Jane Roberts reports that last night's first working meeting of the unified Shelby County Board of Education highlighted suburban Shelby County Schools members' skepticism over the issue of charter schools. David Reaves of Bartlett focused on a comment from Memphis City Schools Supt. Kriner Cash over the possibility of a charter school taking over properties MCS administration is proposing to abandon -- Graceland Elementary, Georgia Avenue Elementary and Lakeview Elementary -- because of declining enrollment, disappointing performance and deferred maintenance. Reaves expressed his belief that the system should be running schools so well that a charter school would not be a better option.
While MCS has approved many taxpayer-funded charter schools and been inundated with applications for many more, SCS has strongly resisted. Last year, it denied an application, but the state overruled and made SCS accept. The Consortium of Law and Business opened this year, and the 23-member board -- now comprised of MCS, SCS and seven appointed countywide members -- will be next month given recommendations by the MCS and SCS administrations about many more applications. David Pickler, who was chairman of SCS from 1999 until last month, has predicted "exponentially" more applications and on Tuesday asked that all board members receive a Stanford University study from 1999 showing that only 17 percent of all charter schools outperform traditional public schools and that "more than double that are performing less well."
Click this link here for that study, which involved 15 states and Washington, D.C., and says in its executive summary:
While MCS has approved many taxpayer-funded charter schools and been inundated with applications for many more, SCS has strongly resisted. Last year, it denied an application, but the state overruled and made SCS accept. The Consortium of Law and Business opened this year, and the 23-member board -- now comprised of MCS, SCS and seven appointed countywide members -- will be next month given recommendations by the MCS and SCS administrations about many more applications. David Pickler, who was chairman of SCS from 1999 until last month, has predicted "exponentially" more applications and on Tuesday asked that all board members receive a Stanford University study from 1999 showing that only 17 percent of all charter schools outperform traditional public schools and that "more than double that are performing less well."
Click this link here for that study, which involved 15 states and Washington, D.C., and says in its executive summary:
The group portrait shows wide variation in performance. The study reveals that a decent fraction of charter schools, 17 percent, provide superior education opportunities for their students. Nearly half of the charter schools nationwide have results that are no different from the local public school options and over a third, 37 percent, deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their student would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools.Though MCS has approved many more charters, Pickler will find allies on the MCS board who are also skeptical about charter schools. Dr. Jeff Warren suggested asking the state to give Shelby a "bye" and stop approving charters until schools consolidation is completed. Among those applying for charter schools are former Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton and the nationally-renowned KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) Academy.
These findings underlie the parallel findings of significant state‐by‐state differences in charter school performance and in the national aggregate performance of charter schools. The policy challenge is how to deal constructively with varying levels of performance today and into the future.
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