I can’t access the letter but it makes no difference.

I’m curious about the timing of this letter.  The threat was made months ago, and this letter appears now?

Just curious.  It’s probably spot-on, but as much as I dislike Dr. White, is it open season on him now?  Piling-on is a penalty in football.

Let’s move on.  Leave Dr. W in the dust if necessary.  (And it probably will be necessary)

Nope.  He is there for one reason and one reason only: four members of the Bd. of Ed think he should be.  They get fed up, and he’s gone.  Poof.

THAT’S where you should direct your ire.  Now, and/or in the next election.  He’s behaving badly because he’s allowed to do so by the Board’s majority.

How would that be score one for Dr. White and IPS? If you are scoring things, why aren’t you scoring in terms of whats good for the kids, not the bureaucrats running the system.  If a parent made a decision to move a kid to a different school because that was in the best interest of the kid’s education, the issue is not whether thats a win or a loss for IPS, its whether its good for the kids’ education.  Shift your focus. 

“the competition model that works in the private sector can’t be effectively applied to educating children. ”

Sure it can.  The issue is what is your priority? The competition isn’t for who has the most students, the competition is for who educates the students they have the best.  Those who educate best WIN the competition for students because students leave districts not performing well for those that do.  People who don’t have their eye on the ball (high performing students) do things like threaten to ban returning transfer students.  A returning student would actually mean you must be doing something right, but their focus is in the wrong place.

No, it can’t, PS.  But the rest of your Post is appropriate.

When we start keeping “score” I know who loses most—-the kids.  The AG and Bennett can’t wait to take a swipe at Dr. White.  He deserves every swipe he gets, and more, but…sometimes, the better part of intelligence is to walk away from a word-fight.  

Bennett hold all the cards.  Game, set match to D.r Bennett.  The AG and Bennett are just piling on now.  I’d prefer quiet performance, to contrast with Dr. W’s public puffery.

You can’t say that the “competition isn’t for who has the most students” and then turn around in the next sentence and say “those who educate best win the competition for students.”  Is there a competition for students or not?  As long as the state funding formula is based on the number of students enrolled in your school, you’d better believe that there is.  Like I said, if it’s a “competition,” then there will be winners and there will be losers, right?  What is the “priority and focus” of someone in a competition?  To win.  Everything else, including the method you use to compete, becomes secondary by nature — your goal is to win.  That’s where the private sector competition vs. education
competition analogy breaks down to the point where competition begins to
actually HARM students. 

If I’m competing with another factory to try
to sell the most widgets, I do whatever it takes to get people to buy MY widgets.  My main technique is to try to make a better widget than the competition, but that’s not the only thing I do, right?  I try to come up with the better advertisements for my widgets…I make sure my sales staff is well-trained and personable and brings the best doughnuts in town to meetings with potential clients…I do promotional events to bring people to my widget store…I make sure my widget packaging is top-notch and eye-catching…I don’t simply rely on making sure that my widget is the best one out there.  So what if you think I’ve “lost my focus” on making the best widget that I can make?  It’s a competition and the bottom line matters.

In a school, if I win the competition for students by doing the best job of
educating, that’s great.  However, if I win the competition for students
by promising excellent athletic programs or planting a seed in parents’
minds that the other schools may not be as good as they seem…well,
those kids count toward my ADM too, don’t they?  If the standard you use
to determine whether or not I win the competition is how many students
enroll in my school, well…Dr. White isn’t the one who decided that this “competition thing” was a wonderful idea.  It wasn’t HIS idea to “keep score.”  You can’t blame him for playing by the rules that others have set up.  Hip hip hooray for competition in education…

A private-sector model of “competition” also assumes that ALL people are interested in buying the best widget for their money.  Extending that to education means that we assume that ALL parents are interested in the best education possible for their children.  That isn’t the case.  Charter schools and private schools do an excellent job of educating the children of parents who care enough about their children’s education to research and make the effort to look at all of their options.  The public schools where students attend simply by “default” are left to deal with those students and attempt to educate them.  Those students drag down the rest of the school by taking a disproportionate share of resources in terms of teacher/administrator time and attention due to discipline issues, and in terms of money due to the need to remediate academic weaknesses.  Charter schools and private schools have the “luxury” of educating ONLY the students of involved and interested parents who have made education a priority, while the “default” public schools who are attempting to provide the best education possible to those students see their resources diverted by having to babysit the rest, too.  Let’s take the kids whose parents don’t attend parent teacher conferences, don’t make sure homework is complete, and don’t even make sure their children show up to school on time…and we’ll divide THEM among all of the traditional public schools, charter schools, and private schools…and THEN we can talk about “competition.”  Yes, under the “old model,” if you lived in a public school’s district, you’re stuck with that school if you’re unwilling to pay to go anywhere else.  However, under both the old AND “new” model, you forget that the public school in your district is “stuck” with YOU, too.

What “stats”?  The fact that test scores in schools that are allowed to deny admission to students with disabilities and expel students for failing a class are higher than those of schools that aren’t allowed to do that?  Shocking.

“Charter schools and private schools have the “luxury” of educating ONLY
the students of involved and interested parents who have made education a
priority”

Seriously? I consider this to be a really bizarre version of the “creaming” argument often leveled against charters.  So its not that the schools are not doing their job, its that they are educating a bunch of students whose parents don’t care?

So your argument is that public schools are dealing with a population of uneducable kids with bad parents who don’t care about education, and that this is the majority of the student population in public schools and thats the problem? Wow. 

 I don’t accept that your argument is correct.  I’d wager that the vast majority of parents in the public school system want their kids to advance and learn just like you and I do for our kids. I’m willing to bet educators in public schools would rebuke your characterization as well.  So I reject your argument as an explanation for decades of crappy performance by public schools. 

Its true that there are parents who don’t adequately support their kids educational efforts and this group of unfortunate kids does demand more in the way of teacher resources and time than kids with more supportive home environments.  That is actually happening. My answer to you on that score however is…so what? 

The fact that a kid has a crappy home situation does not diminish by one iota the school’s responsibility to teach him/her.  Schools get to throw their hands up because a kid has home life problems?(which by the way kids in charters and private schools can have plenty of too). I don’t think so.  And the reality is that urban kids come to schools with issues, whether its traditional public or charter.

Most charters in the city target some of the poorest kids with the dismal educational records because they believe they can do a better job, charters like the Project School for instance. Urban, inner city kids often have serious issues and you don’t need a neglectful parent for it to be a problem (homelessness, domestic violence, poverty and instability, etc.). Kids are coming to school with all kinds of stuff going on.  The schools job is to figure out how to be effective, irrespective of whether the kid has a great parent or not.  A public school thats actually got a correct orientation in this regard is George Washington High School in the Near West. They have kids coming to school with multitudes of issues.  Their response? They find every way they can to bring services into the school to deal with issues.  Kids not getting enough food, they are feeding kids after school.  Parents have no jobs, they try to make a connection.  Mental health of kid or family member in the mix, they connect people to a resource to try to affect that.  Whatever they get confronted with, they try to tap into services that will help make the situation better so the kid can learn.  And if you look at their data, its having an effect. Their minority students actually outpeform their majority students, with  Latino males actually their top performing students.

Neglectful parents is a weak excuse to fall back on.  We’re not being effective, lets claim that we are being stuck with all the bad parents and thats the explanation for decades of poor performance?  That does not explain away decades of poor performance, nor is it an answer to essentially argue that IPS is dealing with an ineducable student population.  If your argument is that they can’t educate the kids they have, then they should pack it in and let others committed to educating kids no matter what pick up the ball.

Charters are not permitted to deny students with disabilities nor are they permitted to expel students for failing a class.  I don’t know about private schools, but charters cannot and do not do that.

The factory argument is useless.  Factories are not legally-required to accept all customers who come to their doors.

Stop already.

Right.  He said “private/parochial” schools.  I never said anything about charter schools being able to do that.

Without competition there is no competence.  The words have the same language roots.  In terms of the product that government schools offer there can be plenty of competetion as we have already seen in Anderson and elsewhere.  But, what government schools offer is not really education, is it?

Does anyone believe that the higher quality of Fort Wayne government schools bears no relationship to the large numbers of private and parochial schools?  As I recall, SuperWhite came out of the Fort Wayne system.

Nope.  I’m not saying that IPS is a bad school district because they have to deal with some students who have uninvolved parents.  I’m saying that the charter schools and private schools get to look good because they DON’T have to do that.  There’s actually a big difference between the two arguments.  We don’t know that IPS wouldn’t be equally as good as the charters it has to compete with if it was also only educating the children of involved parents.  It’s like taking two runners…sticking them in a race against each other…making one push a wheelbarrow full of rocks…and then declaring the winner of the race to be the faster of the runners.  Without the wheelbarrow full of rocks, the OTHER runner may have left the supposed “winner” in the dust.  All of those “finding ways to be effective, irrespective of whether the kid has a great parent or not”?  That takes time and money that private schools and charter schools don’t necessarily have to spend to the same degree as inner-city public schools do.  Your “So what?” declaration says it all.  That’s fine.  According to your argument, charter schools have been an abysmal failure in this state because they don’t perform as well as schools in Carmel, Zionsville, and Fishers.  Hey, those schools are apparently able to deal with their “students’ issues” and get well over 90% of them to pass the tests and graduate and take AP courses along the way.  I guess your charter schools that aren’t getting the same results aren’t as effective as you think, right?

Has anyone ever done or even considered doing a cost benefit analysis of the attempt to “educate” the disabled?  Even a plus and minus T account would be useful. 

You’re kidding, right?  

Art.1,Sec.8: “..provide, by law, for a general and uniform system of Common Schools, wherein tuition shall without charge, and equally open to all.

Mandatory attendance via statute:
IC 20-33-2-6Students required to attend
     Sec. 6. A student is bound by the requirements of this chapter from the earlier of the date on which the student officially enrolls in a school or, except as provided in section 8 of this chapter, the beginning of the fall school term for the school year in which the student becomes seven (7) years of age until the date on which the student:        (1) graduates;        (2) becomes eighteen (18) years of age; or        (3) becomes sixteen (16) years of age but is less than eighteen (18) years of age and the requirements under section 9 of this chapter concerning an exit interview are met enabling the student to withdraw from school before graduation;whichever occurs first.

Indeed–he was a Principal at Wayne High School.  Then to North Central in Indy, then  IPS as deputy supt., then back to North Central as Supt., then IPS.

Right.  Private schools are fine with taking kids with disabilities…as long as the disability doesn’t impact academic performance.  Kid has an IEP because he’s in a wheelchair?  Not a problem, as long as he still has the skills to pass ISTEP.  Kid has an IEP because of a speech alliteration issue?  Bring him on in as long as he’s still performing at least a year above grade level!  Kid has a diagnosed learning disability or emotional disability?  *crickets chirping*
 

I think that at best a half truth.  We I running a private school I would not wish to even know the various Federal and State mandates as they amount to a great mountain of stupidity. I would not run from the handicapped kid, however.  Government school systems did not either even prior to the Mountain of Stupidity.

Take total SpEd costs and divide by total societal benefit (excluding the parents of SpEd kids) and you obtain a very huge number. For the most part, that number IS wasted tax dollars.  I’d include in the costs a considerable decline in student academic achievement that would have otherwise taken place in the absence of this Mountain of Stupidity.  Noticed reading scores declined again on SAT.

We can blame teachers all day long, however, some blame must be placed on the students.  Students who throw their work on the floor over and over and say “I a’int doin’ this shit”  bear some of the responsibilty for failure.  It can’t be entirely a teacher’s fault that some students fail to achieve.