For those of you not caught up in the "education deform" movement, Indiana had been Ground Zero for a while, with Jeb Bush stooge Tony Bennett having been elected the State Superintendent of Education under Mitch Daniels. He wanted to make Indiana the "model for the nation". He wanted to "hold failing schools accountable". He devised an extremely strict A-F grading system for Indiana schools.
But guess what happened when a Charter School run by a VERY influential Republican donor got a very low grade?
Emails obtained by The Associated Press show Bennett and his staff scrambled last fall to ensure influential donor Christel DeHaan's school received an "A," despite poor test scores in algebra that initially earned it a "C."Ruh-roh, Shaggy."They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work," Bennett wrote in a Sept. 12 email to then-chief of staff Heather Neal, who is now Gov. Mike Pence's chief lobbyist.
And the story is as sordid as it sounds. This calls into question the validity and legality of the entire Indiana school grading system.