Mike Black

Mike Rose's resolutions wrap back to Lewis Black's thoughts most notably on their views on charter schools. They both essentially feel charter schools are an idea not a solution. Charter schools are potentially a great alternative to failing public schools but the process of getting into the school and the fact that Jerry Large points out "KIPP (a charter school) students showed a pattern of sliding backward in high school and often failing to graduate college." shows that charter schools are not the winning solution. Also both of them strongly feel there has been way to much talk on how to fix education and not nearly enough actual effective action. They, as they should be, are troubled by the fact that the same economist who so successfully analyzed the financial and housing markets are now flocking into education reform a topic they know most nothing about. How can these people fix a problem they barely understand when they couldn’t fix the one they should know everything about. The idea of judging teachers ability based on the average standardized test score of their class is ridicules! To quote Rose "Imagine judging competence of a cardiologist by the average of her patients’ cardiograms." this kind of system is archaic and proven to be an inadequate method of judging teacher ability.