After writing the previous post about the unimpressive results of the Tennessee Achievement School District, Gary Rubinstein decided to take a closer look at the one school in the ASD that seemed to be making striking test score gains: Brick Church College Prep. He calls his post “Follow the Yellow Brick Load.”
The theory of the ASD was that it would take over the state’s lowest performing schools (in the bottom 5%), shake up (or fire the staff), and raise those schools into the top 5% in the state. Without examining the evidence, several states want to copy the ASD.
Rubinstein looked more closely at state data. He made a discovery. Brick Church College Prep was taking in higher-performing fifth-graders. The new students at Brick Church were not the same students who had enrolled in the past. They entered with higher test scores. This is called “gaming the system.”
Gary concludes:
Besides a hard rectangular prism used to build houses, the word ‘Brick’ generally has negative connotations. In basketball it’s when a ball bounces hard off the front rim. A ‘brick’ of cocaine is something you never want to be found in your trunk when you’re pulled over for a traffic violation. And as more and more accurate data about the kinds of lying that reformers do to keep their jobs get uncovered, surely they will start ‘pooping’ bricks.
from novemoore http://ift.tt/1JX1KBE
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