that the dope in charge, Frances Gallo, picks one of Arne's possible solutions for turnarounds. Photo from Sandor Bodo for the Providence Journal.
From the NYTimes:
Central Falls has only high school, Central Halls High, and it has been on the NCLB "Needs Improvement" list for several years now. It is one of those schools that Arne Duncan has sworn to turn around, despite the fact that he nor anyone else plans to do anything about the grinding poverty that is the primary reason for the schools' low scores to begin with.
And so it is that the dope in charge, Frances Gallo, picks one of Arne's possible solutions for turnarounds. Photo from Sandor Bodo for the Providence Journal.From the NYTimes:
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — A plan to dismiss the entire faculty and staff of the only public high school in this small city just west of the Massachusetts border was approved Tuesday night at an emotional public meeting of the school board.
The board voted 5 to 2 to accept a plan proposed by Schools Superintendent Frances Gallo to fire the approximately 100 faculty and staff members at the chronically underperforming Central Falls High School on the last day of this school year in June.
The plan will also create a new school governance structure and requires the high school’s new teachers to take part in “professional development” that meets federal standards.
Entertainment Properties: Excited About Charter Profits
Entertainment Properties, a public real estate investment trust, is seeing profits on the rise these days thanks to a booming movie industry (thanks, Avatar) and the expanding charter school market. EP owns 27 schools run by Dennis Bakke and the Imagine Schools, and you can be mighty sure EP will continue expanding into the charter school market until regulators put a halt to their shenanigans.
Here's a recent clip from the Wall Street Journal, which touches on the giddiness of EP as Duncan and Obama push for more and more segregated charter chains implementing a hefty dose of test-based mania and "no excuses" pedagogical approaches for poor, black, and brown students:
Constant Surveillance at Lower Merion School District
From HuffPo:
It's a story that won't go away. Last week the family of 15-year-old Blake Robbins filed a lawsuit against Lower Merion School District near Philadelphia, alleging that the school district activated the Webcam in the student's school-issued MacBook to photograph him in his own home. The school district admitted that it did have the capacity to remotely turn on Webcams and said that it did so 42 times in the past 14 months, but only to "locate a laptop in the event it was reported lost, missing or stolen so that the laptop could be returned to the student."
In a civil complaint (PDF), the Robbins family claims that an assistant principal at the district's Harriton High School accused young Blake of using drugs and cited as evidence a photograph of him taken in his own home via the Mac Webcam. Blake said that the "pills" he was accused of taking were Mike and Ike candies.
