Eleven of Michigan’s forty charter school authorizers are facing suspension due to deficient oversight of their schools’ accountability, transparency, fiscal governance, and academic improvement. Achievement was so dreadful across the board that each authorizer’s portfolio ranked in the bottom 10 percent of the state’s annual academic performance rankings of all schools. Offenders have until October 22 to shape up. While Gadfly hears that a handful of these entities were wrongly accused of shirking their responsibilities—Grand Valley State University, for example, is a well-respected and conscientious authorizer—the push for quality and accountability is welcome.
Teach For America is more diverse than ever, thanks to deliberate efforts by the organization. Half of TFA’s 5,300 new recruits identify as people of color, up from 39 percent a year ago. This coincides with the U.S. Department of Education’s new projection that, starting this school year, minority students will outnumber white students for the first time. More remarkably, this diversity is in sharp contrast to the nation’s teaching force as a whole: a mere 17 percent of U.S. teachers identify as people of color, a cohort that continues to suffer from lower ed-school enrollment, licensure-exam-score gaps, and disproportionate turnover.
Like clockwork, the School District of Philadelphia is once again short on funding for the upcoming school year—and, once more, the state has bailed them out, this time to the tune of $265 million. No one sees these bailouts as a good solution to this systemic, hard-to-fix problem (Ed Next has more on that). The governor, for example, recently tried and failed to plug the hole with a cigarette tax. Until all parties have the political courage to address the real problems—like the broken, costly pension system and a runaway teachers contract—we’re going to keep seeing Groundhog Day every August.
