Tag: Charter Schools

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Panel to Reject Federal Funds Has “No Predetermined Outcome”

State Capitol (Photo: Tennessee State Government)

A leader of the group of lawmakers exploring whether Tennessee can feasibly reject nearly $1.9 billion in federal education funding says that the panel’s work will begin in early November, and that its findings — not politics — will guide its recommendations.

“There is no predetermined outcome for this working group, or for what the information we gather is going to show,” Sen. Jon Lundberg, a co-chair of the panel, said Wednesday.

“We want to look at what federal education money we get, where it goes, what we’re required to do to get those funds, and ultimately what’s the return on the investment,” the Bristol Republican told Chalkbeat. “I think this will give us a good overview.”

Lundberg, who also chairs the Senate Education Committee, was responding to criticism from Democrats that Republicans are seeking to undermine public education, cater to charter and private school interests, and advance the political aspirations of House Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Crossville Republican and likely candidate for governor in 2026.

In February, Sexton said Tennessee should consider forgoing U.S. education dollars to free schools from federal rules and regulations, and should make up the difference with state funding. On Sept. 22, he and Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, an Oak Ridge Republican, appointed eight Republicans and two Democrats to the working group to look into the idea and report back by Jan. 9, when the General Assembly convenes a new session.

Most of the federal money the state receives supports low-income students, English language learners, and students with disabilities. Tennessee school districts that are most reliant on U.S. dollars tend to be rural, and have more low-income and disabled students, less capacity for local revenue, and lower test scores in English language arts, according to a recent report from the Sycamore Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

Lundberg expects to release the panel’s meeting schedule later this week. But at this point, its members have more questions than answers, including what such a shift in funding would mean for kids. If the January 9th deadline doesn’t allow for a comprehensive review, he and co-chair Debra Moody, who also chairs a House education committee, plan to ask for more time.

“This is too big an ask to not be thorough,” he said.

If the committee finds ways for the state to feasibly wean itself from federal education money that Tennesseans help generate through their taxes, Lundberg expects legislation to come out of its work. But he acknowledged that state revenue collections have lagged in recent months, potentially making it harder to cut the cord.

“Revenues are a valid concern, but that’s not our charge at this point,” he said. “We just want to do a deep dive on where we stand.” 

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Bo Watson warned lawmakers in August that Tennessee likely will need to begin curbing state spending. But on Wednesday, he endorsed the panel’s task.

“I think it’s premature to say whether there will be budget constraints,” said the Hixson Republican. “Evaluating our programs and our funding is always a healthy exercise.”

Even if officials decide the state can afford to pass on federal funds, JC Bowman, executive director of Professional Educators of Tennessee, questions whether it could effectively manage resources designed to support underserved communities and ensure equal access to education.

He cites the Achievement School District as one example of poor oversight for a state-run program intended to serve students attending low-performing schools. The turnaround district took over dozens of neighborhood schools beginning in 2012, mostly in Memphis, and turned many of them over to charter operators. But it has had few successes to show for its decade of work.

Lundberg said that example shouldn’t stop the state from investigating the possibility.

“Do I trust the state more than the federal government? Absolutely,” Lundberg said. “I think that government that operates closest to the people is the best government.”

Gov. Bill Lee has said he’s open to the idea and denounced what he called “excessive overreach” by the federal government. However, he didn’t give specific examples on education when answering questions from reporters last week.

Advocates for historically underserved student populations say federal oversight is needed to ensure that the state and local districts adequately provide for every student and school.

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats pointed out that the federal government provided nearly $30 million last year to public schools in Cumberland County, which Sexton represents. That’s 44 percent of the East Tennessee district’s budget. Three school districts in Anderson County, where McNally lives, received $31 million in U.S. funds, which covered 32 percent of their budgets.

You can look up exactly how much federal education funding is on the line for every Tennessee county.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.  

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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More Memphis Charter Schools Could Face Closure After State’s Failed Turnaround Effort

Humes Middle School is one of five charter schools in the Achievement School District seeking to return to Memphis-Shelby County Schools. Credit: Caroline Bauman

Several of Memphis’ lowest performing schools face an uncertain future — and possible closure — as their charter agreements with Tennessee’s turnaround district near expiration.

Five of them, including MLK College Prep High School, are seeking approval to return to Memphis-Shelby County Schools as charter schools after a decade in the state-run Achievement School District. But MSCS officials have recommended denying their charter applications, along with bids from four proposed new charter schools. 

If the MSCS board votes to accept the district’s recommendations and deny the charters when it meets Tuesday, it would leave some 2,000 students with high academic needs in limbo, unsure of where they’ll attend classes in the 2024-25 school year. 

Another web of decisions would determine what happens next to those students, and to the schools. So far, neither the district nor the board has articulated a comprehensive strategy for dealing with the fallout of the ASD’s collapse.

“We should have talked about this two years ago, since we all knew it was coming,” said Bobby White, head of the charter company that runs MLK College Prep.

MSCS officials have said they talk to operators and tailor individual decisions because “each school in the ASD is unique.”

The board could defy the district recommendations and approve the charters, as it has done before. But the district argues that it’s not in its interest to bring poorly performing charter schools back into the district. This year, all five applicants bear the same low-performing “priority” designation that primed them for state takeover a decade ago.

“We want high quality seats for our students,” said Brittany Monda, MSCS’ assistant superintendent of charter schools. 

When the state assigned its lowest-performing public schools — most of them in Memphis — to the Achievement School District, the idea was that charter operators would take them over, turn them around, and eventually return the schools to the home districts in better shape. 

But the plan didn’t work. Many of the schools languished or continued to perform poorly under the charter operators. That means that despite 10 years of state oversight, most do not meet state and local performance standards used by local officials to evaluate charter applications.

Data presented by MSCS indicates that despite some gains over the years, each of the five schools has fewer than 12 percent of students on track in reading and math.

State law allows Tennessee school boards to close charter schools in their own portfolios that have priority designations, and that could happen in Memphis if the MSCS board accepts the ASD schools and they don’t make significant academic gains. Memphis policy favors new charter schools that would give other options to students who go to a low-performing school. 

If the board turns down the ASD schools, MSCS could decide to resume operating them as traditional schools. Otherwise, the ASD schools would close when their charters expire at the end of the 2023-24 school year.

It’s no surprise that MSCS is wary of assuming responsibility for more schools. District leaders have been trying over the past decade to align school capacity with shifts in enrollment, and to figure out how to improve the condition of decaying school buildings. Facility plans have been continually revised in recent years, but have never been fully executed. 

Consolidating schools that are operating under capacity would offer better learning environments for students, officials say, and cut down on a costly list of building repair projects. 

Interim Superintendent Toni Williams is poised to deliver a new facilities plan next month. The ASD charter schools — operating in buildings MSCS still owns — could be part of this plan. 

Already, the district is planning for a new Frayser high school that would combine students at Trezevant High School and MLK College Prep. The district plans to build it at the MLK site.

White, the leader of MLK College Prep’s charter operator, Frayser Community Schools, has said that if the MSCS board approves the charter school, he would end the charter agreement early, when it’s time for students at MLK College Prep to move into the new building. 

But if the school isn’t approved as a charter, the district will have to choose between operating it or letting it close. If it closes, students currently zoned to MLK College Prep would have to be reassigned to Trezevant or other schools until a new high school is built.

Stephanie Love, a school board member and longtime advocate for students in the ASD, peppered district officials with questions about school closures and consolidations during a committee meeting last week. 

She pointed out that the district makes decisions to close and consolidate traditional schools based on academic performance, enrollment, and school building needs — criteria similar to the ones it uses to evaluate charter schools.

Many ASD schools have closed already without any MSCS school board vote. 

If the five ASD schools seeking charter approvals eventually return to the district as traditional schools, they could become part of MSCS’ own turnaround model, called the Innovation Zone, or iZone. The model takes advantage of centralized resources and pays teachers more for working a longer day.  

A handful of former ASD schools joined the iZone last year, as traditional MSCS schools, and another will join this school year. Monda, the charter office leader, said the returned schools have shown “promising results,” but did provide any data. (Charter schools cannot be part of the iZone.)

Tuesday’s board vote on the five ASD schools — and the four new applicants — won’t be the end of the story for any of them. 

If they lose their bids for charter approval, they could appeal the decision to the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission, or in some cases reapply next year.

White, the ASD charter operator, said that if the board turns down his applications, he doesn’t plan to appeal. He said he wants to support the district’s plan for Memphis students. But he said there should have been a more comprehensive plan for the schools serving the Memphis and Tennessee students who have struggled the most academically. 

“Our contracts say our time is up after the 10th year,” he said. “And I’m hoping that we have an opportunity after this round … to really dig in on what’s going to happen to … all the other schools coming back in the years to follow.”

Another set of ASD schools serving about 2,000 more students have charters set to expire in coming school years. 

Laura Testino covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Laura at LTestino@chalkbeat.org. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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Hanley School in Tennessee’s Turnaround District Will Return to MSCS Control

A 2020 event at Hanley High School celebrating Journey Community Schools’ takeover of four charter schools. Hanley is shifting now to Memphis-Shelby County Schools’ control as it exits the state’s Achievement School District. Photo credit: Caroline Bauman / Chalkbeat

For the first time, a charter school in Tennessee’s turnaround district will exit the state program and return to the Memphis district’s management, Memphis-Shelby County Schools announced last week. 

Hanley School, a K-8 school in Orange Mound, was taken over by the state and placed in the Achievement School District a decade ago to be run by a charter operator. This fall, it will be part of the Memphis district’s turnaround model, known as the iZone. 

The move marks a setback for the school’s charter operator, and another twist in the chaotic unwinding of the Achievement School District, which has been rocked by leadership turnover and turmoil. 

The state district began operating in 2012 and was designed to elevate some of Tennessee’s lowest performing schools by turning them over to charter operators under 10-year management contracts. The schools were to exit the ASD once their performance improved and return to their home districts — either Memphis, home to all but two of the schools, or Nashville.

But state leaders have acknowledged for years that the turnaround effort had failed in its mission. And as some of the 10-year management contracts near expiration, they have scrambled in recent years to figure out how to move schools out of the faltering ASD and get them on a path to improvement. 

The current state policy describes several pathways for an ASD school to leave the district, including some options to stay open as a charter. The policy stresses “school specific” plans to account for each school’s “unique” situations. 

In the case of Hanley, the policy resulted in the current operator, Journey Community Schools, not being able to keep the school under its network, and the transition to MSCS began over the last few months.

As other ASD schools creep up on their final years, Memphis could see a wave of school closures if MSCS doesn’t bring those schools back into the district.

Nickalous Manning, executive director of Journey Community Schools, denounced the way Hanley’s transition is being handled. 

“The children and families in Orange Mound and at Hanley deserve a voice and a say in their children’s education,” Manning told Chalkbeat Wednesday, echoing a common complaint in Memphis that state leaders make decisions and policies affecting local families — like creating the ASD — without their input.

Manning accused state officials of not communicating an impending deadline for Hanley to apply to remain open as a charter school, and faulted them for not holding more public meetings with families. The exit process was unclear, Journey wrote in a letter to the state asking for a waiver of laws that prevent Journey from continuing to operate the school.

The state’s education commissioner, Penny Schwinn, cited state law and rules in denying the waiver. MSCS shared copies of the letters between Manning and the state with Chalkbeat to explain why the district won’t consider Journey’s charter application for Hanley.

The Tennessee Department of Education, where the ASD is housed, told Chalkbeat that all ASD charter operators received information about transition plans in 2020. ASD leaders meet monthly with the charter operators to review school status, department spokesperson Victoria Robinson said. 

Robinson supplied a list of meetings scheduled over the last academic year with Hanley officials about the transition. Parents received a letter about the plans in January, Robinson said, and were invited to a meeting early last week.

Manning, who grew up in Orange Mound, said Journey plans to keep trying to hang on to Hanley.

Hanley will be the first charter school in the ASD to return to MSCS as a traditional public school. Four other ASD schools in Memphis were never operated as charter schools, and transitioned to MSCS operations this school year, also as part of the district’s iZone program.

Others have followed different pathways as dictated by the state policy, which takes into account the school’s test scores, the local district’s test scores, and how many years are left in the charter contract.

In most of the exits, schools where students showed high growth on state tests have swapped from the ASD to the Tennessee Public Charter School Commission’s oversight. 

That option wasn’t available for Hanley. Available school testing data shows Hanley’s students haven’t noticeably improved during the state takeover, much like other schools in the ASD. 

Hanley’s reading scores, for instance, are nearly on par with the ASD average this year, and lower than a nearby MSCS elementary school, Dunbar. Neither school had more than 12% of students meeting reading benchmarks.

Only one Memphis ASD school has applied to join MSCS as a charter. The board approved it against the recommendation of the district. In April, MSCS board members will have a slate of five ASD schools to consider reabsorbing as charter schools, including Coleman School, another Journey school in its ninth operating year.

Laura Testino covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Laura at LTestino@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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State Rejects Appeals of Two Memphis Charter Schools

The Tennessee Public Charter Commission rejected appeals from the Binghampton Community School and Tennessee Volunteer Military Academy, siding with executive director Tess Stovall’s recommendation and the local school board decision earlier this year. Stovall, pictured on the left, recommended against allowing the two Memphis schools to open last week. Credit: Larry McCormack for Chalkbeat

The Tennessee Public Charter School Commission rejected the appeals of two proposed Memphis charter schools on Tuesday.

The nine-member board’s decision upholds the recommendations of Tess Stovall, the commission’s executive director, and the Memphis-Shelby County Schools board’s decision earlier this year to deny the applications for Binghampton Community School and Tennessee Volunteer Military Academy. The decision is final, and the two schools will not open in August 2023 as local charter leaders had hoped. 

This week’s votes wrapped up this year’s 13 charter appeals before Tennessee’s 2-year-old commission. Of those, three were approved for Nashville and six were denied in Memphis, Clarksville, Brentwood, Hendersonville, and Fayette County. Applicants behind the other four appeals, including three high-profile ones related to controversial Hillsdale College in Michigan, pulled out of the process when it became apparent that their appeals would be denied.

Binghampton Community School leaders said in their application that the school would serve about 360 students in grades K-5 on the eastern edge of Midtown, providing them with early access to International Baccalaureate programming. The Tennessee Volunteer Military Academy was meant to provide about 800 students in grades 6-12 in Cordova and East Memphis with military-based educational programming with a focus on internships and technical education.

In her recommendations for the two Memphis charter schools last week, Stovall outlined myriad concerns with both school’s applications. 

Stovall said in her recommendation that while Binghampton had a strong academic plan and the neighborhood would have been a great location for the school, its academic, facility, and staffing plans all appeared to depend on the unique skills of the head of school who resigned in July due to “extenuating personal circumstances,” according to the school’s application.

Stovall also said cost assumptions for the school did not appear reasonable, and leaders lacked sufficient funding to begin operations. 

Binghampton Community School had promised to hire a new head of school once it got approval from the state. But on Tuesday, leaders said they “respectfully accept” the commission’s affirmation of the MSCS board’s decision to deny the school’s application. 

They added: “We recognize that our capacity as a sponsor and school board to identify and recruit a replacement school leader cannot be retroactively considered during the appeal process.”

The commission also sided with Stovall and MSCS in the case of Tennessee Volunteer Military Academy. Stovall wrote that the academic plan was missing key details, including the school’s grade and class structure, an instructional model, and curriculum. Stovall said the school didn’t explain how it would serve students with disabilities and English language learners.

The application also lacked letters of support, which Stovall said called into question whether the school would be able to meet its projected enrollment of 800.

Stovall also took issue with the school’s “unclear relationship” with Charter One, a for-profit national education management association, and said the school didn’t provide a reasonable budget.

Commissioner Terrence Patterson, who is also the president and CEO of the Memphis Education Fund, said he agreed with Stovall and MSCS’ analysis but hopes both schools refine their ideas and submit future proposals.

“These are the types of innovative models that our children deserve,” Patterson said. “These are the types of innovative models that we were created to support.” 

Samantha West is a reporter for Chalkbeat Tennessee, where she covers K-12 education in Memphis. Connect with Samantha at swest@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Leaving the Blanks Unfilled on the State of West Tennessee

Governor Lee

Some time in the fall of 2017, when his gubernatorial candidacy was newish and his name identification across Tennessee was still in the birthing phase, Bill Lee issued what he billed as a 10-point “Commitment to Memphis and Shelby County.”

The points tended to the abstract rather than the concrete. Examples:

“— I commit that Memphis and Shelby County will play a significant role in our efforts to improve education, economic development, and enhancing public safety across West Tennessee.”

“— I commit to working with local leaders to find tailored solutions for the challenges of Memphis and Shelby County.”

“— I commit to a regional approach for economic development that ensures West Tennessee is competitive with Arkansas & Mississippi.”

Obviously, these — and others like them in the list of 10 — were fine objectives; just as obviously, they were nonspecific in the extreme, not the detailed and localized prescriptions that the Franklin businessman’s campaign billed them as.

The week of “State of the State” addresses just completed by Lee, now the governor, appears to reinforce the same impression of blanks needing to be filled in.

A case in point was the last of the three, billed as a “State of West Tennessee” address in a ballroom at the University of Memphis on Thursday evening, in the wake of the governor’s traditional “State of the State” address at the Capitol on Monday and a “State of East Tennessee” address in Knoxville on Tuesday.
[pullquote-3] Assuming the Knoxville speech followed the same outlines as the one in Memphis, it would have been more accurate to characterize the two outlier occasions as mere repetitions of the Monday night address in Knoxville and Memphis. In any case, the latter contained no new content and no expressly localized references at all, unless one counts Lee’s courtesy acknowledgements of dignitaries present before he settled into his remarks. (And even these acknowledgements, with few exceptions, were highly generalized within a request that “all elected officials” stand and be recognized.)

What followed the small talk and a brief statement of commiseration with area victims of flooding from the nonstop recent rains, was the same recollection of mountain-climbing in the Grand Tetons with daughter Jessica that had begun the speech to the gathered legislators and the state broadcasting networks on Monday.

The speech ended the same way as well, with a rumination on the moment that Lee and his daughter were inching their way along a mountain ledge high above an abyss below, with an intense awareness that looking back or looking down would be perilous in the extreme and potentially ruinous. As in Nashville, and presumably in Knoxville as well, this became a metaphorical exhortation for the state’s citizens and its government leaders as their exemplars to keep their attention focused, not on doubts or misgivings, but on the end goal of the climb upward — in Tennessee’s case, to lead the nation, as Lee would have it.
[pullquote-2] And that goal — or, rather, those goals were the same ones enumerated in the State of the State on Monday — worthy ones, for the most part, though the governor’s somewhat Trumpian pledge to be “unapologetic” regarding “American exceptionalism” doesn’t sound any less jingoistic or worrisome on second or third hearing.

The heart of the “State of West Tennessee” address was as word-for-word with the Nashville original as can be imagined — though a mite condensed here and there. The same points and the same categories were recapped — an educational system featuring parental “choice” and synchronization with the needs of “job creators;” a criminal justice system balancing “swift and severe” punishment for the violent and unredeemable with compassion and re-entry assistance for the non-violent; “high quality health care” (without need for Medicaid expansion, though that aspect remained unspoken); and a cost-effective government.

As before the GOP supermajority in the Capitol, the speech was punctuated with designated applause points — “designated” in the literal sense that a member of the governor’s entourage would get them started (or try to) by extra-loud clapping from the back of the hall in case, say, the Memphis attendees did not grasp on their own, the promised glory of there coming to pass a state rainy-day fund of $1.1 billion, “highest in the state’s history.”

All these deja-vu aspects were noted by the frustrated members of a local media queue as they awaited the governor’s appearance, post-address, in a side room of the ballroom floor. Surely, they reasoned, this was the time to pin him down.

And try they did. First question was a wonky one inquiring about the mechanics of Lee’s proposals for stepping up the role of charter schools. Could he elaborate? “We’re looking to create an authorization — a state authorization that would make it easier to open up good charter schools and easier to close those that are not performing,” said Lee, which was close to his exact words in the speech.

Earlier on the very day of his speech, the state House had passed the controversial “fetal heartbeat” bill. Would he sign it? “I have said and would continue to say that I would support legislation that lowers the number of abortions in the state.”

How, in the absence of Medicaid expansion, could the state ensure the solvency of its hospitals and the accessibility of medical care? “The best way to insure the quality of health care is to lower costs.” And a few more words to that effect.

One reporter was puzzled that a speech purporting to discuss the state of things in West Tennessee, had failed to make a single mention of the sprawling and (some thought scandalously) incomplete 174-acre industrial mega-site along the borders of Haywood and Fayette counties. Just under $200 million in state funds had been expended on the site so far, with an estimated $100 million yet to come. And no serious nibbles to date from potential “job creators” of the big-ticket variety or otherwise. What were the governor’s thoughts?

“I have a lot of thoughts about it. I have met with the folks in that region a couple of times now, and at our cabinet level we are focused on how we can best utilize the mega-site. I believe we ought to have it ready, we need to pursue a tenant for it, and that will be a focus and a priority of ours.”

Why has he taken a position against decriminalization of marijuana? “I think that would not be good for our state.”
[pullquote-1] What did he have to say about the state’s numerous potentially divisive racial issues? “There’s more that unites us than divides us.”

Those were the kernels of the governor’s responses. In fairness, he expanded on a few of them but not to any degree of real elaboration. Over and over, he would beg a question, or ignore it, or find a way to restate it. This has, rather famously, been the pattern as well of his interchanges with Capitol Hill reporters.

It was also the manner of his gubernatorial campaign. As was the case then, Lee has adopted a policy as governor of letting bromides, generalities, and talking points do his speaking for him. That was a helpful tactic during the campaign, when all he needed to do was to be the last man standing. It is arguably less so now, when he is the only one left to guide the state across the treacherous mountain ledge of its future.

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Letters To The Editor Opinion

What They Said (April 2, 2015) …

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Greg Cravens

About the Flyer’s cover story, ”Spring Brews” …

Local craft beer is one of those rare issues that Memphians, regardless of political affiliation, can come together on. Right now, a David-versus-Goliath fight is brewing in Washington between two competing beer bills. The big guys are pushing the Small Brew Act, which essentially benefits four brewers by redefining the “small brewer” as 6 million barrels. On the other side is H.R. 767, the Fair Brewers Excise and Economic Relief (Fair BEER) Act, which cuts the federal excise tax to zero for brewers who produce less than 7,143 barrels.

The Fair BEER Act will help small craft breweries survive and grow and will make it easier for future entrepreneurs to pursue their craft-beer dreams. If you love local beer, then it is time to support your local breweries and encourage Tennessee’s delegation to co-sponsor and support the Fair BEER Act.

Brandon Chase Goldsmith

A terrific piece. Thanks, gang. A whole bunch of new reasons to day drink.

Dave Clancy

About the Flyer’s editorial, “No to Vouchers” …

I hate to keep beating a dead horse here, but people really don’t seem to grasp the point of education in the state of Tennessee. No one is getting properly educated because it costs too much. But that money still has to be spent. Do you really want to give it to all those unionized school teachers so they can teach (destroy the minds of Tennessee youth with) their socialism and evolution theory and feminazi tolerance fascism?

So if you’re not going to actually educate anyone, but you still have to spend the education money, why not give it to your pastor and his private school, or to your friends and retired mayors who are trying to get a piece of that sweet, sweet charter school grift? The money has to be spent. So spend it in the right places, not the wrong places.

That’s the whole point of charter schools and school vouchers. The longer we continue to pretend the voucher proponents and the representatives of charter schools have a legitimate desire to educate the children of Tennessee and that we merely disagree on the best method to accomplish this goal, the quicker they will accomplish their goal of destroying public education altogether. Because that is their goal. Jeff

I don’t know that you will get much agreement that “no one is getting properly educated.” We are sure that a lot of our suburban children are getting educated pretty well. At least standardized testing says so, and they do seem to succeed when they move on to college.

Teachers are not allowed to unionize in Tennessee, either. They can have educational associations, but without the possibility of striking, these are pretty much advisory rather than adversarial relationships with their school boards.

The legislature is determined to fix the educational system in Tennessee. So far, they have tried the ASD which, let’s face it, has produced mixed and uneven results. Charter schools have been tried, with perhaps more success. We shall see as time passes whether the charter school experiment will pan out.

I think the voucher bills in the legislature are headed for passage, and we shall see what comes of it. Proposing an ulterior motive for all these efforts is just wrong. Ill conceived, foolish, wasteful, (add your adjective of choice here), maybe. But an intentional effort to enrich some at the expense of public education? Nah.

Arlington Pop

About Jackson Baker’s Politics column, “Bobby Jindal Talks Tough on Islam” …

After reading this, I have to wonder if Bobby Jindal has ever been to Louisiana.

Autoegocrat

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News News Feature

The Long Shadow

Honest conversations about education reform generate more questions than answers.

Are charter schools the answer to what ails poor children? What will it take to turn low-performing schools around? How can public schools best prepare disadvantaged students for college and careers?

To those queries, allow me to add another: What if we’re asking the wrong questions? Is it possible that what happens in classrooms doesn’t matter nearly as much as education reformers say it does?

What if it’s not public schools that need fixing? What if the problem is hyper-segregated neighborhoods and a job market riddled with race and gender favoritism? What if the problem isn’t poor children who struggle to learn but middle- and upper-class parents who hoard opportunity for their kids?

What if we viewed economic and educational inequality not from the stoop where the disadvantaged sit, but from the perch of those who inherit advantage that they rarely share?

If you weren’t pondering those things before, you will after reading The Long Shadow, which chronicles a groundbreaking study of 790 first graders in the Baltimore public schools.

Starting in 1982, Johns Hopkins University researchers Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olson followed these students’ education and career path for nearly 25 years. Some of the students were white, some were black, some of low socioeconomic standing (measured by household income, the parents’ education level and their occupation) and some of relatively higher standing.

The short version of the study’s findings: Children who are born into poor, disadvantaged families almost always end up where they started, especially when the poor children are black.

For the overwhelming majority of the disadvantaged students, “the promise of upward mobility through educational success has proven to be an empty one,” the book’s authors write.

If you understand how efficiently inequality was designed to reproduce itself, this comes as no surprise. But what surprised Alexander most was how much a family’s access to informal job networks mattered.

When the students in the study were asked as adults how they found their jobs, “Whites were more likely to say through family and friends,” Alexander said. “Blacks said [they found their jobs] on their own and being on your own isn’t a good place to be. The people who had the advantage back in the day still have the advantage today and that’s where race comes into play.”

The institutional, legal racism that once strangled African Americans’ job prospects is largely gone, thanks to equal opportunity employment laws. Still, the African-American unemployment rate is reliably twice that of white Americans. In codified racism’s place are informal networks of access and opportunity that produce virtually the same result.

Here’s one example: More and more companies rely on current employees to find new hires, which in itself isn’t a problem. But people tend to refer people who look like them, which is worrisome for groups historically shut out of the job market. According to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, job candidates who are referred are twice as likely to get an interview. Just over 70 percent of employees recommended job candidates of the same race and 63 percent recommended candidates of the same gender.

Hiring biases could help explain part of why the poverty rate in Memphis is so divergent: Less than 10 percent of white families are poor, compared to 33 percent of African Americans, 47 percent of Latinos, and nearly 15 percent of Asians. This is not a problem that can be fixed in public schools.

That brings me to another set of questions: Is it only education reform we need or should we add some workplace reform too?

Who will train hiring managers to recognize and correct for their biases?

Can we adapt the tools used to measure teacher effectiveness to track how well employers do at hiring people who don’t look like them?

Can we convince charitable foundations that sink millions into education reform to also invest in creating equitable workplaces?

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. When it comes to finding a job, we unquestioningly accept that as fact. But when it comes to education reform, we insist the reverse is true.

That leads me to my last question: When will we resolve that dissonance?

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Opinion Viewpoint

Living in the Educational Past

This May, 60 years after the Supreme Court ruled racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, with its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, a group called the Journey for Justice Alliance sent civil rights complaints to the Justice and Education departments. The group argued that too many failing public schools in black neighborhoods are being closed and replaced with charter schools.

You read that right.

The debate over racial inequality in education has been reduced to complaints that black children are victims of discrimination because they can’t walk to bad schools in their neighborhoods.

“Children are being uprooted, shuffled into schools that are no better than the ones they came from,” Judith Browne Dianis, a leader of one of the Justice Alliance’s organizations told The Washington Post.

The complaints meld perfectly with the views of teachers’ unions. The teachers oppose closing neighborhood schools that operate under union contracts and oppose opening charter schools, which are typically non-unionized.

This attack on charter schools comes a week after the House, in a rare bipartisan vote, approved a bill to put more federal dollars into expanding charter schools. The House Education and the Workforce Committee bill was written by its Republican chairman, John Kline of Minnesota, and supported by its ranking Democrat, George Miller of California.

Kline told reporters that Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, supports the bill and will urge Senate Democrats to pass it. In a Congress that’s politically paralyzed over efforts to update the Bush administration’s plan for improving public school performance — No Child Left Behind — the charter school bill is the first sign of a breakthrough.

In the last decade, cities from New Orleans to Chicago and Newark have closed record numbers of neighborhood schools and invested money in charter schools. The charters can be located anywhere and draw students from across the city.

The flight to charter schools conforms with the Brown ruling’s central premise: that students should be able to attend the best public schools without regard to income or race.

Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who won the Brown case and later became a Supreme Court justice, told me as I was writing his biography that the case was not really about having black and white children sitting next to each other. Its true purpose was to make sure that predominantly white and segregationist school officials would put maximum resources into giving every child, black or white, a chance to get a good education.

In filing complaints, liberal activists are putting more value on having a bad neighborhood school than getting a child into an excellent school. The charge that some charter schools are no better than the neighborhood schools being closed ignores the truth that some charter schools have produced better results. Also, parents have the choice to pull their kids out of charter schools that don’t help their kids.

It is also proven that getting black and Latino students out of low-income neighborhoods is good. This year, a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that minority children from schools with a racial mix were more likely than students remaining in racially isolated neighborhood schools to graduate, go to college, and get a degree.

Earlier this year, a study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA found neighborhood schools enforcing a “double segregation,” in which minority students remain isolated by race and income. That double burden left schools in poor neighborhoods with the disadvantage of educating students with high levels of poverty, more health problems, more street violence, and fewer positive role models.

In 2012 the same group reported “teachers of all races viewed schools with high percentages of students of color and low-income students as less likely to have family and community support,” which are critical to the success of any school.

Duncan recently described the nation’s school dropouts as disproportionately black, Latino, Native American, and poor.

Duncan also noted that in the fall of this year, the majority of American public school students will be non-white. And yet there are now minority parents and civil right groups being used as props by teachers’ unions to oppose school choice by calling efforts to close failing neighborhood schools the “new Jim Crow.”

Ending racial and economic isolation of students is a sign of progress that is in the best tradition of a nation still struggling to offer every child a quality education.

Juan Williams is a Fox News political analyst. Previously, he was the senior national correspondent for National Public Radio.

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Opinion

Why Suburbs Will Eventually Win on Schools

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Where there’s a will there’s a way, and there are more ways than ever when it comes to school choice in public education.

First, there is plenty of will, as evidenced by the smashingly successful suburban referendums earlier this year. The strongest force in the universe is a parent determined to get his or her child into a good public school. The current Shelby County school system is essentially what the Memphis optional schools were a few decades ago: the public school option of choice for middle-class families and some affluent families.

The courtroom setback was a gimme for the Shelby County Commission and federal judge Samuel H. Mays. The ‘burbs were sunk in the opening minutes of the trial in September when commission attorney Leo Bearman played the videotape of that legislative exchange about “Shelby County only.” Attorneys for the defendants promptly objected, but the damage was done. The suburban champions were caught on tape and on Rep. G. A. Hardaway’s clever hook. This was bad law, pure and simple. Mays let the defense team run on for a while about the rural county cover story, but the tape was devastating. Plain words mean what they say. His citation was the dictionary.

The pending segregation claim won’t be so easy. Common sense and mathematics could doom it. There aren’t enough white students in the public schools to integrate all of them. Ninety percent of Memphis public school students attend de-facto segregated schools. That won’t change with unification. Most county schools have diverse student bodies. The exception is Southwind High School, with 12 white students in a student body of 1,653, and its feeder schools. That has the ingredients for an interesting segregation claim, but the federal appeals court has already overruled a Memphis federal court ruling that would have racially balanced the county schools.

The merger of Memphis and Shelby County schools is by all accounts unique in size and scale. It goes against the grain. The trend is smaller, fragmented school systems. I was surprised at just how small some big-city school systems are relative to Memphis. Nashville/Davidson County has 74,680 students. Atlanta has 59,000. Detroit has 51,674. New Orleans had 65,000 pre-Katrina and is a melting pot of charter schools and traditional schools today. St. Louis, taken over by the state five years ago and the subject of a glowing report in The Wall Street Journal this week, has just over 24,000 students.

Nashville, with the blessing of Mayor Karl Dean and Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman, is pushing for charter school expansion to the middle class over the opposition of the local school board. The state-run Achievement School District for failing schools is slated to grow in Memphis. The Republican-dominated state legislature is sympathetic to charters as are private donors such as the Gates Foundation. Vouchers have support. Most important, alternative schools have support from teachers and parents who are the ultimate deciders.

Finally, the dysfunctional unified school board with its core of MCS charter surrender proponents is its own worst enemy. The board, which meets Thursday, is likely to close only a handful of schools instead of the 21 closings recommended by the Transition Planning Commission. (There are 45 Memphis schools and 10 Shelby County schools with under 65 percent utilization, according to the TPC.) This will throw the budget out of whack, condemn the half-empty schools to failure or mediocrity, reduced course offerings, and limited extracurricular activities.

My sympathies and my treasure are with Memphis, but my gut tells me suburbs will get their own autonomous school systems within a few years and that this week’s federal court ruling was a temporary setback. It is as inevitable as conference realignment in college sports.

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School Board Endorses Sales Tax Hike, National Search for Superintendent

Kriner Cash

  • Kriner Cash

The Unified Shelby County School Board has trouble voting on matters within its control, but did agree on Tuesday to tell citizens to vote for the referendum calling for a half-cent increase in the sales tax.

The vote was 14 to 6, with one abstention. It came near the end of a five-hour meeting during which the board also voted 15-6 to conduct a national search for a superintendent.

The majority of board members felt that the sales tax increase, while regressive, would raise $62 million, of which $31 million would go to schools.

“This benefits all children regardless of where they live,” said Martavius Jones.

The superintendent search vote came after an amendment changing the search from national to local (effectively handing the job to John Aitken, superintendent of the current Shelby County school system) failed.

“I’m sitting here wondering how anyone in their right mind would want to come to work for us 23 board members,” said David Reaves. He noted that the board took 90 minutes to approve a resolution on merger strategy and timeline after questioning whether it gave the administration too much power.

The timeline calls for a key meeting on November 15th about Transition Planning Commission recommendations. Additional meetings will be held in November, and members predicted they will last several hours and possibly draw thousands of spectators.

“This is a whole lot of work,” said MCS Superintendent Kriner Cash. “There’s never been a merger like this in the history of anything.”

Cash also said, “We are going to have to get down and dirty with this, and that dirt is coming real soon.”

The basic problem is that the board is divided between urban and suburban interests, the suburban representatives don’t trust the Shelby County Commission, several board members don’t trust the administration, and several more members from both camps don’t trust the Transition Planning Commission and the outside interests working behind the scene through foundations, nonprofits, the state Department of Education, and the group Stand For Children.

In a sign of divisions and votes to come, the auditorium was filled with members of AFSCME, the Memphis Education Association, and supporters of the CLUE program in MCS for “gifted” children. They carried signs saying “Keep CLUE,” “No Lottery For Optional Schools,” and “Stop Rich Folks making $ from public education and creating low-wage workers.” Among the TPC recommendations is a lottery for some spaces in optional schools. Slots now go on a first-come, first-served basis. CLUE, heavily supported by parents from Grahamwood Elementary School and a few of their children who also spoke, is often under the gun at budget time. The “rich folks” reference was apparently to operators of charter schools.