One Very Disappointing Part Of President Obama’s Speech Today

[teach1st]

One Very Disappointing Part Of President Obama’s Speech Today
Larry Ferlazzo blog, 7/29

President Obama spoke at the Urban League today on education reform. You can read his speech here (and you can read what I had hoped he might say here).

I know the President and Secretary Duncan keep on saying they don’t think charter schools are the answer, only part of the answer, and that they are only talking about “good” charter schools.

Well, the President highlighted one of those supposedly “good” charter schools in his speech. Here is what he said:

So, no, I don’t support all charter schools, but I do support good charter schools. I’ll give you an example. There’s a charter school called Mastery in Philadelphia. And in just two years, three of the schools that Mastery has taken over have seen reading and math levels nearly double –- in some cases, triple. Chaka Fattah is here, so he knows what I’m talking about. One school called Pickett went from just 14 percent of students being proficient in math to almost 70 percent. (Applause.) Now — and here’s the kicker — at the same time academic performance improved, violence dropped by 80 percent -– 80 percent. And that’s no coincidence. (Applause.)

Now, if a school like Mastery can do it, if Pickett can do it, every troubled school can do it.

The problem is that Pickett did it with a 42% student attrition rate, which I also pointed out when TIME wrote a laudatory article about the school earlier this year.

Come on! Kicking-out “low-performing” students is an effective way to increase school scores, but is that really the model the President wants to raise up?

[pip]

Perhaps they should check their own foreign policy. We have soldiers dying overseas to build "government schools" for other countries so religious groups and special interest groups can not isolate their youth and indoctrinate them in non-mainstream ideas.

But, here at home we don't understand why we need strong public schools free of special interests and religious zealots?

[D-Dub]

for the first time since WWII our foreign policy (rebuilding) make sense. If Congress would have funded infrastructure in Afghanistan in the 1980's we might not have the problems we have today.

Religious zelot here is not the same as there. We have the NEA- they are a special interest group.