Education Secretary Steps Into a Minefield in Brooklyn ...5-18-2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/nyregion/19duncan.html?ref=education

From the NY Times, I surmise: It is quite apparent that the Obama/Duncan bribery extortion plotting is founded on the telling of lies about charter school success. Otherwise if charters are about the same or worse that regular schools how can Arne be pushing the need for more charters to increase RttT chances of winning the BIG BUCKS? {lies trump data}

Hours before the event at the charter school, the teachers’ union’s press secretary sent reporters a fact sheet titled “A Tale of Two Schools.”

Like many charter schools in the city, Kings Collegiate, widely praised for its high test scores, shares a building with a traditional public school, Intermediate School 588, which does not score as well. The union was trying to point out that students who arrived at I.S. 588 were not as well prepared as their peers at Collegiate.

It also asserted that nearly one-third of the approximately 80 Kings students who entered in fifth grade had left the school by the next year.

Ms. Harris told reporters that approximately 18 students who began fifth grade were held back to repeat the grade and that less than a handful of them left the school. Education Department officials later said that the rate of students who left the school was closer to 20 percent. But documents the school filed with the state show that 11 percent of the students left the school between their first and second years.