pencil eraser
In this year of pervasive teacher-bashing and general assaults on public education, two things have generally been hailed by "reform" advocates as the cure for all schooling ills: charter schools and basing just about everything on "performance," a term defined (of course) solely by high-stakes testing.

In southern California this week, where statewide test results for the 2010-2011 school year were released, charter schools and high-stakes testing came together to create a story which underscored exactly how neither of these "reform" planks are necessarily a silver bullet for education:

By most measures, Green Dot Public Schools, a well-regarded group of a dozen public charter schools in Greater Los Angeles, had a great year on test scores.

But that success has been tempered by a black spot: One of its high schools, Animo Leadership - which has an Inglewood address but is chartered by the Lennox School District - was disqualified from receiving an official Academic