New Jacksonville KIPP Charter Scores At Bottom in FCAT

4 comments, 14/07/2011, by IAmNotARapperiSpit.com, in News, Politics As Usual

A charter school that opened this year with high expectations and wealthy, powerful backers scored at the bottom of all schools in all of Northeast Florida in School Grade score.

KIPP Impact Middle, a college preparatory school, earned an F in its opening year.

“We’re disappointed,” Principal Robert Hawke said. “We fell pretty far short of where we wanted to be.”

Hawke said the school needs to improve how it measures individual students‘ understanding of material in the beginning of the school year. And then, Hawke said, the school needs to perform deeper assessments of how each student is progressing during the year.

The school opened this past school year with about 90 fifth-graders. It will add another 90 fifth-graders in the next school year and grow a sixth-grade class. The school lost a handful of students during the school year.

Tiger Academy, the brainchild of business leader John Baker, didn’t receive a school grade because its only eligible grade was third. But the school was about in the middle of the pack for how it performed on reading compared to Duval schools.

“If you look at our peer schools in northeast Jacksonville, we were first in reading,” Baker said. “We did not do well in math so we have to focus on that.”

Wayman Academy of Arts earned its third consecutive C grade after facing possible closure for poor performance several years ago. River City Science Academy, the district’s highest performing charter school, slipped from an A to a B. Somerset Middle, a new charter, earned an A.