{"id":19688,"date":"2013-07-30T07:00:08","date_gmt":"2013-07-30T11:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/?p=19688"},"modified":"2013-07-30T06:35:58","modified_gmt":"2013-07-30T10:35:58","slug":"bennett-defends-decision-to-boost-indiana-charter-school-grade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/2013\/07\/30\/bennett-defends-decision-to-boost-indiana-charter-school-grade\/","title":{"rendered":"Bennett Defends Decision to Boost Indiana Charter School Grade"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_18219\"  class=\"wp-caption module image right\" style=\"max-width: 297px;\"><a class=\"fancybox\" title=\"Education Commissioner Tony Bennett stands by a 2012 decision to alter the grade of a charter school.\" href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/files\/2013\/04\/TonyBennett1.jpg\" rel=\"\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-18219\" alt=\"Education Commissioner Tony Bennett stands by a 2012 decision to alter the grade of a charter school.\" src=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/files\/2013\/04\/TonyBennett1.jpg\" width=\"297\" height=\"256\" \/><\/a><p class=\"wp-media-credit\">Gina Jordan\/StateImpact Florida<\/p><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Education Commissioner Tony Bennett stands by a 2012 decision to alter the grade of an Indiana charter school.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett stands by his decision to boost the grade of an Indiana charter schools in 2012, when Bennett was the Hoosier State&#8217;s elected superintendent.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.huffingtonpost.com\/2013\/07\/29\/tony-bennett-indiana_n_3672196.html\">Associated Press published emails Monday<\/a> which showed Bennett and his staff discussed ways to boost the grade of Christel House charter school after learning the school&#8217;s initial grade was a C according to the Indiana school grading formula.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/indiana\/2013\/07\/29\/bennett-stands-by-decision-to-boost-indy-charter-schools-grade\/\">Our colleagues at StateImpact Indiana spoke with Bennett<\/a>. He said Christel House&#8217;s performance was similar to that of three other premier charter schools:<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Bennett says his department ran into problems when initial calculations indicated the school would receive a C under the statewide accountability system, which didn\u2019t sit well with the then-superintendent.<\/p>\n<div>\n<div>\n<p>\u201cSo when we looked at our data and saw that three of those schools were A\u2019s and Christel House was not, that told me that there was a nuance in our data,\u201d says Bennett. \u201cFrankly, my emails portrayed correctly my frustrations with the fact that there was a nuance in the system that did not lend itself to face validity.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>At issue were the school\u2019s low scores on statewide algebra tests. Bennett says the problem stemmed from how <a href=\"http:\/\/hosted.ap.org\/specials\/interactives\/documents\/ineds\/choptions.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">combined schools<\/a> \u2014\u00a0that is, those that include multiple grade levels \u2014\u00a0are counted under the state\u2019s accountability system. He says the tweaks his department made benefited a number of schools, not just Christel House, which is run by <a href=\"http:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/indiana\/2012\/08\/02\/interactive-map-whos-giving-money-in-the-campaign-for-state-superintendent\/\" target=\"_blank\">a prominent Republican donor<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The news has prompted critics of Florida&#8217;s school grading and accountability system to call for Bennett&#8217;s resignation.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;If the Florida Board of Education and Governor Scott have any integrity, Superintendent Tony Bennett must be summarily dismissed,&#8221; Bob Schaeffer, the public education director for FairTest said in a statement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Florida Education Commissioner Tony Bennett stands by his decision to boost the grade of an Indiana charter schools in 2012, when Bennett was the Hoosier State&#8217;s elected superintendent. The Associated Press published emails Monday which showed Bennett and his staff discussed ways to boost the grade of Christel House charter school after learning the school&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18],"tags":[860,1075,1069,1106,452],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19688"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19688"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19688\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19691,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19688\/revisions\/19691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateimpact.npr.org\/florida\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}