In a Detroit News op-ed today, Governor Rick Snyder doubled down on his support for the failed experiment with Detroit students known as the Education Achievement Authority. The piece, titled “The EAA is a worthy experiment” is nearly comical in its Polly Annaish view of the EAA. Our governor seems to have bought every single story told to him about the EAA while conveniently ignoring ANYTHING negative.
[UPDATE: The title of the op-ed was changed since I originally posted this to “Every student deserves effective education”. Apparently they don’t want to admit what they are doing with the kids in the EAA.]
The most audacious part is this:
MEAP scores released last week reveal that in many cases, we’ve stopped the downward spiral. […]Results show that 12 percent of students who had previously failed state reading tests passed them in 2013. And overall, 38 percent of the EAA students tested on the MEAP made progress toward or beyond proficiency in reading, and 21 percent improved in math.
You would think a CEO-type leader would recognize that when just over a third of the kids have shown progress of any kind in reading and only a fifth in math that something is horribly wrong. You certainly wouldn’t call that “progress” by any definition.
It seems clear that Rick Snyder has a separate definition for “progress” and “success” for Detroit students than he has for the rest of the state. Any leader worth their salt would look at this year and half experiment as a provable failure and would pull the plug on it before one more day had passed.
But, for Rick Snyder, we must keep on keepin’ on. Apparently he thinks if we just keep doing the same thing only more so, we’ll get a different results. And that, my friends, defines insanity.
[Caricature by DonkeyHotey from photos by Anne C. Savage for Eclectablog]
