Pennsylvania Paper: Defund Charters That Can't Make AYP

An editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer (1/30) describes the "plummeting" percentage of Pennsylvania charter schools that made AYP after ED overruled a state plan to judge them by less rigorous standards. "Under a new, broader, less-stringent assessment method that the department, without federal approval, used for the first time last fall, 49 percent of the 156 charter schools in the state were said to have met academic benchmarks, based on their students' 2011-12 test scores. But that already unacceptable rate dropped to an abysmal 28 percent after being recalculated according to federal guidelines." The paper hails the Pennsylvania School Boards Association for raising a red flag on the lighter standards and complaining to ED about them, and suggests that academically failing charters be defunded.