The Department of Education said they picked Adamowski due to his record in Hartford and his long standing commitment to “education reform.” According to the biography he provides to organizations where he is going to speak, as Hartford’s Superintendent he “engineered one of the most comprehensive urban school district overhauls in the country. He has introduced an all-choice system of high performing schools, reduced the number of middle schools and has created smaller career-oriented academies.”
Some of those who were on the front lines in Hartford’s school system might call the superintendent’s claims hyperbole. When Adamowski left his post last year, Hartford School Board member Robert Cotto Jr. wrote in the Hartford Courant that “Test score improvements in math and reading were inconclusive. For every new student who passed the math and reading test, the district removed one student from standardized testing. For two years, his administration omitted 8 percent of students from regular testing. The greatest factor causing the apparent district improvement was the removal of low-scoring students from the testing sample.”
Hey, if you can’t get the test scores up high enough, just don’t have the lower performing students take the test.
'via Blog this'
This article demonstrates some of the adverse affects that the private, for-profit charter school model will have on real education:
ReplyDelete"One of his first acts to was to claim that Windham conducts more early childhood education than is required and went on to implement a significant restructuring that cut back on the town’s highly accessible early childhood program."
"Special Master Steven Adamowski also announced that he was going to save money by eliminating Windham classes that have less than 15 enrolled students. The decision falls heaviest on high school students taking advanced placement courses. You can be sure wealthy suburban school districts aren’t cutting back on the number of advanced placement courses."
"Instead of recruiting experienced bi-lingual teachers who have the skill set and experience to work in such a challenging school system, Adamowski decided that he would utilize Teach for America students. Not that there is anything wrong with utilizing Teach for America recruits but in most cases these young people have five weeks of training and no classroom experience. Their energy and commitment is great but with many certified and qualified Connecticut teachers (including bi-lingual teachers) on unemployment, why not make an extra effort to identify and recruit the highly trained educators that his contract demands."