CAPITOL LETTERS

Why would you criticize anyone for being a champion at at-risk youth? And at $45k Ms Miller is clearly not in it for financialgain. Most important is what this sb4 is going to do to the at risk youth effected by a poorly thought out bill.

It's sad she didn't look into the rest of the story. The bill was written by TEA and contains provisions that caused a tremendous amount of opposition in the House.

The students attending at-risk charter high schools are severely behind academically. Many are homeless or pregnant. Many are the TYC "bubble" kids: Those who aren't incarcerated but who have been expelled by the traditional system for behavior problems. They end up at the charter schools looking for a second chance while being two or three years behind grade level.

The charter schools serving these students are, quite literally, competing with the prisons and morgues. They have very high completion rates and make greater academic progress than the traditional system because they not only recover the dropout, but they get them back on track academically.

Shapiro is shortsighted and wants the child who is pregnant and three grade levels behind to perform on grade level like the students who start at half a grade level behind, all the same time period.

The racial and social disparity between the schools she calls "bad" and the ones she calls "good" is stark. The "good" schools require longer school days and contracts with parents. The "bad" schools' students often don't have ANY parent involved in their lives, and couldn't get a contract if they wanted one.

Typically, politics seem to play a larger role in education than research. The TEA's recent commissioned study of charter schools undergirds the importance of the State developing standards for the dropout prevention schools that measures their progress. It even points out that at-risk charter schools do better than their traditional public school counterparts.