Forum Post: Tony Bennett proves that charter schools work - they help get rid of lying Rs

Florida education chief Tony Bennett resigns over how a C became an A
{ is he an Rs ? }

Tony Bennett stepped down after reports that, while directing Indiana schools, he upped the grade of a charter school run by a major political donor. { is she an Rs ? }

By Stacy Teicher Khadaroo, Staff writer / August 1, 2013

The Associated Press published e-mails this week - Mr. Bennett forged the new A-F grading system in Indiana to favor a charter school run by a major donor { is she an Rs ? } giving it an A instead of the C it earned. Bennett said in a press conference that the accusation was “malicious and unfounded” and that he hoped there would be an investigation, but that he was resigning to avoid distraction to Gov. Rick Scott’s education reform efforts in Florida. { is he an Rs ? }

Bennett has been a prominent member of Chiefs for Change, a coalition of state school chiefs backed by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, { is he an Rs ? } which put out statements of support for him this week. As an outspoken promoter of a certain brand of accountability – supported by the privatization - for profit corporate schools, Bennett’s supporters see him under attack by politically motivated opponents.
“The most important thing we ought to do is educate children,” Bennett said Thursday, adding that he wished complex education policies could be discussed “without getting personal or assigning motive.” – such as the profit motive. Ultimately – we privatized the military & the prisons. Schools & the Post Office need to be too. David & Charlie told me.

But the pressure for him to resign is just one example of people’s “growing concern that there is little or no honesty or integrity when measuring the performance of schools,” says Maria Ferguson, executive director of the Center on Education Policy at George Washington University.
How schools are measured often has high stakes attached to it. In Indiana, the grades affect funding, determine if schools were taken over by the state, and have implications for whether students can seek private vouchers immediately or have to attend public school for a year first.

In one of Bennett’s e-mails last fall that was revealed this week, he wrote to his chief of staff after learning about Christel House charter school being likely to receive a bad grade: “This will be a HUGE problem for us…. They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work.”

Bennett explained in an interview with Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute this week that finding out that a school was slated to get a C. Christel House was founded by Christel DeHaan, the political donor { is she an Rs ? }

Bennett has been involved in manipulating Florida’s A-F grading system, including persuading a split board of education to adopt a “safety net” so that the grades of more than 500 schools would not drop more than one letter grade this year.
The controversy has the potential to “open up new conversations about what goes into these grades,” says Michael Petrilli, an education analyst and executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington. “It’s not a science. There are a lot of judgments and we should talk publicly about the pros and cons and the tradeoffs.”

The Christian Science Monitor.