Tag: Memphis City Schools

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News The Fly-By

The Cheat Sheet

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

British star Kate Beckinsale, perhaps best known for her sexy roles in several vampire movies, is coming to Memphis in a few days to film a journalism thriller about an outed CIA agent. We hear that, among other locations, the movie will use The Commercial Appeal newsroom as a set. Yes, we are now officially jealous of the CA.

It is October, but you’d never know it by going outdoors, where plus-90-degree temperatures in our area are breaking records that have stood in place for more than 50 years. At this rate, the most popular Halloween costume will be the Human Torch.

Memphis City Schools is forced to throw away an undisclosed amount of frozen cafeteria food after they fail to store it properly. When the district was building its Central Nutrition Center a few years ago, it said the central kitchen would make the food safer, more palatable, and cheaper. Guess not in this case.

A gunman at a Germantown convenience store hands the clerk a 32-ounce cup and orders her to fill it with coins. Where did he think he was — Tunica?

So it’s Mayor Herenton for four more years. In his victory speech, among other comments, he said, “There are some mean people in Memphis. They some haters. I mean they some haters in Memphis.” This man holds a Ph.D. — in education, no less — so why does he talk like this?

In one week, two different Olive Branch police dogs have nabbed two different robbery suspects — with their teeth. Talk about taking a bite out of crime.

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News News Feature

Counting Graduates and Dropouts

One of the toughest math problems in Memphis City Schools is counting the students. Under pressure from school board members to make good on its policy of “Every Child. Every Day. College Bound,” school officials presented a report on graduates and dropouts at the board meeting Monday. Among the highlights:

There were 5,442 graduates in 2007 from the 115,321-student system.

The graduation rate has improved from 60 percent to 67 percent in the past four years. The graduation rate is the number of students who get a regular diploma in four years plus a summer, divided by the number of entering freshmen.

A significant but undetermined number of students don’t report for class until after Labor Day. Board member Martavius Jones thinks the number is close to 50 percent, but Bill White, director of student accounting, says it is probably closer to 5-10 percent, although he concedes that MCS has not been able to get an accurate count on the first few days of school. He dismissed a report showing only 32,867 students came to the first day of school last year as highly inaccurate.

A total of 1,633 graduates in 2007 received college scholarships. Board member Wanda Halbert said that number should be higher.

About 94 percent of MCS students say they expect to go to college. Board member Kenneth Whalum Jr. has questioned whether sending every child to college is realistic, given the graduation and dropout rates.

There were 3,570 students in grades 6-12 who dropped out, including 635 12th-graders. White said one of the most frustrating things for high school principals is that middle-schoolers who are supposed to enroll but never show up for a single day are counted as dropouts from their school “even though they may have never known that kid.”

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News The Fly-By

Barred at the Gate

Latricia Wilson should have graduated from Westside High School in 2002. Though she completed all of her coursework, Wilson did not receive her high school diploma because she failed the state’s Algebra I Gateway exam.

Last month, Wilson filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the State Board of Education to discontinue the use of the Gateway as a graduation requirement. Wilson was diagnosed with a learning disability and would like to see alternative testing that takes learning disabilities into consideration.

“We filed on behalf of the students of Tennessee who are similarly situated,” says Javier Bailey, Wilson’s attorney. “I believe it’s unconstitutional to have a standardized test of this nature without recognizing the fact that some students have disabilities.”

Since the 2001-2002 school year, passing standardized end-of-course Gateway tests has been a state requirement for graduating high school. Students must pass the algebra Gateway exam, as well as exams in English and biology.

In 1999, Wilson was diagnosed with a math disability and issued an Individual Education Plan (IEP), a list of accommodations required for students with special education needs. However, Wilson contends that the Gateway exam did not take her special accommodations into account.

“I was taking a math resource class, but the rest of my classes were normal,” Wilson says. “On the Gateway, I was tested at a higher level in math while I was taking classes at a lower level.”

Rachel Woods, a spokesperson for the state Department of Education, says special education needs are taken into consideration with Gateway exams.

“I think the lawsuit is less about the Gateway and more about Memphis City Schools (MCS) not providing accommodations that are in an IEP for particular students,” Woods says.

Shawn Pachucki, a spokesperson for MCS, says the school system has no comment.

Because she failed the exam, Wilson received a special education diploma, a certificate that is not accepted for entrance at most colleges and technical schools.

Wilson had planned on attending cosmetology school to become a television makeup artist. But three weeks into her training at the New Wave Hair Academy, Wilson was told the school’s corporate office would not accept her special education diploma. Other schools, like Southwest Tennessee Community College and ITT Tech, would not accept her either.

In the 2004-2005 school year, 576 MCS students received special education diplomas. That’s roughly 10 percent of the students who finished their high school coursework. “The Gateway exams create an even playing field across the state for all students,” Woods says. “It ensures that the Tennessee diploma means something. If you take away that requirement, some students may pass courses just because they have an easy teacher who wants to get them out the door.”

But for Wilson, the test has created a major hurdle.

“This is something that’s holding students back from moving forward,” Wilson says. “It’s holding me back from getting a job, and I can’t get into college. Yet I need college to make a decent living.”

The court is currently awaiting a response from the state.

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Opinion

A “Momentous” Decision

The most powerful force in the universe is not gravity, earthquakes, or tsunamis. It is American parents bent on getting their children into the school of their choice.

This force — abetted in Greater Memphis by cars and roads, separate city and county school systems, private schools, and the proximity of Mississippi schools — is the reason why the latest federal court desegregation order on Shelby County schools is doomed to fail.

To paraphrase a famous quotation, U.S. district judge Bernice Donald has made her ruling. Now let’s see her make it stick.

At least Donald acknowledged the elephant in the living room: The new Southwind High School between Germantown and Collierville will be, if not this year then next year or the year after that, a virtually all-black high school. As her ruling says, it is expected to have an 88 percent or higher black enrollment on the day it opens this month.

Overall, the Shelby County school system is 34 percent black. There is some nuance and a lot of historical context in Donald’s 62-page order, but the gist of it is that racially identifiable schools are a no-no in the system, and individual schools should more closely mirror the system demographics, plus or minus 15 percent, in both their student body and their faculty.

Courts can rule all they want about public schools, and for a year or two they can dictate the demographics of schools. But parents and politicians are free agents. The people’s court is going to challenge and eventually overrule the federal court. This is especially true in Memphis when a suburban school starts out as a county school and becomes a city school via annexation. In 1980, Shelby County built Kirby High School. It was majority white. Memphis took it over in 2000. Last year, it was 1 percent white. In 2000, Memphis and Shelby County jointly opened Cordova High School, which is now a city school. Its white enrollment declined to 41 percent in 2006-’07, from 60 percent in 2004-’05.

Southwind High School is in the Memphis reserve area. Memphis School Board members approved the site and will eventually take it over. Last year, the Memphis City Council and the Memphis and Shelby County Office of Planning and Development did everything but pull the trigger on the so-called southeast annexation. It failed mainly because council members Tom Marshall and Dedrick Brittenum recused themselves.

Marshall was the architect of the annexation plan. He is still on the council until the end of this year. He is also chairman. He told the Flyer this week he expects the council to take up annexation after the October election. If and when it does, he says this time he will vote for it.

If Memphis annexes Southwind High and selective (i.e., not-gated) nearby neighborhoods — even if it delays the effective date for a few years — then the county school system has to recalculate its racial math. Hundreds of black students and a sprinkling of white students will shift from the county system to the city system.

History suggests that the harder Donald pushes to eliminate racially identifiable schools, the more “churn” she will produce from the people’s court. In 1971, another Memphis federal judge ordered forced busing to desegregate schools. Within three years, nearly 30,000 white students left the system and Memphis had the largest private-school population in the country. Today, more than 95 percent of the 115,000 MCS students attend racially identifiable schools because there are fewer than 9,000 whites in the system.

In her ruling, Donald said the county school district “does not yet merit a passing grade,” and she called the school board’s compliance track record “decidedly mixed.”

In some ways, her historical analysis is generous. She could have pointed out (but did not) that the county board, with no district seats, was all-white until a couple of years ago and that its former superintendent allowed a single real estate developer, Jackie Welch, to pick most of the school sites. In other respects, however, her ruling is naive. It ignores the reality of school choice broadly defined to include magnet schools, separate city and county school systems, private schools, and DeSoto County schools. In the long run, there is nothing that Donald or any federal judge can do to eliminate racially identifiable schools.

The ruling overlooks something else. The Shelby County schools have grown from black flight as well as white flight. In 1987, the system was only 14 percent black compared to 34 percent today. The neighborhoods in the southeast annexation area are primarily middle class. Residents include former Shelby County mayor Jim Rout.

Southwind High School is mentioned only once in the ruling, so it’s impossible to say how much it weighed on Donald’s decision. Appointed by Bill Clinton in 1996, she is the lone black judge on the federal bench in Memphis. Like her judicial colleagues, Donald, a native of DeSoto County and graduate of the University of Memphis, does not grant interviews about pending matters and lets her rulings speak for themselves. What can be said, however, is that Southwind High is a far cry from the dilapidated schools with no air-conditioning and third-hand textbooks of the 1960s and ’70s — a period the ruling describes in great detail, for whatever reason.

Most parents will probably skip the history, arithmetic, and the 62 pages and get to the bottom line: What does it mean for my house, my neighborhood, or my kid?

Donald’s order calls for a special master — a “neutral expert” in desegregation issues — to be picked within 30 days. The county school board is supposed to achieve full compliance, as determined by Donald and the special master, by 2012. Apparently, Southwind High School will be allowed to open this month as a “racially identifiable”county school that doesn’t meet the county guidelines. After this year, it’s anyone’s guess.

With positive leadership and a focus on excellence instead of race, Southwind High has a chance to be a very good school. Instead, sadly, it has already been called a dumping ground by one neighborhood leader.

Donald writes about “the momentous, irreversible nature of this court’s pending decision.” But it could be momentous in a different way than she thinks.

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News The Fly-By

Q&A: Martavius Jones,

When Memphis City Schools (MCS) superintendent Carol Johnson announced she’d be leaving for Boston in August, students asked her to stay and school officials quickly recognized that hiring both her successor and a qualified replacement to serve in the interim would be a challenge. Now, following the July 5th application deadline for an interim candidate and a July 9th search committee meeting, MCS must make an important decision. The Flyer recently spoke with Martavius Jones, MCS board commissioner and head of the search committee, about the interim search process and position.

— By Rachel Stinson

Flyer: How long do you think it will take to hire an interim superintendent?

Jones: When we had the original June 29th [application] deadline, I was hopeful that we could have the process done by the 16th. In light of the process being reopened until July 5th, I’m hoping we can make the decision by July 30th.

What qualities are you looking for?

The board feels that we’re headed in the right direction with MCS. We’re not looking for someone to come in and change the way things are. We want to continue in the same direction.

How will the interim’s salary compare to Johnson’s?

The interim’s salary range will start at $150,000 with the upper end at $185,000. The upper end is about $20,000 less than Dr. Johnson’s salary.

Do you think it would be beneficial to hire someone who is already familiar with MCS?

I think it would be a benefit. I also think it would be a benefit to hire someone with a management or business background. There are merits to both.

I’d like the board to select the top three traditional candidates and the top three [management or business] candidates.

How long will it take to hire a new superintendent?

We think that a comprehensive search will last six months to a year, but Boston’s search for a superintendent lasted 18 months. Finding a qualified superintendent for a large urban school district is a challenge. We have our work cut out for us.

Do you believe this is a competitive position?

Finding someone qualified to do the job is difficult. It would be a lot easier if we had 25 qualified candidates for a large urban school district knocking on our door.

Why is this an important decision, even though interim superintendent is only a temporary position?

The loss of Dr. Johnson is a definite setback. The interim will decide if that setback is permanent or not.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Don’t Complain. Pitch In!

As a commissioner, I am saddened when I hear blanket, broad, and baseless attacks from people concerning the Memphis City Schools (MCS). I was especially disappointed to read the comments of former city councilman John Vergos (Viewpoint, “Time for a School Takeover,” June 21st issue), since I would expect a former public officeholder to help educate our community on the challenges public officials face when trying to run any large urban government entity.

I certainly would not expect a former officeholder to misspeak so terribly. While I dare not point out each instance, I would be remiss if I did not address some of his blunders.

First, while Mr. Vergos attempts to compare the budgets of the city and the school system, he overlooks the fact that MCS has 16,500 employees (half of whom are teachers), versus the city’s 6,700. Since its work force is more than twice the size of the city’s, isn’t it logical that MCS would have the larger budget?

Further, Vergos opines that MCS is not fiscally responsible and attempts to illustrate as much by pointing to two projects that amounted to less than 3 percent of the budget (using his numbers). In addition to being just plain wrong (the nutritional center he mentions has only cost the district $2.8 million to date and is a revenue-generating venture), Mr. Vergos’ arguments are completely illogical.

He fails to acknowledge that people are about 85 percent of the MCS budget — that’s the principals, teachers, other instructional staff, and administration.

Perhaps Mr. Vergos has been out of the loop since 2003 when he was last on the City Council, but over that time MCS cut $55 million from its operating budget. Thus, we do not have much flexibility in our budget, and to suggest we would be more fiscally sound by forgoing projects that amount to less than 3 percent of the budget — including one that is actually generating revenue — is absurd.

Finally, Vergos states that while the MCS budget has consistently increased, the performance of the district has rapidly diminished. A look at the performance data of the system proves otherwise. This data is neither buried nor manufactured, as Vergos implies. Be assured, we do not have our heads in the sand. We know we still have a lot of work to do.

However, we can no longer sit quietly by while some people in this community continue to berate, degrade, and insult MCS with no real foundation or basis for their sentiments. Contrary to what Vergos says, MCS is not broken beyond repair. We have great administrators, principals, teachers, students, and parents who work hard every day to make our schools successful.

We have National Blue Ribbon schools and students who are National Merit Scholarship semifinalists; we have outnumbered all other systems in the state with the number of National Board certified teachers; we have increased the graduation rate over the last three years; and several of our schools have made vast improvements in student achievement. We have plenty to be proud of.

If people in this community would spend as much time constructively assisting us, we could do much more. Communities that have great schools do so because the entire community decided that the schools would be great. The people and businesses in the communities with successful schools believe in the system, they support the system — they don’t spend all of their time with destructive comments that do more harm than good.

You would think a former elected leader of this community would be outraged that the governor would threaten to take over MCS. This would not just be an indictment of the school board, but of us as a community for allowing it to happen. If nothing else, that possibility alone should make people decide that enough is enough and that it is time for us to take 100 percent responsibility for our school system, whether one has students in the system or not.

MCS has the structure and many ways for people to get involved — through the Our Children Our Future tutoring program, through the Connect mentoring program, through Adopt-a-School partnerships, and through simply showing up at a school and letting the principal know you want to do your part. (Note: You will need a background check.) Those simple actions will make a huge difference.

In the words of Forrest Gump: “That’s all I got to say about that!”
Tomeka Hart, an attorney and president and CEO of the Memphis Urban League, is a member of the Memphis school board. This essay is adapted from her online response to John Vergos’ Viewpoint column.

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News The Fly-By

Sign of the Times

In 2004, 15-year-old Westside High School student Tarus Williams wanted to be a member of G-Unit, a small student-led gang. But in order to gain entry, Williams had to fight another member in the school bathroom.

Williams never joined the gang. During the fight, his heart ruptured after he was thrown into a bathroom stall.

Such fights ­— along with an increase in citywide gang violence — have led to a tougher anti-gang policy for Memphis City Schools (MCS). Starting this fall, students caught wearing gang colors, throwing gang signs, or participating in any type of gang activity will face expulsion.

“Our greatest concern should be that recruiting of new gang members is occurring in elementary and middle school,” Mike Heidingsfield, director of the Memphis/Shelby County Crime Commission, said in an interview last year.

“From the media, we get a sense that [gang members] are young men in their early 20s, but it begins long before that,” Heidingsfield said. “Schools are the single biggest center for gang recruitment.”

The Shelby County District Attorney’s Office estimates that there are roughly 5,000 teenage gang members and “wannabe” gang members in Shelby County.

“We do have a growing gang problem in the Memphis community, and thus in our schools,” said Memphis City Schools board vice president Tomeka Hart. “We want the message to be clear that gang affiliation is prohibited.”

In addition to hand signals and colors, teachers also will be looking for any student passing out gang literature, wearing jewelry that represents gang affiliation, participating in gang fights, or writing gang graffiti. They’ll even be looking for gang affiliation in how students groom themselves.

“Some styles of braids mean kids are in a gang, or maybe it’s a certain way they wear their belt,” Hart said.

However, students won’t be expelled immediately because of their fashion choices. Rather, students caught displaying certain colors and styles will be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

“If we see a child wearing their belt in that certain way, we’re not going to immediately expel that child,” Hart said. “We’ll bring the child in and figure out what’s going on.”

If middle or high school students are displaying gang affiliation, they will face an expulsion of 11 to 180 days. The longer, 180-day punishment probably will be reserved for students who bring weapons to school or commit more serious offenses.

Before expelled students can return to school, they must go through mandatory gang-prevention counseling. Students facing longer-term expulsions may be eligible for placement in an alternative school.

But some critics of the plan worry that expulsion won’t be a deterrent to some gang members.

“I’m going to be frank,” Hart said. “If we have a kid who doesn’t care and there’s nothing we can do, then he or she is probably more of a distraction than we need. If a child knows an offense can get him or her kicked out of school and it doesn’t matter to them, what else can we do for that child?”

Elementary school students will face a three- to five-day suspension if caught demonstrating gang affiliation or interest.

“If a third-grader has an older sibling in a gang and they bring a scarf to show off, we don’t want them suspended from school,” says Hart. “But we will know that child is a potential target for [future gang recruitment]. That’s where the intervention comes in.”

The district’s new gang-prevention coordinator, a staff position created last spring, will oversee enforcement of the gang policy. Director of Student Engagement Ron Pope is currently serving in the role on an interim basis. Pope was unavailable for comment.

“We need our kids to understand we’re not playing around,” Hart said. “If students are walking up and down the halls throwing gang signs, we don’t know who is for real and who is [just messing around]. Last year, that might have gotten a lesser response. But this year, it could get you expelled from school.”

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News

Carol Johnson Faces Challenges in Boston

CREDIT: John Bohn/Boston Globe

The Boston Globe published an analysis Sunday of the problems that will face recently departed Memphis Public Schools superintendent Carol Johnson, Boston’s next school superintendent.

From the Globe: Johnson … will confront far different obstacles here than the ones she’ll leave behind in Memphis — including a powerful teachers union that could block her reforms, standardized tests that are tougher to pass, and thousands more students who speak English as a second language.

Johnson, who is expected to start in late August, won praise for raising test scores in Memphis schools, a district more than twice the size of Boston’s 57,000-student system. But it is unclear how her achievements will help her tackle Boston’s paradox: It is one of the best urban school systems in the country, yet home to some of the worst schools in the state.

Read it all here.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Time for a School Takeover

People can talk about crime being the number-one issue. It’s not. Education is. If we can educate our kids, crime goes down, but the present educational system has failed us all. It’s time for a radical change.

The departure of Memphis’ latest school superintendent, Carol Johnson, provides an opportunity to revolutionize Memphis City Schools (MCS). In its present state, it’s nothing but a system that is failing to educate, is fiscally irresponsible, and is a major drag on the general welfare of this community. And the only solution we ever hear from our educators is: Give us more money.

But just consider: The city school budget is already almost twice the budget of the city of Memphis. The operating budget for the 675,000 residents of Memphis is $539 million. This encompasses fire and police protection, roads, garbage collection, parks, sewers, city courts, and much more. By contrast, the operating budget for the Memphis public school system — for 119,000 students seven hours a day, nine months a year — stands at $918 million. The two budgets were roughly equal in the 1990s, but in recent years, the school budget has escalated dramatically — with rapidly diminishing results. Increased funding is not the answer; better management is.

More than a decade ago, we saw Superintendent Gerry House come and go with rave early reviews, only to realize later that her tenure was, to say the least, unsuccessful. Johnson has come and is now going with the same tepid results. Yes, she can extrapolate from the reams of data at her disposal and point to some slight test-score improvement here and some minor success there, but that’s more show than substance. We forget that running the school system is a billion-dollar-a-year business for which a doctorate of education offers little training.

The results of overlooking business credentials can be seen in school projects such as the Mitchell High School auditorium, which escalated from a $1 million auditorium renovation to a $5 million performing-arts center, with no one accountable to explain how it happened. There is a new $20 million child nutritional center that no one knows how to run, whose need is questionable, and which is operating at 20 percent capacity with no positive results for students. Tens of millions have been spent for consulting contracts with no demonstrable purpose other than to provide cover for the lack of business acumen on the part of the superintendent and the school board. I could go on.

It is now the time for all to come to the realization that the Memphis City Schools system is broken and not fixable by means of the present school board/superintendent structure. If MCS were a company, it would be a prime candidate for Chapter 11 reorganization.

As it happens, there is a means at hand to accomplish the reorganization of a school system. Before we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to employ “hiring consultants” to bring in another superintendent with more of the same credentials, it may be time for Governor Phil Bredesen to exert his authority under the No Child Left Behind Act and take over the school system, as he has recently threatened to do.

He needs to do what Mayor Herenton wanted to do, and that’s to fire the school board, which has been riddled with incompetence, conflicts, turf protection, and emotional outbursts, and bring in a new head with a new team to shake this system to its very core, rebuilding it from the ground up — a new school “czar,” to use an overworked term.

This new head could operate outside of the political arena and make those hard decisions that need to be made unfettered by school boards and prior contractual constraints.

We can delude ourselves into thinking that success is just around the corner, but it’s not. Another search team looking for another superintendent with the same old resume for the same old system won’t work. We’ve been down that road before.

It’s time for a radical change, and I believe Governor Bredesen has the guts and ability — and the legal and political wherewithal — to change the system.

Now is the time to act. Memphis restaurateur John Vergos is a former city councilman.

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Opinion

Counting the Class of ’07

Happy graduates in caps and gowns, proud parents with the latest cameras, dire warnings about misbehavior, and the most far-flung list of venues in recent memory mark high school graduation ceremonies for the Class of 2007.

Memphis and Shelby County high school seniors will march across stages from the DeSoto Civic Center to The Orpheum to the Mid-South Coliseum this month.

Uncertainty about the availability of the Coliseum earlier this year caused some schools to lock in dates at other sites. Germantown High School and Collierville High School are both slated for the DeSoto Civic Center. The Orpheum, the Rose Theater at the University of Memphis, Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church, and World Overcomers Church are also holding graduation ceremonies.

The Coliseum will host graduations for four county schools and 11 city schools between May 19th and May 27th. The facility may or may not be closed and demolished as part of the redevelopment of the Mid-South Fairgrounds, but it is back in play for at least one more year as a graduation site. The second most popular site is downtown at the Cannon Center for the Performing Arts, with nine graduations scheduled. Schools pick their own sites and set their own policies for how many guests each graduate may invite, said Memphis City Schools (MCS) board member Tomeka Hart, who will attend ceremonies for five schools in her district.

One of her school board colleagues, Kenneth Whalum Jr., also plans to attend several graduations, including one at the Coliseum for Overton High School, where his son is a graduating senior. But Whalum, himself a graduate of Melrose High, is not pleased with what he sees as a reluctance on the part of the central office to provide numbers on graduates and dropouts for each school.

“The statistics we get are useless without comparisons,” said Whalum, who is pastor of Olivet Baptist Church.

At Monday’s school board meeting, Whalum introduced a resolution directing the superintendent to produce a graduation report by the start of the 2007-2008 school year. It would include the total number of seniors enrolled in MCS in each high school at the start of the 2006-2007 school year and the number who actually graduate as well as school-by-school scholarship and college acceptance information.

Those numbers are currently not readily available and have not been widely reported when this newspaper has printed them. In previous years, the number of graduates has varied from nearly 400 at the largest schools to less than 80 at the smallest. A low number of graduates is usually an indication that a school is losing enrollment to demographic movements or dropouts. Such schools can face pressure to close — the most politically sensitive decision a superintendent or board member can make. Likewise, when scholarships offered to MCS grads are reported as a lump sum, it obscures the fact that a single standout student can receive multiple offers worth hundreds of thousands of dollars while the majority of his or her classmates get little or nothing.

As far as Whalum is concerned, a school-by-school graduation report would show that the MCS motto “Every Child. Every Day. College Bound.” is unrealistic. “It’s sticking our heads in the sand, it’s a blatant lie, and it’s unfair,” he said. “We do not owe them a college education. We owe them a high school education that prepares them to make their own decisions.”

Whalum welcomed Governor Phil Bredesen’s warning last week that funding increases must be tied to better results next year or the state could take over the system.

“I say bring it on,” Whalum said. “Remove the board if it’s not doing a good job. But you know and I know that the state doesn’t have the human resources to run the schools.”

Whalum believes smaller class sizes are the best remedy, even if all failing schools must be converted to charter schools. But he doubts that will happen, because “I am seen as this preacher who is new and doesn’t know how things work.”