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Recent test data show that some Detroit-area charter high schools are performing at best on a par with public schools, according to a newspaper’s analysis published Thursday.

Of 25 charter schools in and around the city, six had higher math or science proficiency scores than Detroit Public Schools’ average on the most recent Michigan Merit Exam, The Detroit News reported, and most of the others were doing worse than the district.

More charters chalked up poor results in reading and writing, but they surpassed the Detroit school district in social studies.

Educators say public and charter schools face the same challenges of educating students in Detroit, where many live in poverty.

“Everybody is pretty much in the same boat,” said Doug Ross, CEO of New Urban Learning, which runs University Preparatory Academy, one of the few schools to consistently outperform the Detroit district.

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Are you an International CPA Exam Candidate looking to polish your writing skills for the BEC portion of the CPA Exam? Read the rest of article…

Arlington Christian guard Jay Manning signed a basketball scholarship with Augusta State.

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Late last week, David Brooks wrote a New York Times piece that is quite critical of education historian Diane Ravitch. [She has since responded].

Aside from what seems a personal attack on Ravitch (of whom I am a fan), the gist of the piece is that Brooks recognizes that standardized testing can be problematic, giving schools “an incentive to drop the subjects that don’t show up on the exams but that help students become fully rounded individuals — like history, poetry, art and sports” and to “game the system by easing out kids who might bring the average scores down, for example.” He doesn’t mention the widespread cheating scandal in Atlanta (brought more fully to light this week after his piece posted), or the one suspected in Washington, DC, or the concern that scoring on the Regents in New York is not exactly accurate, but one could argue that those too are caused by perverse incentives created by the testing environment.

Given such incentives, one could also argue (like Ravitch often does) that we should pause in our rush to use test scores to judge school, teacher and even student performance until we have worked some of these issues out.

Instead, Brooks points out that:

[T]he schools that best represent the reform movement, like the KIPP academies or the Harlem Success schools, put tremendous emphasis on testing. But these sc

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