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proud2BlibKansan

(96,793 posts)
Sun Apr 1, 2012, 11:42 PM Apr 2012

Letter to Secretary Arne Duncan

I am getting more and more disturbed by lies and myth-information being spread by the U.S. Department of Education and Secretary Duncan. I do not want my tax dollars to go to someone who either won't check his facts, or won't have someone else check his facts. In his Harvard speech recently he told some untruths about the "double-digit gains in a school. When we checked, we found out the double-digit gains he referenced for math and reading were in the year PRIOR to the turnaround he was complimenting, and NOT after the turnaround began Schools like Miami Central, Bruce Randolph, and Urban Prep are some of the lowest performing schools in their respective states, based on the same measures Secretary Duncan claims we should be using to measure schools, and should not be used as "exemplars" to brag about the success of the reforms he is advocating. By the way, they were very low-performing when he gave credit to them, and all have gone down in their scores since then.

It is the CLAIMS I have problems with, not the schools, or the teaching in the schools. Unlike many in the reform movement, I actually do not make claims about "failing schools" or poor teaching or comments like such and such a school "was one of the lowest performing schools in the state" without specifying how I am measuring it. For purposes of this letter, I am using the same the same measures that Secretary Duncan claims to be using WHEN CONDEMNING A SCHOOL, but then, when his reforms are in place, the measures of school success seem to change! (For so many schools, the claims of failure are simply not true!)

More recently, Secretary Duncan highlighted Roosevelt High School in Portland, Oregon. Claiming, as usual, that this school was one of the worst schools in the state just two years ago, he then makes claims about the early success of this school under its School Improvement Grant (SIG). Considering that the school doesn't really exist, in a sense, it is easy to highlight gains. Why do I say it doesn't exist? Well, a number of years ago Roosevelt High School became an "umbrella" if you will, for three separate programs. Look up Roosevelt High School in the Oregon State Accountability charts and it doesn't exist. You have to look at scores for each of the three programs making up the school. When you do, you find that in scores for the Spring of 2009 that the three programs, on average, were ranked at the 22nd percentile in the state. The next year, in 2010, they were at the 13th percentile in the state, and in the most recent year, they had gained a tiny bit of ground, all the way up to the 14th percentile.

more . . . http://educatorsforall.org/opinion-page/2012/3/19/letter-to-secretary-arne-duncan.html

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