Tag: Memphis City Schools

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No Time for Politics

Revisiting history does not mean that we have the right to rewrite it.

I mention this in light of a recent meeting of the Memphis City Council in which members of my administration and I were criticized about the city’s debt even as our finance director presented a debt-restructuring plan. 

Rather than focusing on the merits of the plan, the discussion descended into a debate on how we somehow misled the council with respect to our 2010 debt plan and our overall finances. In this meeting, one council member went so far as to misrepresent my comments on this matter by selectively editing an audio version of my past remarks.

Given this rather selective amnesia of certain council members and the concern of many citizens in how we got here financially, I am compelled to set the record straight.

There is no way to truly understand our current financial circumstances without speaking to the Memphis City Council’s 2008 vote to cut funding to Memphis City Schools (MCS) and the successful lawsuit against the city to restore this funding. The following points are matters of record:

In July 2008, over the objection of Mayor W. W. Herenton, the Memphis City Council voted to take $65 million per year from the Memphis City Schools. Two months after my election in October 2009, my request to the council to restore the school funding tax rate was refused.         

In August 2010, the Tennessee State Supreme Court affirmed the $57 million lower court ruling in favor of MCS. 

Based on the decisions of the courts in favor of Memphis City Schools, the city restored its annual school funding in 2010. What remained was the amount taken from schools in the 2008-2009 school year that needed to be paid back. The council’s options were rather straightforward: Restore the tax rate that had been dedicated for schools, cut other operating expenses to free up funds for the schools, or some combination of these two items. 

In this context, it is important to underscore that while the mayor has to propose a budget, it is the council that has authority to raise taxes and to set the budget.  

On the matter of raising taxes and making budget cuts to pay Memphis City Schools, the council was hopelessly deadlocked. But, something had to be done.

Against this backdrop, we presented the 2010 Debt Restructuring Plan as a compromise solution for council members to avoid the immediate need to raise taxes and make drastic budget cuts. It was a commonly used “scoop and toss” arrangement that allowed the city to push payments on this financial obligation out into the future.

To be clear, the 2010 Debt Restructuring Plan was essentially done to allow us to comply with the court order to pay the schools. The 2015 Debt Restructuring Plan is largely being proposed for the same lingering issue.  

Those who see the debt plan and those who submitted this plan as the source of our financial challenges are confusing bad-tasting medicine and the administering physician with the issue being treated. This is not meant to place the funding of children’s education in a bad light, but only to highlight the confusion of some on this issue.

The current debt-restructure plan was developed with a team of nationally recognized financial advisors and later vetted and approved by the state comptroller. As a local newspaper article recently outlined, what we are doing is standard for many other major cities faced with varying financial challenges. With the annual pension obligation increasing, the looming debt services bubble, and interest rates that will soon rise, we can no longer afford inaction or delay.

What we need now is action to approve the proposed debt-restructuring plan. Financial realities and past missteps should remind us that we don’t have time for politics on this matter.

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Opinion

The Curious Case of Clarence Mumford

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Is Clarence Mumford a criminal mastermind and Public Enemy Number One in education? Or is he this year’s version of Logan Young, the late Memphis football booster who was hauled into federal court and convicted in 2005 for paying a football coach to influence a recruiting prospect?

The United States Department of Justice and federal prosecutors in Memphis seem to think the former. Mumford was in court Friday to change his plea to guilty to charges that he organized a scheme to get stand-ins to take certification tests for teachers in Memphis, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Mumford made money on the deals, probably quite a lot of it. He charged his customers $1,000 to $6,000 for multiple tests, according to a presentation of the case Friday. He started arranging bogus tests in 1995, and wasn’t sniffed out until 2010 when a phony test taker wore the same pink cap to two sessions in one day and caught the attention of a monitor.

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Editorial Opinion

On Second Thought …

CREDIT: Danziger

It seems like forever, but really it’s only been slightly more than two years since the clouds first gathered over public education in Memphis and Shelby County, and the storms they presaged have not yet abated. Among our hopes for the coming year, one of the foremost is that the chaos that has rained down upon us since the beginnings of the school-merger crisis will be resolved — judicially, legislatively, howsoever.

To recap just how we got here from there: The elections of 2010 proved disruptive in more than one way. First, the August countywide voting of that year produced an unexpected blanket win for a Republican slate of candidates in the face of a demographic base that seemed ready-made for Democrats. That circumstance encouraged suspicions of electoral hanky-panky among Democratic-leaning voters in general and the African Americans who now constituted a majority in Shelby County in particular. And, though no credible evidence has emerged to demonstrate that anything untoward had occurred, misgivings (as well as legal challenges to the outcome) have not yet been stilled. If anything, a nonstop series of glitches that marred the election process, not only in 2010 but even more glaringly in 2012, have magnified a discord which existed at all levels — political, social, racial, and economic.

The election results of November 2010 fostered further division. A referendum on political consolidation of Memphis and Shelby County was on the ballot to rekindle passions and animosities, and it went down in flames in outer Shelby County while eking out a bare majority within the city limits of Memphis. Bad omen. And, fueled by Tea Party resentments, the Republican sweep of legislative races statewide in that election was the proximate cause of the school crisis.

Popular legend has it that David Pickler, then the long-standing president of the Shelby County Schools board, was first mover when he opined out loud that the General Assembly would now be likely to approve special-school-district status for SCS. Pickler himself notes that Martavius Jones, his opposite number on the Memphis City Schools board, had already vented the idea of surrendering the MCS charter to force city/county school merger. The chicken-egg question hardly matters: The charter surrender occurred, and the merger process got under way, as did legislative efforts to abort it or deflect it on behalf of the Shelby County suburbs.

Although Judge Hardy Mays has not ruled on all aspects of the ensuing litigation — specifically, on whether the Norris-Todd Act of 2011 allows suburban municipal school districts to begin forming after August 2013 in Shelby County — he has already found unconstitutional a bill by state senator Mark Norris that would have made for an early kick-start of such Shelby-only schools.      

The result is that there will apparently be, in both name and in fact, a Unified School District for at least the 2013-14 academic year. Our hope is that residents of the suburbs will give the new system a chance to work in what amounts to a court-ordained laboratory period. This is one of those times when a little constructive second-guessing would seem to be in order.

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Opinion

Report Cards Are Out for Memphis, Shelby County Schools

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Here are some first-glance observations about the Tennessee Department of Education report cards for Memphis and Shelby County school systems released Thursday.

Memphis is losing students. The system has 101,696 students this year, down from 110,753 in 2007. Memphis is losing white students — down from 10,345 in 2007 to 7,928 (7 percent) this year.

Memphis has more teachers and administrators today although it has fewer students than it did five years ago. There are 464 administrators and 6,755 teachers today compared to 359 administrators and 6,438 teachers in 2007.

Shelby County has also lost students. The system has 45,050 today compared to 45,897 in 2007. The county system is also losing white students. It has 23,916 today and had 28,290 (60 percent) in 2007.

Shelby County has more teachers and administrators too. There are 169 administrators and 2,742 teachers, compared to 153 administrators and 2,588 teachers in 2007.

There is a continuing “flight to quality” to high-performing city optional schools like Richland, John P. Freeman, Grahamwood Elementary, and White Station High School (22.9 ACT composite score). In the county, the beneficiaries include Houston High School (24.1 ACT) and Collierville High School (23.9 ACT). The state average ACT composite is 19.6.

As I have written many times before, I believe the report cards contribute to the data-driven schools culture, the flight to quality, and the fail-your-way-to-success model of the Achievement School District, which means the state takes over the worst performers and brings in hard-chargers from outside.

There’s plenty of data for one and all in the report cards. Let the comments begin.

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Opinion

Sex Education, Abortion, Puberty, and Saturday Mornings

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When the issue is sex education in school, there are at least three groups: abstinence education, birth control education on the assumption that teen sex happens, and a third group that prefers to deal with the subject at home.

All three came to mind Saturday when I drove to the Memphis Board of Education for a parents and staff meeting on sex ed or family life curriculum as it is also called. The target audience was parents, and the letter to them on the handout table began thus:

“Your child is about to begin, or may have already begun, a period of rapid growth called puberty.”

It continued, “By teaching children about the wonderful ways they are maturing, adults can promote a positive attitude toward sexuality that helps children grown into healthy, responsible adults.”

Puberty was not much on my mind on this beautiful October morning, possibly because my children are, thank goodness, well past it. But I expected to see at least a modestly energetic turnout of parents at a meeting to explain the new “opt in” as opposed to the old “opt out” policy for students entering those wonderful years of hair, breasts, zits, muscles, Tampax, and dirty jokes among other things. Instead, there was no crowd at all, unless you count the handful of presenters and MCS staff.

There was however, a turnout of about 40-50 people outside the Planned Parenthood office on Poplar Avenue near East Parkway that I drove past on my way to the meeting. They were mostly students from St. Benedict High School carrying anti-abortion signs. Their sponsor, Sharon Masterson, said they were members of Teens For Life and “October is the month when we focus on right-to-life issues.”

At the meeting, Planned Parenthood representative Barry Chase told me opt-in, opt-out “is my personal big issue.” The Society for Sex Education, he said, “says the opt-in policy presents a barrier that opt-out does not.”

“We have a real problem with parental participation,” Chase said. “Why require more of it when you don’t have enough now?”

Witness, he said, the tiny turnout.

Cassandra Turner, speaking for MCS on the issue, said the non-turnout was not surprising considering that it was a beautiful Saturday morning with lots of other things going on.

“We want the parents involved,” she said. “But parents feel more comfortable in their school.”

She said opt-in as opposed to opt-out is “only a big deal to people who don’t have faith in parents.”

The so-called Michigan Model Family Life Curriculum has been adopted by MCS as part of its curriculum in grades 4-9. It will, according to the handout, “promote appreciation and respect for the amazing changes experienced by self and others” as well as “equip children with the skills they need to postpone sexual intercourse.”

I was educated in public schools in Michigan long before AIDS and oral sex and Roe v. Wade entered the national vocabulary. As I remember the Michigan model in that era, in sixth-grade the boys were herded into one classroom and the girls another for separate sessions with gym coaches that proved to be disappointing on the sex front as far as pictures, stories, and specific information. I can’t speak for the girls, of course.

As a parent, I wound up in the libertarian, we-will-take-care-of-this-at-home camp. I recall my MCS-educated children taking a Health class they considered an immense bore some time around ninth grade. A woman promoting abstinence came to a PTA meeting and told her personal story of unwanted pregnancy and later enlightenment, which was later shared with students, possibly on an opt-in basis but I can’t say for sure.

Faced with writing an essay on, say, condoms as homework and sharing it with my parents, I would have felt strange as either a student or a parent. But that is the new world in which we live. I am well aware of the personal and social costs of unwanted pregnancy and am a strong proponent of family planning, etc. But it’s Saturday. Now I am going into the other room to watch football.

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Opinion

Cash and Herenton Bury the Hatchet

CREDIT: John Branston

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Eight times they met for breakfast in a restaurant in the Westin Hotel downtown, Kriner Cash the superintendent with an uncertain future in a unified school system and Willie Herenton the former superintendent who wanted to hold the job again before Cash got it instead.

The meetings began in February and continued for several weeks. Seven months after they buried the hatchet, Cash and Herenton held a joint press conference Wednesday to announce the former mayor’s participation in a new charter school for juvenile offenders.

It isn’t clear exactly who reached out to whom and how. Cash recalled that he sought out Herenton to fill a niche in the school system well suited to his experience and personal biography as a home-grown Memphian raised by a single mother. Herenton said he reached out to Cash as well as Shelby County Schools Superintendent John Aitken and others to help him get back in the schools game. Whatever, the two men met and apparently the talk was unfiltered.

“Straight talk, real straight talk,” said Herenton, adding that if the meetings had been taped “you would have heard some dynamic interaction.”

“We would tease each other,” said Cash. “I asked him ‘why do you want to take our money?’ ” — a reference to the state funding that follows students who go to charter schools. They ate pancakes, and all of the meetings were one-on-one.

At the news conference, Herenton said the final form of the new school isn’t clear yet but “my personal hand, my professional hand, will be all over this program.”

The announcement and photo op came a day after Cash gave what seemed to be a farewell speech at Memphis Botanic Gardens to 134 Memphis teachers honored by their peers as the best at their individual schools. He said his role now is to ease the transition to the unified school system and the 14 new charter schools that have been approved. He is undergoing a personal transition as well as a widower looking for another job. He expects to be gone by the end of the year and is a finalist for a superintendent job in Florida.

Herenton, on the other hand, has been on the outside looking in since leaving the mayor’s office. His attempt to be named superintendent failed when the school board instead opted to do a national search and ultimately selected Cash, of whom Herenton has occasionally been openly critical. Herenton’s image was tarnished again when he was trounced by Steve Cohen in his bid for Congress. After that he turned his attention to what he has said many times was his first love, education.

I met with Herenton at the Flyer’s office (a change, to be sure) in January when his charter school application was being slow walked in Nashville. He wasn’t ready to go public with his frustration, but he was considering other means of getting a piece of the charter deal if he didn’t make any progress soon. Within weeks, he and Cash started meeting.

And a year from now, Willie Herenton could be a player again in Memphis education while Kriner Cash is somewhere else.

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Opinion

Kriner Cash Shines Along with 134 Top Teachers

Kriner Cash

  • Kriner Cash

Memphis City School Superintendent Kriner Cash was at the top of his game Tuesday night at a classy ceremony at Memphis Botanic Gardens giving public recognition to 134 teachers chosen as the best at their respective schools by their peers.

Each “Prestige Honoree” got a $100 check and a glamour shot that was part of a 15-minute slide show, and several of them are featured on signs at bus stops and on city buses and on billboards that say “I Teach. I am.” Cash called them “our irreplaceables” at a time when teachers are leading the news and frequently under fire in Memphis and Shelby County as well Chicago, where the teachers’ union is on strike.

Speaking without notes, Cash then took a personal tack.

“I’ve only fallen in love with two women in my life,” he said. One was his wife, who died earlier this year. He recalled how she urged him to come home earlier and spend more time with her and their family, and he promised he would but devoted himself to work instead.

“I’ll be there, I’ll be there,” he would say. “I never thought she was going to pass when she passed. I thought I had some years.”

He said he is “almost at complete peace” now that the school system merger is less than year away and “my role now is to transition.” He praised “my great beautiful staff” and in a voice choking with emotion said the second love of his life was “that grand lady which is Memphis City Schools.”

“I’m honored to be able to have served with you for just a few years,” he said.

He stopped short of setting a resignation date but later told me he expects to be gone by the end of the calendar year. He said he is still a finalist for a superintendent job in Florida and has fully informed the school board.

It was one of the best impromptu speeches I have seen and heard in years and he seemed to have the crowd in the palm of his hand, almost like Bill Clinton at the Democratic Convention last week, but in his own way. It was clear why Cash has been a finalist for at least three big superintendent jobs in the last four years. And a reminder that a public man or woman has many sides that not everyone sees. And, finally, a night to make Memphis proud of its schools and teachers.

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Opinion

A School Desegregation Solution?

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With 3,474 students, the Fayette County public school system isn’t much larger than some high schools in Shelby County, but it might have some indicators for its bigger neighbor when it comes to desegregation.

On Tuesday, the U.S. District Court in Memphis approved a settlement of a 47-year-old case that U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton called “a significant landmark in this desegregation case.” The NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund and the Fayette County Board of Education also signed off on it.

What relevance might it have for Memphis and Shelby County, which have a combined enrollment of about 150,000 students? Stanton said in a prepared statement that the settlement will ensure that students “are educated in a manner consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution,” which is also at issue in the upcoming case of the Unified Shelby County Schools and the municipal school systems that voters approved earlier this month. The trial is scheduled to begin in November.

School resegregation was also an issue in the Shelby County Schools in a federal court order by then U.S. District Judge Bernice Donald in 2007. Her proposed remedy involving a special master and a realignment of school boundaries and attendance zones to create schools with a racial mix within 15 percent of the black and white percentages in the county system was overturned on appeal.

The ten Fayette County schools are each more integrated than the Memphis City Schools, which are over 90 percent minority and 87 percent black. The highest white percentage for a Fayette County school is 65 percent. The highest black percentage is 80 percent. Southwind High School, a Shelby County school, was nearly all black the day it opened because of the way the boundaries were drawn. The Shelby County school system at the time was about 37 percent black. Donald is now a federal appeals court judge.

The consent order for Fayette County requires the district to implement a “controlled choice program” by the start of the 2014-2015 school year. Here’s how:

BUILD NEW SCHOOLS: And close two existing elementary schools.

CREATE A CONTROLLED CHOICE REGION: And use a random selection system to assign students to schools based on their ranked preferences, provided that racial diversity is achieved in each school. The term “student racial diversity” means within 15 percentage points of the racial balance in the district as a whole.

ENCOURAGE MAJORITY TO MINORITY TRANSFERS: Black kids can transfer to white schools and vice versa.

FEDERAL MAGNET SCHOOLS ASSISTANCE PROGRAM: If the number of applicants exceeds the number of spaces, there is a random lottery selection process.

FREE TRANSPORTATION TO NON-ZONE STUDENTS: So long as this does not “negatively effect” the students’ willingness to apply to the magnet school.

EMPLOYEE RACIAL DIVERSITY WITHIN 20 PERCENTAGE POINTS.

NEW SCHOOLS CANNOT CAUSE ANY EXISTING SCHOOLS TO FAIL TO ACHIEVE RACIAL DIVERSITY STANDARDS.

The largest private schools in Fayette County are Rossville Christian Academy and Fayette Academy in Somerville. What the consent order cannot control, of course, is the impact of those schools and smaller private schools in Fayette County as well as future changes in the school system(s) of Shelby County.

“They are making more demands of Fayette County than they ever made of Shelby County,” said Louise Mercuro, former deputy director of the Memphis and Shelby County Office of Planning and Development. “I don’t get that at all. God knows how many students will be going from Shelby County schools to Fayette County schools.”

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Opinion

12 Hot Buttons in the Schools Merger Report

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The Transition Planning Commission released a first draft of its transition plan for the merger of the Memphis and Shelby County schools in 2013. Members were discussing the 198-page report Thursday and scheduled a press conference for Friday morning. Copies of the plan were distributed to the media Thursday morning at the start of what is likely to be an all-day meeting.

Here are a dozen likely hot buttons when the report gets to the public and unfied county school board, which must implement the merger one way or another.

1. “The likelihood of of municipal districts.” This language first appears on page 190. Arguably, it should be in the first paragraph of the executive summary. As the report says, “Enrollment projections will be particularly challenging given school closures, the growth of ASD (Achievement School District) and charter schools, and the potential for municipal school districts.” That and every other projection for a unfied system that could have some 150,000 students if the muni’s don’t start their own systems, or something closer to 100,000 students if they do.

2. “In 2011, 10 percent of students met the ACT’s college readiness benchmark, and 25% scored 21 or better.” The ultimate goal of the plan for a merged system is that every student graduates ready for success in college and career. Ambitious, to put it mildly.

3. “A district wide school transfer policy on a space available basis. The district will continue to support the Optional Programs that exist in the current MCS, as well as unique offerings such as the International Baccalaureate programs in the both school districts.” Holding high-achieving students has been an issue since busing in the 1970s. The optional program accounts for about six percent of MCS enrollment. The schools-within-schools model contrasts with the entrance-by-test-score model for the top public schools in Nashville and other cities.

4. “The TPC recommends that teacher compensation be redesigned to better attract and retain effective teachers.” In other words, no automatic raises for seniority or picking up an advanced degree in summer school.

5. “The analysis indicated an opportunity to close 21 schools for a savings of about $21 million a year.” The schools are mainly in “Western Memphis” but they are not identified. That will be up to the unified school board. For perspective, there are 89 schools with under 80 percent utilization, and 70 of them are in Memphis.The plan recommends doing the deed before school starts in 2013. Never has MCS/SCS closed so many schools at once.

6. “Overall Shelby County public school enrollment is projected to decline 3 percent from FY 2012 to FY2016, resulting in approximately 147,400.” This estimate could be wildly optimistic depending on what happens on August 2nd.

7. “Independent of the merger, the district is projected to face a deficit of $73 million in FY 2014 . . . The merger increased the deficit by $72 million, with the TPC recommending an additional $15 million in investments, leaving the merged system with a starting gap of $160 million.” To close it, the plan recommends $93 million in “net efficiencies” by cuts, closings, outsourcing, and combining functions and “vigorously pursue” additional sources of funds, notably the city of Memphis repayment of $55 million withheld in 2009 and currently in legal dispute.

8. “In recent years, MCS has had large surpluses: 296 teachers in 2010-11 and 621 teachers in 2011-12.” Under the MEA agreement, MCS teachers are currently surplussed in seniority order without consideration of effectiveness. The plan recommends that the district “no longer guarantee jobs to surplussed teachers” and fire them if they are rated “significantly below expectations.” Improving the teacher talent pool is on of the main goals of the plan.

9. “Migrate to the Shelby County Schools model of outsourced custodial services.” Estimated savings: $22-$25 million.

10. Security officers. Currently, MCS spends $13.5 million per year and SCS spends $1 million. The plan recommends continuing to use district-funded security officers and local law enforcement, but raises the prospect of somehow replacing or eliminating 211 crossing guards, which, of course, is one of the primary contact points for public school parents.

11. Both districts have a surplus in their school nutrition departments. In MCS, it has ranged from 6 to 9 percent over the last three years. In other words, the free lunch program, which includes 85 percent of MCS students and 38 percent of SCS students, is a profit center.

12. “The transition office will first need a superintendent named for the 2013-14 school year to manage and lead the merger effort.” At one point in the report, it is suggested that this take place by October 1, 2012, but in another part of the report the superintendent selection is recommended before the fall of 2013. Whatever — “The most important milestone in the implementation of the merger is the first activity listed, the naming of the 2013-14 superintendent.” As of mid-Thursday afternoon, the TPC members were having a vigorous debate about this. More to come in later Flyer reports and blogs.

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Opinion

Can Schools Fail their Way to Success?

ASD Supt. Chris Barbic and Gov. Bill Haslam

  • ASD Supt. Chris Barbic and Gov. Bill Haslam

Tennessee’s Achievement School District is in the news today. In Nashville, there was a press conference Monday to announce that seven charter school organizations plan to open nine new schools in the ASD in Memphis and Nashville in 2013, the year of the big change.

Is the Achievement School District like the NBA Lottery? Can you fail your way to success?

In the NBA, if a team is mediocre it winds up with a low-to-middling draft pick, but if it is really bad, it is rewarded by making the lottery and has a chance (but not a certainty) for the number-one pick that can turn the team around in a year or two.

In schools, it seems that if a public school is mediocre it stays that way and remains part of the parent system (let’s say Memphis City Schools). But if it is deemed a failure year after year by state standards, then it becomes part of the charterized Achievement School District and gets an infusion of special attention and new leadership.

And some of the individual teachers and principals at the failing school can also get new life in what purports to be a “worst to first (top 25 percent)” program.

I’ve read a bunch of articles and comments on this, but would welcome your thoughts. As I wrote on this blog last week, I have doubts about “miracle schools” being able to replicate their success on a system-wide scale. And the goal of “100 percent go to college” is a notable achievement, but it might be better if some of those graduates went to trade school, work, or the military.

If you have a connection to either a “failing” school or the ASD and don’t mind identifying yourself, that could be helpful.