Wednesday, November 30, 2011

More questions for J.C. Brizard

Sorry I can't make it to UIC at noon today for J.C. Brizard's speech. If there were time at the end, I would ask him the questions I posted below. But if you are attending, you might also ask him about this story in today's Trib: "Report finds charters struggling like other CPS schools."

 Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other city leaders have long heralded charter schools' innovative approach to education, but new research suggests many charters in Chicago are         performing no better than traditional neighborhood schools and some are actually doing much worse...At Shabazz International's DuSable Leadership high school on the South Side, just 7 percent of students met state standards on the PSAE. A few miles south, nine out of every 10 students at CICS' Hawkins high school missed the state benchmark.

For example, you might ask: Mr. CEO, doesn't this report make it clear that standardized test scores are more a measure of poverty than they are a measure of school quality or teaching skill? Doesn't this suggest that your strategy of closing (rather than supporting) low-scoring schools and replacing them with privately-managed charters only diverts us from the real issues facing schools and students?

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