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Friday, December 21, 2012

Louisiana Educator: Letter to the Baton Rouge Advocate Exposes RSD Snow Job

Louisiana Educator: Letter to the Baton Rouge Advocate Exposes RSD Snow Job:


Letter to the Baton Rouge Advocate Exposes RSD Snow Job

This letter to the editor of the Baton Rouge Advocate by Dr Mercedes Schneider, copied here verbatim, exposes the fraud perpetrated on the state and nation by the Louisiana Recovery School District. I have included also the comments by readers of The Advocate which I believe has been complicit in supporting the RSD propaganda machine.

Letter: Publicize school letter grades RSD

DECEMBER 19, 2012
I have been reading about Gov. Bobby Jindal’s promoting the Recovery School District (RSD) as an example of the success of his educational reform package. I am not sure how Jindal qualifies “success” since a disproportionate number of RSD-run schools earned a D or F as a 2012 school performance score. So, I went to the RSD website to see how this issue of “success” might be treated.

Here’s is the RSD tactic: Ignore the school letter grade situation completely.

You read it right. The RSD makes no mention of school letter grades on its website. It does offer links to “school performance” and even uses the term “school performance scores.” The RSD site offers charts and graphs with the numeric school performance scores. Why, then, does the site not include the letter grades?

In 2010, Board of Elementary and Secondary Education President Penny Dastugue defended the then-new school letter grade system by saying, “People can relate to grades.”

Bingo.

According to the information posted on the Louisiana Department of Education website for 2012, 60 schools are