Sacramento City Unified's Withdrawal from the CORE Waiver is No Big Loss
Jonathon Raymond left Sacramento last December for personal reasons. It must gall him that since his departure, Sacramento City Unified School District has declined to continue with one of his professional goals--participation in the California Office to Reform Education waiver from NCLB. After all it's the professional goal of Broad Academy graduates to privatize public education. Raymond used the opinion pages of the Sunday Sacramento Bee to bemoan the losses and outline the consequences that the district will face without the waiver. Aside from the loss of flexibility in the 20% of Title 1 money that will once again have to be set aside for tutoring by non-district vendors, the district isn't missing out on anything.
Sacrament City Unified will once again have schools labeled has failures--No Child Left Behind doesn't label schools as failures. It places them in Program Improvement. It is the media that has portrayed these schools as failures. The CORE waiver ranks schools from reward to focus. Woe to those labeled focus schools--if they fail to raise test scores in two to four years they face "turn around" regimes, conversion to charter schools or closure. If the district had failed to follow those prescriptions, it could have been sanctioned by the appointed oversight commission, which is the arbiter of compliance with the waiver. The district, however, will have more options for schools in Program Improvement under NCLB.
Sacramento City Unified will lose the ability to evaluate schools with meaningful measures of success-- it's questionable how meaningful it is to measure a student's "social and emotional" learning, if that can even be done. What the waiver created was new jobs for consultants in "social and emotional" learning. It also depended Sacramento City Unified's Withdrawal from the CORE Waiver is No Big Loss | The Sacramento Coalition to Save Public Education:
Sacrament City Unified will once again have schools labeled has failures--No Child Left Behind doesn't label schools as failures. It places them in Program Improvement. It is the media that has portrayed these schools as failures. The CORE waiver ranks schools from reward to focus. Woe to those labeled focus schools--if they fail to raise test scores in two to four years they face "turn around" regimes, conversion to charter schools or closure. If the district had failed to follow those prescriptions, it could have been sanctioned by the appointed oversight commission, which is the arbiter of compliance with the waiver. The district, however, will have more options for schools in Program Improvement under NCLB.
Sacramento City Unified will lose the ability to evaluate schools with meaningful measures of success-- it's questionable how meaningful it is to measure a student's "social and emotional" learning, if that can even be done. What the waiver created was new jobs for consultants in "social and emotional" learning. It also depended Sacramento City Unified's Withdrawal from the CORE Waiver is No Big Loss | The Sacramento Coalition to Save Public Education: