Charter schools in Memphis

Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter. — African proverb

The state of Tennessee’s Achievement School District announced this week that it will take over four Shelby County schools for the 2016-2017 school year: Caldwell-Guthrie Elementary, Hillcrest High, and Kirby and Raleigh-Egypt middle schools.

Those schools had scores in the bottom five percent statewide and have been matched with charter school operators that will rename the schools, hire new staff and a new principal, and reformat the way the schools are run. The ASD is the state agency charged with turning around the state’s lowest-performing schools. The way they “turn around” these schools is by giving them to charter school operators. Scholar Academies will take over operation of Caldwell-Guthrie and Raleigh-Egypt Middle, and Green Dot Public Schools will take over Hillcrest High and Kirby Middle.

Memphis has the majority of the state’s “low-performing” schools, which also means more of our tax dollars will be funneled into for-profit education corporations that operate under their own auspices and that are primarily concerned with, well, profit.

But here’s the thing: There will always be a “bottom five percent,” even if all schools are improving, which assures that charter operators will continue to take over five percent of our public schools every year, funneling more public tax dollars into private education companies. Mr. Ponzi would be proud of this scheme.

Parents, teachers, and administrators are almost always against charter takeovers of their neighborhood schools. Long-standing school names, mascots, sports traditions, and academic achievements are lost to history. But these folks don’t get to write their own stories any more. Charter school operators will get to decide who attends their neighborhood schools next year.

A Vanderbilt University study released earlier this month found that Shelby County Schools’ iZone program, which attempts to turn around low-performing schools that ASD doesn’t take over, is actually doing better than the ASD. That study looked at data from the first three years that the ASD and iZone have been in operation and found that iZone schools had made greater gains.

So tell me again why we’re privatizing our schools. Could it be that charter school lobbyists in Nashville have the ears (and wallets) of our legislators? Nah.

No one’s denying that many Shelby County schools need improvement. But the real problem was shown again this week by a U.S. Census study that revealed that a third of Memphis children live in poverty. It was amplified by a report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that showed that 78 percent of Tennessee’s black students graduated from high school in 2013, but only four percent tested as college-ready in all four ACT-tested subjects.

It all goes back to fixing poverty. We need to raise the minimum wage to a level that allows people to support themselves with a 40-hour-a-week job. We need to fix the Medicaid gap in Tennessee that makes affordable healthcare available to the unemployed, but keeps low-income workers ineligible. We need to focus on education programs that we control, such as iZone.

And we need to quit allowing our future lions to be educated by the hunters.

The educational reforms proposed and overseen by the Haslam administration statewide have been both well-intentioned and internally flawed. There is no question that too many public schools in Tennessee qualified for

the adjective “failing” in 2011 when Governor Bill Haslam, then newly inaugurated, appointed new state education officials dedicated to pursuing new policies.

Those policies were heavily reliant on standardized testing of student performance, teacher effectiveness, and institutional outcomes, and have met with significant resistance from several sectors of the population that, to say the least, had not previously operated in tandem.

Classroom teachers saw their influence over the educational process reduced by the General Assembly’s simultaneous abolition of collective bargaining, and many of them objected also to the intensified testing regimens mandated by the state, complaining, among other things, that training students for the tests took up time and energy that could be more usefully applied to exploratory teaching methods, that the tests, by concentrating on relatively rote outcomes in specific areas (English and math, normally) shortcut the aims of public education, and that the tests did not measure real learning.

The standardization of the tests, especially under the rubric of Common Core, also earned the distrust of parts of the state’s population who imagined that sinister national forces might be attempting to brainwash young Tennesseans. The two kinds of resistance coalesced into a group of unlikely political bedfellows that forced the state to rethink its commitment to Common Core and to develop a more Tennessee-specific standard.

Another phase of Tennessee’s new educational policy — the creation of a state-run Achievement School District empowered to take over under-performing schools from the jurisdiction of local school districts — has also met with resistance. This has particularly been the case here in Memphis, which had 69 local schools on the ASD’s “priority” list of institutions that tested in the lower five percent of effectiveness. Of those 69 schools, 31 are among the 33 that have been taken over by ASD, and ASD officials announced last week that another four — Caldwell-Guthrie Elementary, Kirby and Raleigh-Egypt middle schools and Hillcrest High — are due for takeover in the academic year 2015-16 and conversion to charter schools.

State policy permits other options, including leaving the schools under the jurisdiction of Shelby County Schools’ iZone (Innovation Zone) program. At a press conference last week, state Representative Antonio Parkinson (D-Memphis) brandished a recent Vanderbilt University study showing that iZone schools have achieved better results than have schools administered as charters or more directly by ASD. He promised to introduce legislation in the forthcoming session of the General Assembly to limit or abolish ASD’s prerogatives.

Such legislation will probably have little chance of passing, but Parkinson’s threat should not be regarded as idle. Sentiment against ASD’s procedures continues to build among proponents of locally controlled education, who note that SCS and iZone, unlike ASD, are responsive to an elected school board. Given the results of the Vanderbilt study, it becomes harder and harder to justify authoritarian state policies that override the long-established democratic basis of public education.