There is also a bill up in a House subcommittee Tuesday that would essentially shut it down. "The only people that are benefiting are in K12, a Virginia corporation that is rising statewide to siphon off millions of dollars every year ... for enormous profits," said Stewart, adding that K12 CEO Ronald Packard was paid $3.9 million last year and $5 million the year before. Stewart also cited an email sent to Virtual Academy teachers in December that says they should "take out the October and September progress (reports); delete it so that all that is showing is November progress reports." Stewart asked that Johnson be allowed to speak to the committee. "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," principal Josh Williams said in the statement. But the email suggests that teachers erase the bad grades, leaving students with just the good grades. In traditional classrooms, if students score a 60 on one test and a 90 on a second test, they're stuck with a 75 average. K12 officials refused to sit down to answer our questions, but the Tennessee Virtual Academy's principal said in an email that the goal was to "more accurately recognize students' current progress." The original bill would have covered Tennessee Virtual Academy — which now has about 3,200 students — with a 5,000 cap.
– Tennessee Virtual Academy, a for-profit, online public school heavily supported by state Republicans, has found a novel way of boosting student performance—just delete bad grades, reports News Channel 5 in Nashville. A leaked December email from the school's VP appears to tell its middle-school teachers to erase some scores that don't measure up. "If you have given an assignment and most of your students failed that assignment, then you need to take that grade out," it reads. "To me, this appears like it's grade fixing," said one Democratic state representative. Virginia-based parent company K12 is refusing to talk, but the TVA principal said the deletions were intended to "more accurately recognize students' current progress." But as the two-year-old school will receive $7.5 million in funding from the state this year, many Tennessee lawmakers are outraged. The Knoxville News Sentinel reports that a House bill that proposed shutting the school altogether was killed yesterday; a second was passed by the House Education Subcommittee. It would allow the state to shutter a virtual school that records sub-standard student performance two years in a row. (Meanwhile, a Lehigh University student is suing over a bad grade.)