Texas Charter Schools, Part One: Failing and Cheating
By Mimi Rothschild
According to The Dallas Morning News, some charter schools in Texas are nothing short of fraudulent and Texans are now paying dearly for a decision they made in 1998. On September 10th, 1998, the State Board of Education in Texas came under fire from the audience and decided to reject recommendations made by the Texas Education Agency for deciding which charter applicants would be receive charters; in turn, they decided to give every charter school applicant a charter. Since then, chaos has ensued.
A study done by The Dallas Morning News analyzed data from the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills. The data was taken from 2005 and 2006. The Dallas News analysts discovered “that by far the most extreme cases of cheating were in the state’s lightly regulated and privately run charter schools.” Two cases of cheating come from a married couple who each run their own charter school, Jesse Jackson Academy and Theresa B. Lee.
Here’s a brief profile of Jesse Jackson Academy:
• Received charter in 1998 despite being ranked 67th out 84 applications by the Texas Education Agency.
• Started By Jesse Jackson (not the famous Jesse Jackson).
• State officials have reprimanded the school for reporting false dropout data, ignoring accounting requirements, and keeping poor records.
• In 1999, none of the five teachers were certified by Texas. Two teachers had no college degrees at all.
• Jesse Jackson Academy has received the lowest rating from Texas five times.
• No student passed the math, science or English language arts sections of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills in 2003.
• Multiple experts say that four of the blatant and severe cases of cheating all came from Jesse Jackson Academy.
Jesse Jackson Academy is not the only charter school to run amuck in Texas. There are scores of other failing charter schools in the Lone Star State, as you’ll read in part two. It is astonishing that the State Board of Education could lack so much common sense and hand out 84 charters to 84 applicants, some of whom have no business running schools at all. With Texas public schools failing and Texas charters schools cheating in addition to failing, Christian Texas parents should seriously consider homeschooling their children.
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I taught for a year in a Texas Charter school. It was quite an experience. I learned an awful lot of skills related to “teaching to the test”, had my absolute fill of participating in benchmark tests and asssorted other programs and assessments designed to get the test scores up. They did just about everything but focus on improving the teaching in the classroom.
Our school was probably one of the more successful examples of a charter school in Texas, with a mission of reaching out primarily to drop-outs and students who, for various reasons, were not eligible to enroll in public schools. With the facilities we had, the equipment we were given, the curriculum materials, and the overcrowding of the classrooms to squeeze every dollar out of the state, I’m amazed that we accomplished anything at all.
BTW, I enjoy this blog, and I’ve linked it on my blogroll at http://kingdomeducation.wordpress.com
Come and visit!
Comment by Lee — August 15, 2007 @ 12:09 pm