So Why Did The State Board Hold Up Release Of A-F School Grades Until Day After Election?

Congratulate LaNier Echols, your newest IPS board member, for her D performing charter school

It's no secret that the State Board of Education is populated by a bunch of puppets for the education profiteers who masquerade themselves under the banner of education reform. The latest A-F grades for the state's schools were belatedly released today after they were supposedly held up to allow some under-performing charter schools an opportunity to re-calculate their grades upward, and they show modest improvements for IPS schools. A little over half of IPS' schools are still under-performing, but the grades are moving in the right direction. The ChalkBeat's Scott Elliott describes the results:

Indianapolis Public Schools was an example of a district that saw a shift toward better grades. The district has been among the state’s most troubled with a majority of schools earning a D or F.

That’s still true: 54 percent of IPS schools rated a D or F this year, according to the data released today. But that was down from 59 percent last year.

At the lowest end of the scale, IPS saw the most progress. While more than a quarter of the district’s schools rated an F (28 percent), that’s a big improvement from more than a third of schools last year (36 percent), the data showed.

Those same newly-released grades show that 40% of Mayor Greg Ballard's city-sponsored charter schools received a D or F. "A majority (55.2%) of Indianapolis/Marion County charter schools are low performing; similar to the 54.7% of IPS schools that are 'low performing,'" Amos Brown observes.

One charter school that caught my eye in particular was the Carpe Diem school whose dean of students, LaNier Echols, was one of those three so-called school reform board candidates the out-of-state education profiteers pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into the election to buy their seats. Echols defeated incumbent board member Michael Brown. The grade for her school was a D. She ran on a pledge to reform Indianapolis public schools and she can't even earn better than a D for the school she's in charge of running? It looks to me like the grades were deliberately held up by the politically-run State Board of Education in order to promote their agenda of convincing the public that IPS schools were headed in the wrong direction and to aid these so-called reform candidates who were elected for the sole purpose of feathering the nests of their own masters.

Somebody needs to be asking how much was funneled to the consulting firm owned by Jennifer Wagner, wife of state education board member Gordon Hendry, to help elect the so-called education reform IPS candidates. One hand washes the other.

Loved working with three amazing education advocates this cycle: @MaryAnnforIN @EcholsForEd @KellyBentley1 #ipselect
— Jennifer Wagner (@JenniferAWagner) November 5, 2014