Chicago Public Schools released the names of five charters schools Thursday, including Catalyst Circle Rock, Catalyst Howland, CICS Longwood, EPIC Academy and UNO Tamayo, which have been placed on the District's Charter Academic Warning List as a result of failure to meet the academic standards outlined in their respective charter agreements.
Charter schools on warning list will be required to improve student academic performance or face closure.
Any of these schools that fail to improve their academic performance by June 2014 could face closure at the end of the following school year.
Updates to the Charter Academic Warning List, which serves as the District's systematic process to identify low-performing charter and contract schools, were based on newly available performance data for CPS schools.
"Every school in our District, regardless of school type, must be held accountable for upholding rigorous academic standards for their students to ensure they are on a path to a bright future," said CPS CEO Byrd-Bennett. "We expect each charter school on this year's warning list to improve their academic performance or we will take appropriate action to close those schools."
The five charter schools on this year's warning list have failed to meet or make reasonable progress on the criteria outlined in their own contractual academic accountability plan for the previous two years and have fallen into the bottom third of charter and contract school campuses.
The District's goal is to ensure students graduate, 100% college ready and 100% college bound. Next school year, CPS will be moving to a District-wide academic performance model that will apply to most schools including neighborhood, charter, contract, and other school types to ensure we can reach that goal.
Each of the five schools that have been placed on the Academic Warning List must submit a remediation plan based on their academic contractual agreements with CPS no later than November 15. The schools' performance results will be evaluated at the beginning of School Year 2014-2015 (SY 14-15) to determine if they have improved enough to be removed from the list.
