Dive Brief:
- Wisconsin Republicans have introduced a new bill that would require failing traditional public schools to reorganize as charter schools.
- The bill, the first of the 2015 legislative session, would also mandate all public, charter, and private schools accepting voucher students be subject to letter grades based on performance measures chosen by schools and pulled from four different standardized tests.
- According to the Associated Press, Democrats and those associated with the state's largest teacher's union, Wisconsin Education Association Council, view the bill as a mechanism to destroy public schools.
Dive Insight:
"The bill charts a course for the end of our neighborhood public schools as we know them, paving the way for struggling schools to be converted to privately-run charter schools unanswerable to locally elected school boards and taxpayers," Wisconsin Education Association Council President Betsy Kippers told the Associated Press.
Assembly Speaker Robin Vos counters this claim, saying the bill is intended to kill off failing schools and not necessarily public schools. How the state determines which schools are failing will largely depend on the letter grades those schools receive based on test scores.
An earlier draft of the bill also suggested teachers and principles from failing schools be fired, but that language was later removed.
Relying too heavily on test scores to determine a schools success can have dire consequences. Not only does it ignore the social and emotional needs of students, but it creates incentives for teachers to focus too heavily on teaching to a test — and, in some cases, even cheat.