In Connecticut, Where There’s a Reformy Con, There’s a CAN!

I was intrigued a few days ago when I saw this headline in my news alerts regarding school funding. Headline: Report: Funding helps low-performing school districts I was particularly intrigued because the headline comes from a Connecticut newspaper where I am fully aware that the state really hasn’t done crap to substantively increase resources for

From Portfolios to Parasites: The Unfortunate Path(ology) of U.S. Charter School Policy

I recall several years ago attending an initial organizing meeting for a special interest group on Charter Schools at the American Educational Research Association. Note to outsiders – AERA has several special interest groups, some research oriented, some advocacy oriented…  many somewhere in between. These are member organized groups and many are very small. If

Real Reform versus Fake Reformy Distractions: More Implications from NJ & MA for CT!

Recently, I responded to an absurd and downright disturbing Op-Ed by a Connecticut education reform organization that claimed that Connecticut needed to move quickly to adopt teacher evaluation/tenure reforms and expand charter schooling because a) Connecticut has a larger achievement gap and lower outcomes for low income students than Massachusetts or New Jersey and b)

Follow up on Reformy Logic in Connecticut

A few days ago, I responded to an utterly silly CT Ed Reform op-ed which argued that poverty doesn’t really matter so much, nor does funding (by omission), and that Massachusetts and New Jersey do better than Connecticut on behalf low income kids because they’ve adopted accountability and teacher evaluation reforms in the past few

Baseless Reformy Thoughts from Connecticut (& How this year’s reforms improved decades of past performance!?)

This utterly absurd post appeared yesterday on the CT Ed Reform blog: http://ctedreform.org/blog/2012/04/poverty-is-not-to-blame-ct%E2%80%99s-low-income-students-rank-48th-in-the-nation-while-ma%E2%80%99s-rank-2nd/ Essentially, the argument goes: CT’s achievement gap is worse than achievement gaps in states like Massachusetts and New Jersey and in particular, CT’s low income students perform less well than low income students in those states. Massachusetts has recently adopted reforms to

A Few Additional CT Charter Figures

I was admittedly in a bit of a rush the other day to pull together some figures on CT charter schools based largely on data I had previously compiled, some of which only included Achievement First charter schools.  Here, I include all charter schools in Hartford, New Haven and Bridgeport, and address only the %

SB24 won’t solve CT’s real Teacher Equity Problems

Connecticut’s SB 24 appears to be little more than boilerplate reformy legislation which, like similar legislation in other states, creates a massive smokescreen concealing the very real problems facing Connecticut school districts. I addressed in a previous post my concern that SB24’s emphasis on charter expansion as a solution for high poverty districts is misguided,

Snapshots of Connecticut Charter School Data

In several previous posts I have addressed the common argument among charter advocacy organizations (notably, not necessarily those out there doing the hard work of actually running a real charter school – but the pundits who claim to speak on their behalf) that charter schools do more, with less while serving comparable student populations. This

Reformy Platitudes & Fact-Challenged Placards won’t Get Connecticut Schools what they Really Need!

For a short while yesterday – more than I would have liked to – I followed the circus of testimony and tweets about proposed education reform legislation in Connecticut. The reform legislation – SB 24 – includes the usual reformy elements of teacher tenure reform, ending seniority preferences, expanding and promoting charter schooling, etc. etc.