The Daily Report Card: School Closures, High-Priced Advocacy, Disabilities & Charter Schools

Discover RCS master plan tonight – Richmond Palladium-Item A cost-cutting plan in Richmond could “shutter two or more elementary schools and reshuffle the rest, a move that could push sixth-graders, and perhaps other grades, into its under-utilized middle schools.” (Palladium Item)

Education Advocacy: If I Had A Million Dollars – Hoosier Ed Why do we demonize large donors to education causes as having “impure motives”? asks Jennifer Wagner. (hoosiered.com)

No Choice: Florida Charter Schools Failing to Serve Students With Disabilities – StateImpact Florida “86 percent of charter schools [in Florida] do not have any students classified as severely disabled,” write our StateImpact cousins in Florida. They rolled out a huge investigation on their blog, and on Morning Edition on Wednesday. (stateimpact.npr.org)

Autism linked to educated parents – Joanne Jacobs Its growing prevalence is “more a surge in diagnosis than disease.” (joannejacobs.com)

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly: School Turnarounds and Profiteers – Democrats for Education Reform “While the SIG program will have done some good helping to support the development of a few new schools (like several here in Denver), most of the funds will go to ill-conceived and clumsily implemented interventions with little change in student outcomes.” (dfer.org)

In Praise of Performance Pay — for Online Learning Companies – Education Next After a scathing New York Times report on an online charter school (operating programs in Indiana), the head of a right-leaning education think tank writes, “Where the article landed a punch, in my view, was around the perverse incentives at play today.” (educationnext.org)

Productivity Push Could Hurt Community Colleges – US News & World Report “Any move to link funding to degree completion will be problematic for community colleges, which have low graduation rates even for full-time students,” writes Joanne Jacobs. (usnews.com)