Monday, November 14, 2011

Add this to your Talking Points

John Thompson:

And the study also found, “At the CMO level, we do not find impacts to be associated with use of a uniform curriculum, extended instructional hours, frequent formative student assessment, or performance-based compensation.” To me, this report suggests that, instead of continuing to use charters as laboratories we should scale up their best practices and -- most important -- reconsider some of the less effective charter-inspired policies that are being exported to neighborhood schools.

This is an important substantive point, and one that rings true with my experience. It is also a good "gotcha" tactic because reformers do not want to get bogged down on talking about disciplinary policies in a traditional school context.

The longer you look at "no excuses" charters, the more important discipline looks, and it is just not transferable to regular public schools. And for that matter, the implementation of the policies in charters is often borderline (if not outright) scandalous.

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