In March, Governor Markell randomly popped up at a Delaware State Board of Education meeting to announce a Statewide Review of Educational Opportunities. The State Board did a yes sir and got to work right away on this. It’s basically a review of what’s working in Delaware and using that mold to copy in different schools. And of course, this is open for interpretation by the entity conducting the research. But is that the State Board, the DOE, or Markell? Hell no! They will have their focus group with all the “stakeholders” (basically whoever they can find that blindly agree with them). But the real work will be done by an outside vendor. The bid proposal went up June 15th, and closed July 15th. These are the bidders:
American Institutes for Research (already our testing vendor for the Smarter Balanced Assessment, no conflict of interest there)
Cross & Joftus (never heard of them)
Public Consulting Group (good old PCG, data-tech company that already handles all the Medicaid reimbursement to special education providers and saves the state a lot of money while we pay them a lot of money)
So what was in the actual RFP?
Yeah, more ways the DOE can suck up even more money, throw it away on something we know will come back as saying: more charters, more magnets, more “World Immersion”. So how about saving the money and just write the damn report yourselves!
The Season Of Myths 
Oh for God’s sake. THIS we have money for. You can’t swing a dead cat at DOE without hitting a Ph.D, (not that I am advocating violence) so why can’t they design the study themselves?
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Because they don’t know how. They are incompetent, and we know that based on the fact that every time they do a “study” or “research” they farm it out to some corporate education reform company out there to give them the results they know they will get. Then they can say “See, this company said what we need to do, so we must do it.”
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Besides, by now everybody knows the secret sauce for “high-performing” schools. The recipe requires picking a lot of cherries. But by its nature, you can’t make that recipe in large batches.
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