Administrators at the for-profit K12 online charter called Tennessee Virtual Academy instructed teachers to delete failing grades from the fall semester.
School officials defended the practice:
Tennessee Virtual Academy Principal Josh Williams insisted that the school had taken the steps to “more accurately recognize students’ current progress.”
“By going back into our school’s electronic grading system and recording students’ most recent progress score (instead of taking the average throughout the semester) we could more accurately recognize students’ current progress in their individualized learning program,” he told the station in an email.
This must be the lamest excuse ever invented, since it achieves the opposite of what is intended. If you want to show “progress,” you keep the failing grades. That way, you can see gains from September forward.
The school is one of the lowest performing in the state. Despite its poor performance, the school is making money for K12 and hopes to grow enrollment.
We will soon find out whether the legislators care more about the quality of education offered to Tennessee students or pleasing the lobbyists for K12.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
While the final grade is what is important, it needs to cumulative and show the progress. You cannot just throw out everything bad unless you also throw out everything good except a posttest that can be compared to a pretest.
What these “reformers” do with their website marketing, soundbites, and “data razzle-dazzle” never ceases to amaze and then instantly enrage me. What kind of mind could ever conceive of this slanted scheme of measuring student progress? And, more significantly, who is “buying” this bunk?
“By going back into our school’s electronic grading system and recording students’ most recent progress score (instead of taking the average throughout the semester) we could more accurately recognize students’ current progress in their individualized learning program,” he told the station in an email.
Old saying: If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your b.s.
They were taught well by Michelle Rhee.
If I told my students that I was going to grade them like that, they would mutiny, and rightly so.
I hope the same score-juking can be applied to teachers who get lousy evaluations.
HaHa!! Typcial charter school cover up. Use lies and propaganda. Use fear and intimidation of teachers to put up a fake graduation rate. Everything is about selling the product rather than producing results.
We had real problems with how to grade failing work since there were only ten ways to get any other grade but 59 ways to flunk something.
Being able to recognize progress is also very important. I had a boy who worked very hard to try to get a B in English. He missed it by 1%. I should have told the teacher to give him the B, but at the time I did not know the whole situation. He gave up. His earlier grades carried too much weight even with a solid string of Bs at the end.
Another article on the story from a news website:
http://www.newschannel5.com/story/21129693/email-directs-teachers-to-delete-bad-grades
Not true, says TNVA teacher: http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2013/feb/16/summer-shelton/
The original story quotes an email from an assistant principal at the Tennessee Virtual Academy, to teachers. The school official did not say the email was false; the school official defended the practice of deleting failing grades.
So basically, everyone should ignore failing grades, give students several chances at mastery and then claim them to be straight A students. Sounds great, but doesn’t it encourage students to work less in the beginning knowing that their original work doesn’t matter anyway and teachers will just give them chance after chance to apply themselves? Sounds like a real waste of teacher time and school resources, neither of which are plentiful in the public schools.