Thursday, May 24, 2012

Mitt Romney Calls for Direct Action to Stop School Closures

Mitt Romney:

We have good teachers, like the ones who are leading New York City’s Democracy Prep. Because of them, kids from the city’s poorest community are outperforming children from the wealthiest. Last summer, these teachers took over the worst elementary school in Harlem rather than let it shut down. Democracy Prep is a testament to good people who refuse to give up on our kids or leave our cities without a fight.

1 comment:

Sean said...

Have you read the Romney white paper yet? A summary of the K-12 stuff:

1. Deregulate teacher certification.
2. Expand school choice.
3. Let federal dollars follow the student.
4. Expand funding so that high performing charter networks can grow.
5. The NEA (but not the AFT) and its affiliates control the Democratic party, school board elections, General Assembly elections, your life, my life, etc.

There's evidence to support each of these, and evidence to destroy each of these.

The one unsubstantiated claim is that Obama's school turnaround process has not led to demonstrable increases in student achievement. Thomas Dee's (very recent) paper argues that school turnaround has led to .1 SD per kid in California. Nothing to write home about, but more efficient than class size reduction.

Obviously jury's still out in RI and whether those results would generalize here (they likely wouldn't).