The Waiting List Game
No doubt your state is home to a lengthy waiting list of students trapped in union-stifled public schools. In Massachusetts we call this list a “waiting list” and it is growing lengthier by the day. Not only is there virtually no one left who is NOT on the list, I believe that in fact you are on the list and you don’t even live here and are frankly not a high achiever.Our waiting list for excellence and innovation has now grown so long that policy makers have no choice but to respond to the growing waiting list by making policy that reflects the extraordinary length of the waiting list. Except that some actual reporting this week by the Boston Globe revealed that the waiting list is more fiction than fact. The story follows on the heels of this devastating expose in Chicago in which a reporter dismantles claims of a 19,000 charter wait list in Chicago, the length of which is now being used to justify charter expansion even as public schools are closed in that city.
The numbers game
In Massachusetts, as in Chicago, the primary flaw in the list is that it counts applications, not students. So a student who applies to four charters, eight charters, twelve charters gets counted multiple time times. That’s a key distinction because as this guidance counselor told the Globe: “If a family is applying to charter schools,
Dear TFA: You Don’t Need to Keep Telling Us How Excellent You Are (Because We Already Know)
Dear Teach for America:I trust that this letter finds you in excellent form. I write concerning a subject that concerns us both: your excellence. You see, I am in receipt of this recent announcement regarding your excellence, this one, this one, as well as this one, and would like to let you know that I will require no further communication on this topic. I get it. We get it. TFA is excellent.
And by excellent, of course, I mean REALLY excellent. Like SAT score *crushing,* perfect GPA, college of your choice, 22nd century career ready kind of excellence. While we were still lying in our state-schooled beds of mediocrity this morning, fantasizing about school vacation or worse, retirement, you were up early, achieving excellence excellently. In fact, in the time it took me to type that last sentence you exfoliated one layer of excellence, only to reveal another layer of even more excellent excellence underneath. In other words, enough already. I get it. We get it. So please stop.
Middle school students of corp members received more than half a yr of additional learning than students of other new teachers.
— Wendy Kopp (@wendykopp) March 8, 2013
The latest study to find @teachforamerica teachers have outsized impact in the classroom, this