Thursday, January 15, 2015

Wisconsin K-12 "reform" heads back to the drawing board

The big news yesterday in Wisconsin was the public hearing (that gave little time for the public to be heard) for the Assembly's education deform reform proposal, and it ended up turning into a massive farce, with the bill having to be pulled back for of fiscal information and likely having the proposed Academic Review Board be unconstitutional. I'll forward you to Andy at the Wisconsin Soapbox for a thorough rundown of yesterday's events.

I watched some of the testimony yesterday, and the bottom line kept coming back to this, which was summed up by Journal-Sentinel education writer Erin Richards, and comes as no surprise to anyone who has spent five minutes in a low-income classroom or community.



And until you start investing in low-income communities, and start giving pathways to success for both adults and school-aged children, you won't change academic achievement. And our GOP Legislature and Governor don't seem the least bit interested in that. In fact, the 262-driven Wisconsin GOP seems to want poor neighborhoods to stay second-class, so their mediocre selves can stay above someone.
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1 comment:

  1. AnonymousJanuary 15, 2015 at 12:48 PM

    Diane Ravitch raised an interesting point about high-stakes testing on her blog. It's a point that hasn't gotten a lot of attention but should. She said that a meeting of the Texas School Boards Association, a school board member and engineer by trade said "If we tested every product, we would spend most of our time testing the product, and we wouldn’t have time left to manufacture or to improve the product." More details here:
    http://dianeravitch.net/2015/01/14/doug-garnett-the-absurdity-of-testing-every-child-every-year/

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