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PA makes it easier for charters to pass state tests
Pennsylvania has made it easier for charter schools to pass standardized tests in what seems like an effort to make them look better than traditional public schools.
PA makes it easier for charters to pass state tests
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The Pennsylvania Department of Education has made it easier for charter schools to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) on standardized tests, in what seems like an effort to make them look better than traditional public schools.
Public schools are evaluated by whether they meet certain test score targets in each grade tested. Under the changes, implemented by Education Secretary Ron Tomalis without federal approval, charter schools would only have to meet those goals in one of three groupings of grades: 3-5, 6-8, and 9-12. This means that a charter school's 3-5 and 6-8 graders could perform abysmally as long as high schoolers scored well.
An Allentown Morning Call investigation found that the new scoring method may provide a false impression that charters outperformed traditional public schools last year. A 2011 Stanford University study found that charters performed worse over all.
This isn't the first time the administration of Republican Governor Tom Corbett has been accused of giving charters special treatment, as City Paper reported last month. A new state law requiring that test scores be included in teacher evaluations only applies to teachers at traditional public schools--and excludes charters. So much for accountability.
The quiet changes made to charter school evaluation is particularly striking given that public school test scores plummeted last year. Secretary Tomalis credited his crackdown on standardized test cheating. But the cheating was most likely prompted not by lax rules, but by the increasingly high stakes of standardized tests. And others, including a member of his own advisory committee, contradicted his assertion that major budget cuts to education had not impact. Gov. Corbett's cuts fueled the elimination of 3,800 teacher and staff positions in districts statewide.
Just another way for the Secretary of Education to cheat on the test and game the system. What a disgrace.
The whole concept of Adequate Yearly Progress is faulty at its inception.— Democracyined
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