Bad Grades for Education Managemnet Organizations. Who are they? Part of the Privatization of Education.

While Republicans demand teacher evaluations and school rankings be based on test scores, the privatization movement and managers brought in to oversee many charter schools think it’s unfair to use those same standards. Huh?

It’s all part of the upside down world of conservatism, where platitudes about freedom and liberty are thrown in to fill the space left by the lack of research and substance. “It’s what the founding fathers envisioned…blah, blah, blah.”

The public is getting suckered into believing the private sector is somehow better, like the following profit and non-profit management companies (EMO's) in the story below. The Republican narrative has been a raving success, sweeping in major minority groups sold on the snake oil promises that they have the secret to closing the achievement gap. It’s all a lie, and it’s all about making money off our kids. Is anything more deplorable?

EdWeek: The annual report, "Profiles of For-Profit and Nonprofit Education Management Organizations," whose 2010-11 edition was released this month by the National Education Policy Center, offers a mixed picture on the academic success of outside operators of public schools, as measured by their schools' ability to make adequate yearly progress, the main yardstick (the same yardstick used to bash teachers and public schools). It offers a dimmer assessment of for-profit virtual schools' performance by that oft-criticized standard.

You won’t believe how bad virtual schools look in the report.

The academic showing of the EMOs profiled in the report was uneven. Forty-eight percent of the schools run by for-profit EMOs made adequate yearly progress. Nonprofits fared better, with 56 percent of their schools making Academic Yearly Progress (AYP).

Those figures are comparable to overall public school performance … 52 percent of the nation's schools made AYP during the most recent year studied. One for-profit organization listed in the report, EdisonLearning, was found to have just 34 percent of its schools making AYP.

Not a rip roaring solution to improving our educational system, is it? But it gets worse when we look at virtual schooling, a popular Republican idea being pushed heavily in Wisconsin:

The report found that a much smaller proportion of virtual schools managed by for-profit EMOs—27 percent—made AYP. Those academic-performance figures were for full-time virtual schools … the poor performance of virtual schools was "a bit of a mystery" and a cause for concern.

As Wisconsin adopts this ideologically driven movement of failure and profit taking off the education of our kid’s, many are captured by the hypnotic language and magical promises of improve learning through the private sector. 

  

Dismantling this mess will be all but impossible once our public schools have disappeared.