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Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Chiefs for Changing Grades? - United for Public Schools

Chiefs for Changing Grades? - United for Public Schools:

Chiefs for Changing Grades?


Florida education commissioner Tony BennettFormer Indiana schools chief and current Florida education commissioner Tony Bennett changed Indiana’s school grading system to benefit one of his donors. But he and other Chiefs for Change have changed more than grades to enrich their funders—they’ve changed states’ education policies, too.
Yesterday, news broke that former Indiana schools chief and current Florida education commissioner Tony Bennett overhauled Indiana’s school grades system in order to benefit a charter school owned by an influential Republican donor, Christel DeHaan. Seeing that the school was set to receive a C, Bennett—who received $130,000 in political contributions from DeHaan– and several top staff members of the Indiana Department of Education worked frantically to adjust both the grading system and the charts used to present the data, in order to make her school look more successful than it had been.
Bennett, who helped establish Chiefs for Change with former Florida governor Jeb Bush, claims to support a tough, data-driven brand of “accountability” when it