Reply #11: And what happened to 7th and 8th grades?

[madfloridian]

"Its efforts and achievements are for the most part admirable. Its schools include the Promise Academy Charter Schools. Curiously, grades 7 and 8 are not mentioned on the Promise Academy Web site (although the HCZ Web site does mention them).

What happened to those grades? Apparently failure happens even in the HCZ. In March 2007, Canada announced that he was phasing out the Promise Academy middle school, which originally was intended to expand into a high school. The graduating eighth graders would have to find high schools elsewhere. And there would be no incoming sixth grade. Why?

The preliminary test scores weren’t high enough. (See chapter 10 of Paul Tough’s "Whatever It Takes"). Performance has since improved, but no one has bothered to put the seventh and eighth grades on the Promise Academy Web site. If “failure is not an option,” then presumably those who fail cannot fully exist."