Petrilli’s Desperate Attempt To Save Democracy Prep’s Reputation
The hardest thing about trying to have an intellectual debate with ‘reformers’ is every time they start to lose, they try to change the rules.
First they say “poverty doesn’t matter” and when it becomes clear that it does, they start saying “Well, it matters, but we still need to make schools as good as possible and standardized test accountability is the best way to do that.” First they deny that charters have a self-selected population that is easier to teach, and then when you prove them wrong, they say “Yes, it’s true, but it is a good thing.”
So for years they have been hailing “miracle schools” which are high poverty schools with, supposedly, the “same kids” as the nearby ‘failing’ school who get incredible standardized test results. In New York City these included the KIPP schools, the Democracy Prep schools, and the Success Academy schools. Then, when the results came back from the more difficult common core tests, the KIPP and Democracy Prep schools didn’t do so well, though the Success Academies did.
This certainly put ‘reformers’ in to an awkward position. If Success Academies are so much better than KIPP and Democracy Prep, why not throw those other two charter chains under the proverbial bus and focus on the one true Messiah?
Instead the ‘reformers’ are trying to have it both ways: For Success Academies, there have been many op-eds about how those schools are proving all the critics wrong with their superior test results. As far as the schools who are not proving any critics wrong with their inferior test results, well, we have this recent Huffington Post piece by Michael Petrilli from the Thomas B.
