Excellent post from Seattle Education explaining the bogus rating of schools

[spedtr90]

http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2011/01/23/kate-walsh-nctq-and-us-news-world-report/

Explains why the National Council on Teacher Quality has nothing to do with education, teachers, and especially quality. What a scam!

"Imagine an organization that decides to assess doctor preparation by establishing its own standards rather than those embraced by the American Medical Association. Or something similar for lawyers, engineers, nurses, police officers, etc. This is what NCTQ does. Whatever our own major professional associations subscribe to, or whatever the research shows, NCTQ assumes its own standards and then assesses our programs based on them. In addition, they do no direct observations of practice, no interviewing of students and school and community partners, and very little follow up of the factual errors that we call to their attention..... In my view, and those of my colleagues, their efforts would not be sufficient to pass an undergraduate research course."

"It is also enlightening to see who is on the NCTQ Advisory Board, people who will benefit from cheap labor in the form of Teach for America recruits who are staffing charter schools throughout the country. The people on the board include Michael Feinberg, Founder of The KIPP Foundation , a charter franchise, Michael Goldstein, CEO and Founder of The Match (Charter) School in Massachusetts, Paul T. Hill, Director, Center for Reinventing Public Education which supports charter schools and is a recipient of Gates’ money, Wendy Kopp, CEO and Founder of Teach For America, Michelle Rhee, Board of Directors for the Broad Foundation, a proponent of charter schools, Stefanie Sanford, Senior Policy Officer with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, another major proponent of charter schools, Laura Schwedes, KIPP charter schools and Deborah McGriff, Partner, the New Schools Venture Fund."

"The New Schools Venture Fund states on their website “we have made portfolio-level investments in 35 nonprofit and for-profit organizations, including nonprofit charter management organizations (CMOs), school support organizations, accountability and performance tools and human capital providers“.