Trends

This Rhode Island high school situation sure seems like a bogus trend story.   Turnarounds may be a trend but really dramatic moves like this seem pretty anomalous.  That whale in Florida killing people seems like a more common trend than schools firing all the teachers en masse.  

But in Florida we may be seeing a real trend around expanded choice.   In places like Florida (Milwaukee is another example) the lines are now so blurry between public and private as to make those distinctions sort of meaningless.   It doesn’t stop the advocates from slinging those terms around but to really understand what’s starting to happen in these places (and ultimately its effects and impact) we’re going to need some new verbiage.

Update:  Liam Goldrick sees a trend, too. We’ll see…perhaps the federal dollars will provide some cover here but traditionally this is one of those chasms in education we periodically gaze into and then back away.  So count me among the skeptical.  There is an enormous difference between a lot of teachers being laid off for cost reasons in a difficult fiscal climate and a lot of teachers being let go (meaning actually separated from the district, not moved into other roles, other schools, put into a paid absent reserve status, or any of the rest of the games here) for cause.

One Reply to “Trends”

  1. There just aren’t that many school districts carved out of 1.3 square miles of closed mills and densely packed tenement housing, so it is hard to make this a trend.

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