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Sunday, January 19, 2014

V.A.M.: Value Added Measure: Dr. King's Dream?

V.A.M.: Value Added Measure: Dr. King's Dream?:

Dr. King's Dream?




"If you can ride at the front of the bus, but you cannot read, you are not free."  (Arne Duncan)


Let's use the imagery of Arne Duncan.  Let us imagine students in the United States all riding somewhere.  Let us imagine that their transportation symbolizes their school.  Public-school students are riding on public buses. After multiple school closures during the Bloomberg administration, many of these N.Y.C. buses are no longer servicing communities.




Some high-ranking educational deformers send their children to private schools, not subject to their mandates.  They take private transportation.  Let us imagine their children being chauffeured to school in cars similar to the one pictured below.





Charter-school operators claim that their students are also riding, so to speak, the public bus.  Charter schools are funded by public as well as private interests.  Some of the schools are very well funded.  Charter-school operators may make far more money, overseeing far fewer 





Size Really Does Matter!
Class size, that is. Sorry, nothing like a cheap, tawdry double entendre to lure in the readers.  At the Bloomberg Institute for Advanced Learning, we simply don’t believe in limiting the number of students in a classroom, but we do encourage them to raise their hands when they have a question. We also hire only the best teachers; so a class of 134 kids is a piece of cake for our facilitators. For