exvigilare

From this morning’s Dallas News:

Last year, 53 sophomores took the math TAKS test at Houston’s Jesse Jackson Academy. Two stood out from the crowd.

They were the only two whose answer sheets don’t show evidence of cheating.

Sorry, what was the name of that school? Ah, here it is - the Jesse Jackson Academy.

“Mind-boggling,” said David Harpp, a Canadian cheating expert who examined the school’s scores. “Total corruption.”

Even subpar charter schools - heck, especially subpar charter schools - can only be as good as the leadership behind the school. To answer your question, no it’s not that Jesse Jackson, but the implication was certainly ripe (maybe Rueters will pick me up).

No, it’s not that Jesse Jackson. The Jesse Jackson in question is a Houston resident with experience in curriculum and nonprofit work and a doctorate from Vanderbilt University. He is not the civil rights leader and political activist.

I’m (obviously) a big fan of charter schooling, but to be fair we need to recognize them when they fail, too. How did this school (along with the Theresa B. Lee Academy) get their charter, you may ask.

But reviewers of the two schools’ applications had numerous issues with the proposals, ranging from the schools’ lack of a “clear written vision statement” to problems with the way they planned to teach their curriculum.

In the end, though, those concerns didn’t matter. On Sept. 10, 1998, at a now infamous committee meeting of the State Board of Education, dozens of angry charter-school applicants demanded that their proposals be approved. Several argued that the state was being racially discriminatory when it rated some proposals from minority-led organizations lower than some from white-led ones.

Under pressure from the audience, the board committee voted to reject TEA staff recommendations and to give every applicant a charter. That decision has haunted the Texas charter movement since, as a number of the schools approved that day have gone on to have serious financial and management problems.

“That was the worst day in my professional life,” Mr. Flemister said. “You either have a selection process that is precise, or you just open up the gates and let everybody come in. By opening up the gates, we got some that just weren’t ready to run a school.”

Ironically,

It is one of the strange quirks of the cheating at Jesse Jackson and Theresa B. Lee that copying answers often doesn’t appear to have helped many students pass. Students whose answer sheets were filled with responses identical to their classmates’ still didn’t manage to get enough questions correct to do well.

And what is being done legislatively to correct this issue? After all, that’s how Texas got into this mess.

A bill proposed in the recent legislative session, Senate Bill 4, would have made it easier to close certain under-performing charter schools. As originally written, it could have allowed the closure of Theresa B. Lee, but let Jesse Jackson Academy survive.

But, as has happened before with proposals to tighten regulations on charter schools, the Legislature concluded its session without passing it.

Ah, of course.