NJ Education Report

 I wish that the critics of testing and ‘test-based accountability’ would get together with their opponents and agree on some fair, effective and efficient ways of evaluating teachers. Just being against something isn’t enough, in my book, and teachers deserve to be fairly evaluated.

That’s one of John Merrow’s New Year’s wishes (hat tip: Alex Russo), although Merrow is not, what disparagers of school choice like to call, “reformy.”  He’s no  fan of PARCC standardized testing,  the Common Core State Standards, value-added teacher evaluations, Arne Duncan’s waivers, the U.S. Congress’s failure to reauthorize ESEA, and what he terms  “drill and kill” teaching and learning.

 Merrow also makes a dig at school choice, particularly charter schools which, in New Jersey, is one of the only ways for poor parents in urban districts to opt out of traditional public schools:

It is my fervent wish that the good people within the charter school world will police their own, because it’s increasingly clear that the ‘movement’ is being hijacked by profiteers and other ne’er-do-wells who are in it for the money. If the good folks continue to do very little, charter schools will become another failed experiment. It’s disingenuous for education’s leaders and politicians to say they “support good charters and oppose bad ones” and then do nothing about the loopholes that allow for-profit and not-for-profit charter operators to loot the public treasury.

I don’t know the reasoning behind Merrow’s allegations of “profiteer[ing]” and “loot[ing] the public treasury,” nor am I privy to the evidence  that might support his conclusions. In my neck of the woods, charter schools, which serve about 32,000 schoolchildren ( about 2% of the total public school population) are non-profits that are accountable to tax payers and government regulators with nary a “hijack” in sight.   Admissions are done through lotteries with exceptions permitted only for siblings. Charters receive less money per pupil than traditional schools and no facilities aid, even in N.J.’s poorest “Abbott districts” where typically the State pays the full tab.

I don’t know a single charter school operator in New Jersey who is in it for the money. I do know that there is high demand for more seats. Currently, about 20,000 kids sit on waiting lists.

So here’s my New Year’s wish, ala Merrow.  I wish that people would stop maligning the right of parents to make choices about their children’s schooling, a choice that parents of means make all the time.  I wish that people would stop casting vicious and unsubstantiated aspersions upon dedicated school administrators, regardless of whether they work in public charter schools or traditional charter schools.

As Merrow says, just to be against something isn’t enough.