Snyder’s education adviser said he anticipates Rhodes and other Detroit schools leaders will be taking aggressive steps to fix struggling schools.
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The four districts are seeking a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to stop the SRO from closing schools outside Detroit.
Amber McCann, Meekhof’s spokesperson, said the senate majority leader is “disappointed by the Governor’s decision to use the opinion of one law firm as a reason to eliminate a tool meant to help students in the Detroit Public Schools Community District”.
More than 50 schools across the state have two strikes for landing on both the 2014 and the 2015 list of priority schools.
Half of the schools on Michigan’s new list of low-performing public schools are in Detroit but can not be closed by the state until 2019 at the earliest, Gov.
Attwood School, a 4th through 6th-grade building, and Gardner Academy, a 4th through 8th-grade school, are now priority schools and will receive additional state monitoring for the next four years.
The list published Tuesday has 124 schools, including 116 that remain open and were not closed by their district or their charter authorizer or board.
If their 2016 scores again put them in the bottom 5 percent, the state School Reform Office would close them unless it decides that closure would pose an “unreasonable hardship” to students.
Before the Every Student Succeeds Act, there was no clear standard by which schools would have to prove their compliance, and the Department of Education has taken the bill as an opportunity to be more specific.
The Warren Consolidated Schools on the list are Cromie, Harwood and Willow Woods elementary schools, which were placed on the list in 2014.
School officials have pointed out that OSD as proposed by the governor would dilute the concept of local control, conceding authority of so-called “failing” schools to the state.
Snyder spokesman Ari Adler acknowledged there are differing opinions on the legislation, but said “those can be worked through”.
“The students of Detroit have a fresh start for a new educational opportunity as a result of this decision”, she said. “We are holding ourselves accountable”, said Meriweather.
“The legislature did not intend to give a three year holiday from accountability”, he said.
Therefore, the memo states, there won’t be three years of academic performance data – which the state would use to determine schools eligible for closure – until 2019.
School groups around the state are nervously anticipating the list, arguing the state’s recent changes in standardized testing have made it hard to compare year-over-year performance. Rick Snyder’s office said Thursday, angering some Republican lawmakers and school-choice advocates.
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Gary Naeyart, executive director of the Great Lakes Education Project is against the decision. “It takes the child out of their community environment, away from friends and puts them in situation they don’t know”, he said.
