Leading off: Pennsylvania is adding four new online charter schools. This is despite the fact that only two of the state's existing 12 cyber-charters are making Adequate Yearly Progress and eight are in "corrective action status." Additionally:
The virtual-school students started out with higher test scores than their counterparts in regular charters. But according to the study, they ended up with learning gains that were “significantly worse” than kids in traditional charters and public schools.
As Diane Ravitch points out, this is yet more evidence that "lectures from 'reformers' about data-driven decision-making and focusing only on results" are "empty rhetoric" and that profit is the real driving force.
A fair day's wage
State and local legislation
- With the Speaker of the New Hampshire House, William O'Brien, suggesting a state law preventing people from spending welfare benefits on tobacco, alcohol, or lottery tickets, Nashua-area blogger Livia Gershon writes about how the time she wouldn't let her husband quit smoking reminds her to have empathy, and how many of the biggest forms of welfare are invisible:
Most of us have worse excuses than that for our drinking and smoking and junk food habits. Certainly that’s true of me, and, as it happens, I’m a welfare recipient too. In at least one recent year, my family made little enough money that we got an earned income tax credit—free money from the government. After we bought a house two years ago, we also got an $8,000 first-time homebuyers credit. That’s $2,000 more than the average participant in the state’s cash benefits program gets in a year, and four times as much as the average food stamp recipient gets. But, since the money went straight to our bank account, not into a distinctive card, I don’t get dirty looks when I pick up a 12-pack of microbrew at the supermarket.
Our societal tolerance for people getting government money rises even more when it comes to the upper end of the economy. I doubt executives at G.E., a company that managed to pay no federal income taxes between 2008 and 2010, would feel much shame about buying steak for the company barbecue.
- Tea partiers in Tennessee are outraged about International Baccalaureate schools.