AYP: Hawaii and "America's Choice™"

Here's an article from some time back that slipped through my cattle-guard sized Internet filtering cracks. For those who don't want to RTFA, it discusses the dramatically increased amount of Hawaiian taxpayer money going to non-Hawaiian educational firms like America's Choice™ to fix schools deemed "failing" via No Child Left Behind.

I mention/link it here, months later, because:

• It's a news story I'd like to see from newspapers in all 50 states
• Hawaii's NCLB test scores just came in and....
  

"A record number of Hawaii schools this year failed to meet their progress goals under the No Child Left Behind law. This year marked the second year of dramatic increases in the number of schools failing to meet the federal goals, known as "adequate yearly progress." Only 34 percent of schools — or 97 campuses — made AYP this year compared with 42 percent a year ago."

• As has been mentioned here before, New Mexico's "failing" schools (including mine) are using firms like America's Choice™, and will most likely do so on a much greater scale as our number of "failing" schools continues to climb.
  

One sentiment expressed in Hawaii is the concern about money being sent to "the mainland". Kind of makes me want to dig a giant moat around New Mexico so folks can better understand the mistake of throwing tons of NM taxpayer money at these educational carpetbaggers.

Okay...as a "liberal" Southerner, I admit I'm not 100% comfortable with using terms like "carpetbaggers". For some of us, even in the South, the Carpetbaggers were actually the good guys. So let's avoid that semantic can of worms, and just refer to America's Choice™ as "predatory scumbags making untold and largely undocumented profits from a warped, misguided policy designed to set up public schools and its current students as failures."

Something like that. It's a bit lengthy as defining terminology goes, and obviously a work-in-progress. Journalists from the 49 states that aren't Hawaii are encouraged to tweak my little definition as need be in writing their own stories on how their State is throwing piles of money at these NCLB war profiteers.