Results tagged “charterschools”

Remember the early allegations of cheating on the DC-CAS (the standardized test that determines school progress under NCLB)? Bill Turque has done some digging, and reports in the Post that two teachers and one administrator at Howard Road Academy Public Charter School in Southeast have been fired after realizations that the two teachers were given advance copies of the exam so students could have "extra practice." The scores of 27 4th and 6th grade students at the school have been invalidated, and the campus will lose $10,000 of Title 1 funding in order to cover the costs of the tests. How did the teachers get caught? An exam proctor was suspicious when a student finished the exam's math section extremely quickly and said, "We did this yesterday. I know all of the answers."

Bad news for D.C. charter school teachers: you may not be getting paid on Friday, according to a story just posted to the Post's website. D.C. missed a $103 million payment to its 60 public charter schools this morning, thanks to some kind of tax revenue shortfall or delay, Bill Turque reports. The District is facing at least a $190 million deficit in the current fiscal year, thanks to shrinking tax revenues due to the recession. The Post story says that charter board officials are negotiating with the city to make some kind of partial payment from contingency funds to help them meet immediate payroll needs.

Over the weekend the Post launched its investigative series/Pulitzer bait on the District’s charter schools, which together enroll about a third of D.C.’s students. In addition to profiling the high-performing D.C. Prep, the Post dug into the suspect financial benefits some members of the D.C. Public Charter School Board have received as a result of their board work, mostly through the complicated world of charter school loans and financing. The Post found conflicts of interest involving nearly $200 million at more than a third of the city’s charter schools.

D.C. Wire reported late yesterday that the D.C. Public Charter School Board has passed new attendance and truancy policies in the wake of the killings of the daughters of Banita Jacks. The decomposing bodies of the four girls were found dead in their Southeast home after having been absent from school for months. Charter schools will now be required to report attendance statistics on a quarterly basis, and will mark attendance at a threshold rate of 85 percent, and truancy at less than 20 percent.