The Paris Academy, an online charter school in Saginaw, Michigan, announced it was closing as the Michigan State Police launched an investigation about padded enrollments. The school allegedly was paid for students who were not attending.
Curiously the school was supposedly the top-performing charter school in the state only last September.
A brand new online school in Mid-Michigan is outperforming hundreds of other schools across the state.
“It was a good achievement for everyone all the way around,” said Nancy Paris, the founder of the Paris Academy.
The academy has the 18th highest SAT score statewide. Paris said it is a huge feat for a cyber school in its first year of online learning.
“We were really excited you know to see that we made the top 20 and that we were the number one charter school in the state, so it was like you know hard work paid off,” said Paris.
Thirty-two students took the SAT, averaging 1,174 out of a possible 1,600.
The test measures college readiness among 11th graders. Josiah Klingenberg feels fully prepared to take it this year.
“It feels good to have the opportunity to go to a school being the number one charter school,” Klingenberg said.
The Paris Academy is the only charter school to make the top 20.
But it closed on June 29, and its authorizer dissolved the charter.
Is there an investigative reporter out there who can explain this puzzle?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“Curiously the school was supposedly the top-performing charter school in the state only last September.
A brand new online school in Mid-Michigan is outperforming hundreds of other schools across the state.”
Take ed reform endorsements with a grain of salt. They all waved pom poms for ECOT too. For YEARS.
It’s not so much science as it is marketing. Marketing they understand. They’re more POLITICAL scientists than they are evidence-based.
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“It’s not so much science as it is marketing. ” EXACTLY true across the nation.
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Be aware, public school parents. Ed reform lobbyists are working as hard as they can to cram the canned “online learning” they use in charters into every single public school in the country.
They’ve gone off the deep end for “personalized learning”. They’re ALL pushing it in their usual lock-step fashion.
There’s no real debate on “personalized learning”. The only question is how fast they can jam it INTO public schools and how much ed tech product they can sell TO public schools.
The ed tech industry was never going to survive on charters alone. They only make up 5% of schools. The big market is public schools. Ed reformers pay absolutely no attention to public schools unless they’re selling us a test or an online program or a device of a consultant. Your kids are a sales opportunity and that’s ALL they are.
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I called my local school board member about the “personalized” learning coming to my district. The school board member said that, “Kids use a lot of technology now. It’s the wave of the future.” I tried to tell her that forcing 1st and 2nd graders (which was the designated group to start this) on to computers for half the day was wrong–that we should be encouraging fewer computers at school, not more, since kids use computers so much at home. She wouldn’t listen.
She was a teacher for decades, but she also has bought into this tech nightmare. It was frustrating.
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Not a puzzle to thinking people, the Wall Street folks told them how to lie and they did it. Online learning is so technology companies can monitor your child’s every move and produce more anti social adults.
Public School parents fight back.
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Did those alleged students take the SAT test online and were they actual students or from the padded list? My bet is that Nancy Paris, or people working for her, took all those tests using the sock puppet names from the padded portion of the student roster.
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