EDITORIAL: A New Game Beats System
Advocate (excerpt)

While we recognize that no system is perfect, we hope BESE looks long and hard at the accountability commission’s proposal. Magnet schools ought to get their own scores; those are schools students enroll in voluntarily. But alternative schools are where students are sent, and the traditional school leadership is who is sending them.

The striking thing about this whole “re-routing” controversy is how willing schools are to do what they can in the system to make their numbers look better — anything, it seems, but improve students’ performance. Are principals going to look at some of their difficult charges around mid-November and decide to ship them off to an alternative school?

Is this commission recommendation an incentive to push out children who are not “teachable,” in the words of one of the Accountability Commission members? And is it BESE’s view that some children aren’t “teachable”?