A charter school faces the ugly history of school choice in the Deep South - Best School Kumbakonam
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In rural parts of the South, school choice has long been linked to private segregation academies opened for white families fleeing desegregation and busing. Mississippi’s first rural charter school challenges that legacy, but threatens the struggling traditional public schools most black children still attend
LARKSDALE, Miss. — It was a rainy February morning, but Clarksdale Collegiate Principal Amanda Johnson was fired up. “You know how Ms. Johnson feels about Friday,” she told the students as she paced around the cafeteria in an “I am black history” shirt. “If you didn’t get it all done … Friday’s the day you turn it around.”
The former church youth-group multipurpose room had become a shrine to academic achievement, the stained-glass window overshadowed by bold purple banners listing the students’ future college graduation years, the school’s values and the slogan “#RUReady.” The students were just in kindergarten, first and second grade, but Johnson was projecting far into the future.
“Raise your hand if you know your stretch goal,” Johnson said — referring to students’ personal better-than-best target score on their upcoming standardized tests. “I need you to know what you’re aiming at.”
The 140 voices shrilled the morning chant, spelling out the school’s core rules: Work hard, be nice, stay safe, demonstrate urgency. “Because I matter. Because you matter. I am a scholar. And a future college graduate!”Ricky Taylor, a skinny first grader with a gap between his front teeth, raised his hand way up until it practically lifted him off the bench. “My stretch goal in math is 191,” he said.
Johnson hustled over and gave Ricky a dollar. Then they walked silently to their homerooms past a volunteer who was busy counting the crushed, damp bills students had brought from home for their college accounts.
Johnson opened the doors of Mississippi’s first rural charter school in this temporary space a year ago. Pulling students from Coahoma County and its county seat of Clarksdale, the school serves an area of the Mississippi Delta known for its rich blues heritage, low incomes and abysmal educational outcomes. For Johnson, the school was a bid to cultivate the greatness she saw in these local kids, including her own daughters. They were so bright, so eager, and yet if the current statistics held, 25 percent would not graduate from high school.
But Clarksdale Collegiate opened in the face of protest. The Clarksdale school board and Advocates for Public Education, a group of local parents and educators formed to oppose the charter, joined the Southern Poverty Law Center in a lawsuit aiming to overturn the state’s entire charter law.
In a county with fewer than 27,000 residents, more than 1,300 people signed a petition opposing the school. They wanted a better education for all students, not just a few, Coahoma County lawmaker Johnny Newson told the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board. His comments at the 2017 meeting were ineffective: The board had already approved the charter’s application before they opened up public comment, according to MCSA’s minutes.
Nationally, controversy over opening a charter school is nothing new. But in Clarksdale, it had a particularly painful resonance. In 1970, when the courts ordered schools to desegregate and controversies over busing erupted across the country, white parents in Coahoma County fled the public system for private segregation academies, calling it “school choice.”
White abandonment of the public system impoverished the public schools that served Clarksdale’s African American majority. Fifty years later, the term “school choice” still evokes injustice to the elderly African American educators and NAACP civil rights activists who led the drive to stop Clarksdale Collegiate. They saw the charter school as a new way to create a free but essentially private education for the privileged.
Elsewhere in the Deep South, charters have lived up, or rather down, to that fear. In Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas, dozens of taxpayer-funded public charters enroll far more white students than any of the traditional public schools in their areas. They don’t charge tuition, but they’ve become exclusive enclaves through other means — for example, by not providing a free or subsidized lunch or bus transportation. Southwest Georgia S.T.E.M. Charter School opened in 2016 on the former campus of the shuttered Randolph Southern School, a private school that had not enrolled a single black student in 2012, the last year for which enrollment numbers are available. Top 10 cbse schools list in Kumbakonam
During its first year, the charter school’s student body was 70 percent white; enrollment in the local public schools was 4 percent white.
Despite the chorus of opposition, parents came to Clarksdale Collegiate. Ricky’s foster parents, Sakenna and Keithan Dear, worked in public school systems, but they signed Ricky up anyway. They hoped this school would support the child they were trying to adopt, who had come to them at age 3 from the children’s hospital in Memphis barely speaking, and left kindergarten at a local public school unable to read basic sight words.
Like the Dears, most families who came to the charter were black, and they believed Johnson when she said her school would be different. It would, first and last, be better than the schools the area already had. Johnson was opening outside the traditional public system not to create some kind of segregated fiefdom but because that’s where she knew how to run a great school. But she faced an uphill battle against public sentiment strong enough to silence even supporters. She would have to convince them by following through on her promises, helping kids like Ricky learn to read.Ricky had his own hopes for his new school. He wanted his teachers to pay attention to him. He wanted them to build a playground. He wanted to learn how to fly an airplane, only not too far off the ground, because heights were scary.
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