So, if Senator Coleman's bill passes, St. Louis will have the same school board it now has, but no accreditation?

Dave,

Smith's bill extending the school day, year, mandating looping, etc. is a sloppy piece of legislation. We know you are a big fan of Jeff's but consider it carefully.

The uniforms are a great idea. Preschool for all is fantastic.

The district doesn't have enough certified teachers now. Driving good teachers out and replacing them with substitute teachers will really help the students get into college!

Looping is a wonderful thing and should be expanded, but forcing it on all school and teachers would cause problems. Certainly, expand looping. Looping is effective with experienced teachers but would be a disaster with new teachers. When there is a horrible match of a student and a teacher, do you want to lock the student into several years of hell?

The buildings are not yet all air conditioned. Middle class families that are in the district will bail if told that their kids have to go to summer school in those blast furnace buildings. Yes, it would be great if the legislature would start actually funding the foundation formula and the district could go back to having summer school for those students that need it. Poor kids with asthma will learn so much in between asthma attacks.

Did Jeff Smith even know that a number of early childhood centers and elementary schools dismiss at 4:08 PM and that there are three tiers of start times? Is dismissing young children at 5:38 PM a good idea? Let's make students walk home past drug houses in the dark!

Teachers should be competant in their core areas, certainly. His bill is vague about how the teachers will be tested. The testing could be as stupid as the MAP test and filter out good teachers and retain bad ones. [The MAP test is stupid because it compares apples and oranges. The MAP test would be a lot less stupid if it tested students at the beginning of the year and at the end of the year and looked at how much the students learned.]

If Smith's bill is so great, make it statewide and include Clayton, Ladue, etc. Clayton students will love uniforms.

I am no fan of the teachers or Lizz's approach but I have to agree that Smith's proposal seems to throw together any ideas he has heard with no thought about how they might work. His lack of real world experince really concerned me during the election and you can see his grad student self showing through. You can almost see his preface to his proposal of "Assume money wasn't an issue..."
Through out the campaign, his only credentials on education were teaching as a grad student and The Confluence Academies. The Confluence Academies are an unmitigated disaster and are only benefitting for-profit Edison Schools. They are certainly not helping students. DESE needs to take away their accreditation. Their students are performing much lower thatn the rest of SLPS kids but no one seems to care.
I like the Mayor having the power to do charter schools but he needs to run away from Smith.