Three math teachers who taught at Crossroads Charter High School on North Tryon Street are asking politicians and the state and federal education departments to investigate their claims that about a third of the school’s graduating class failed math — and likely other subjects as well — but were handed their high school diplomas anyway. To prove it, they opened their grade books to Creative Loafing and provided hard copies of tests taken by the students. If what the teachers claim is true, it could rock the charter school system in North Carolina.
The teachers claim that administrators changed or overlooked the grades of at least eight students out of the graduating class of 25 to allow them to graduate. But because charter schools are essentially public schools whose charters are awarded by the state, and whose affairs are governed not by a superintendent or elected school board but by a board of volunteer citizens, the teachers say they have virtually no one to take their complaints to other than the media.
Like the dozens of other charter schools around the state, Crossroads was started with a unique mission that was supposed to serve a purpose not being met in the public schools. According to its charter, Crossroads was designed to provide kids who aren’t succeeding in regular public schools because of discipline and learning problems with whatever assistance and attention they need to earn their diploma.
But the teachers, as well as two parents and an author of the charter proposal for the school, say that the day-to-day reality at the school was very different from what was proposed to state education officials in the charter application. They claim administrators lost control of the kids early on, creating an atmosphere in which teachers were regularly threatened and could barely control their classrooms. They say many of the kids spent their time in a kind of in-house detention center where they watched movies all day rather than attending classes, and as a result missed critical classroom instruction.
The result, they say, can be found in their grade books.
“The majority of those students couldn’t add a fraction of one-half and one half,” said Dr. Herbert Moore, who taught math at the school.
According to copies of tests taken by students, a teacher’s grade book, and printouts of student grades from January and June given to CL by the teachers, four of the students got grades under 30 percent for at least one of the three quarters in which the teachers taught there. One student never took a math exam in second or third quarter, but received a diploma anyway. Another, who the teachers describe as out-of-control, was separated from the other students and spent most of his time watching movies in the school’s school-within-a-school program for troublemakers. The teachers claim he got no training in math and took no exams second semester, yet passed anyway. Another student dropped both her math classes without completing them but was given credit for them and allowed to graduate, they say.
Moore, who taught geometry at the school, says he was disciplined for refusing to go along with the administration’s loose policies and quit his job in frustration before the end of the school year. Joel Silver says he was fired in February for questioning the administration’s policies and for refusing to pave the way for the kids, who he insisted on holding to the academic standards set out in the school’s charter. Alvin Abrams, who says he initially inflated the students’ grades to help them weather the transition from public school to a makeshift school to the charter school, says that after the first quarter, he too refused to give the students grades they hadn’t earned. In most cases, the grades given by Abrams in the second quarter are significantly lower than what he gave students in the first quarter. Abrams says he was fired for allegedly assaulting a student. He claims that the student, who was bigger than he was, started a fight with him.
The grades the students received in the fourth quarter were unavailable to CL, because the three teachers, who taught the same students, were gone before the end of the fourth quarter. How much instruction the students received in math during the fourth quarter is unclear. Though teachers of other subjects were recognized at the school’s graduation on May 31, no math teacher was named.
School attorney James Conrad says the students did receive math instruction during the fourth quarter by a teacher functioning in a substitute status until his drug screening and background check were completed. Conrad claims that the teacher was officially added to the staff after graduation. He also says that the kids who were failing completed bonus and make-up activities in the fourth quarter that allowed them to graduate.
“I will tell you every student that graduated this year graduated on grades that they earned,” said Conrad.
But Queen Thompson, one of the original authors of the charter request for the school, doesn’t buy it. She says she wishes that she could undo what she started when she wrote the charter proposal.
“This was not the way it was supposed to be,” she says.
Though school headmistress Tara Anderson hung up on CL when we called her for comment, Conrad, the only person from the school who was willing to talk to CL, says the problem was the three disgruntled teachers and Thompson, not the students.
Conrad claims it was the three teachers who doctored their records to make it appear that the students should have failed.
“They are all working for a singular purpose, to embarrass the school,” Conrad told CL. “The information they gave you is false. I think you are being duped. You are being used by them.”
Conrad says that it is true that a large number of students in Moore’s classes were failing before Moore left. But Conrad blames Moore, not the students, for their grades.
“If a student was late a minute to class, he refused to let him take the exam,” said Conrad. But Moore said he was merely enforcing the school’s policies.
“The school had the policy that if the student was late after the second bell, they had to go to detention,” Moore said. “That was their policy, not mine. I was just enforcing it.”
All three teachers claim that many students dropped off at the school by their parents before administrators arrived would leave and then come back after the second bell so they could spend the day in the detention program watching movies rather than in class. A parent of one of the students confirmed that this was a regular occurrence. After she discovered that her son regularly left the school after she dropped him off and later returned to spend the day in detention, she says she began personally marching him to the principal’s office and then to class to keep him out of detention.
Conrad, who spoke to CL on behalf of the school’s board of trustees, admitted that the school did have significant discipline problems with the kids. And he says that at one point it was discovered that a teacher who ran the school’s in-house detention program was showing movies to the kids rather than teaching them, but that the problem was quickly resolved. He denies that any of the students’ grades were changed and says that the problem is the three math teachers, all three of whom he says were fired.
Conrad also had harsh words for Thompson, who served on the school’s board before resigning earlier this year. He says Thompson became angry with the board after they refused to give her more control over how the school was run.
“Thompson wanted to be the principal of the school and it become abundantly clear that she wanted to get to the money (used to run the school),” said Conrad. “She sent the board a demand and said she wanted be paid 10 percent of the money (the board received from the state to run the school) as a grant writing fee. She saw this as her golden parachute. She wanted to take this stuff and package it and go around the country teaching seminars.”
Conrad says that although the state awarded the school a charter, Thompson did a poor job on the application.
“I was surprised the department of public instruction would even award a charter for the school,” he said. “The writing in the application was so atrocious.”
How this situation can be resolved is unclear. Had something similar occurred at a public school in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system, complaints about grade fixing could have been taken to a high school regional assistant superintendent, the school system superintendent and ultimately the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Board, which is elected by voters. But because this is a charter school, these individuals have no power to govern what goes on there. Worse yet, officials with the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction say they play an advisory role to the state’s charter schools, but have no governing power over them. *
News of the Weird
Tall Orders
By Chuck Shepherd
* In a May dispatch from Cuba, The Wall Street Journal reported that Fidel Castro proposed in 1987 to alleviate a chronic milk shortage by trying to get his scientists to clone the most productive cows, shrunk to the size of dogs so that each family could keep one inside its apartment. The cows would feed on grass grown inside under fluorescent lights. Cuba was the home of the late Ubre Blanca, the Guinness book record-holder as the most milk-productive cow of all time.
* A Dutch livestock-breeding-device manufacturer recently began selling a $27 vibrator that supposedly relaxes sows during artificial insemination to increase the chances of fertilization. Said the sales manager at the company Schippers Bladel BV, “Once the vibrator is inserted, the pig’s ears will go up and she will stand ready to be serviced.” The company also makes a remote-controlled plastic pig whose movements, mating sounds and scents supposedly encourage the sow to be serviced.
Recent Lack-of-Fashion Statements
* Among those arrested in May for inexplicable nudity: a 45-year-old man, driving naked on Interstate 95 (Cocoa, FL); a 23-year-old man, driving a pickup truck naked over the lawn of the state capitol (Lincoln, NE); a woman riding naked atop an SUV (Indianapolis); a 21-year-old prisoner who stripped and jumped against a bulletproof courthouse window in a futile escape attempt (Hillsboro, MO); a man in his 20s who ran onto an ice rink naked, interrupting a late-night skating class (Richmond, British Columbia); and a 20-year-old man who broke into a house and immediately removed his clothes (Eugene, OR).
Compelling Explanations
* They’ve Got the Shining: After the body of Chandra Levy was found in a wooded area of Washington, DC, in May, former Georgia state Rep. Dorothy Pelote, who via a much-maligned psychic vision last year “saw” Levy’s body in a ditch in the woods, said this proves that she has “the gift.” And Fort Lauderdale, FL, attorney William Cone told reporters in April that Federal Trade Commission fraud charges against his client, the psychic Miss Cleo, are bogus because she actually can see the future. Cone also said his California-born client’s claim to be a Jamaican shaman was true, too, and gave seven possible explanations for that, saying one of them described Miss Cleo but refusing to tell reporters which one it was.
Not My Fault
* In Scranton, PA, in May, Janice Taylor, who maimed her 4-year-old son in 2000 in a stabbing attack because she thought he was the Antichrist, filed a lawsuit against two psychiatrists and an obstetrician for not giving her enough anti-psychosis medication. Taylor was pregnant at the time she attacked the boy, and her doctors were wary of prescribing more medication for fear it would harm her fetus, but they finally relented and gave small doses of Thorazine. (The baby was born unharmed, even though Taylor made a stab at it, too, plunging the knife into her abdomen.)
Latest Rights
* Italy’s highest appeals court ruled in April that a 29-year-old out-of-work lawyer still has the right to be housed and financially supported by his parents. The son, Marco Andreoli, owns property and has access to a $200,000 trust fund, but he objected when his father cut off his $675 monthly allowance that had been ordered when his parents divorced, saying he needed it because he had not found a job fulfilling enough. (More than a third of all men in Italy between ages 30 and 34 still live with their parents.)
* Born-again-Christian roommates Derrick Mitchell, 38, and Teresa Tafawa, 58, were served eviction notices in May by their landlord in Cornwall, Ontario, because of complaints that they pray loudly and often around the apartment complex. Mitchell says he can’t help himself when he receives “visions,” especially the holy alerts about local devil worship; he said he is moved to speak in a high, quivering voice that Tafawa calls “the ecstasies” and that the pair may pray and sing for several hours a day, even in the laundry room and the parking lot. Said Tafawa, “We try to walk with the Lord all day.”
Thinning the Herd
* A 54-year-old school guard was accidentally shot to death by a colleague as the two demonstrated quick-draw techniques to each other outside a school dance (New Orleans, April). … A 38-year-old angler was killed when he overestimated the height of a cement bridge beam he drove his boat under while speeding at midnight in a no-wake zone (Wilton Manors, FL, March). …The 22-year-old man behind the wheel of a drive-by-shooting car was accidentally killed by the passenger-side shooter, firing out the driver’s-side window (Los Angeles, May).
Our Civilization in Decline
High school students in Palm Beach County, FL, needed only a score of 23 percent to pass a standardized state history test (55 is an A) (May). … Through bureaucratic error, sensitive US Air Force spy-plane parts, originally intended for destruction, wound up in private hands and were up for auction on the online eBay service (May). … Also through bureaucratic error, 50 large boxes of sensitive abuse reports and medical records of foster children and other clients of Florida’s embattled Department of Children and Families were offered at auction and purchased by a TV reporter for $5 (May).
Also, in the Last Month …
Three young Amish drivers were charged with traffic violations after their late-night buggies’ race caused a collision with another Amish-driven buggy (Leon, NY). …A 17-year-old boy who had allegedly vandalized a beekeeper’s hives with a truck was identified because his family Bible had fallen out of the driver’s side door during the incident (Northeast Harbor, ME). …A 24-year-old man dashed frenziedly out of his apartment after settling down to sleep and encountering a 3-foot-long snake under the sheets, left over from a previous tenant (Guelph, Ontario). …Police put out bulletins for the “dork bandit,” named for his demeanor, who is wanted in three robberies (Atlanta). *
Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa, Fla. 33679 or Newsweird@aol.com, or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com/.
This article appears in Jun 19-25, 2002.
