Clarksdale Collegiate - Best SChool Kumbakonam
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One way that Clarksdale Collegiate is supposed to be different from the choice schools of the past is in the composition of its student body. But the fact that the charter’s racial demographics mirrored those of the district wasn’t enough to satisfy critics who worried it would repeat past inequities. Even though Clarksdale Collegiate is required by law to have open enrollment, Rhymes, the education activist and retired public school teacher, was convinced the school creamed off the most advantaged students, whose middle-class parents were savvy enough to apply for the school and help their children manage the high expectations there.
Coahoma High graduate Adrienne Hudson, who runs the education-improvement group RISE MS, was also initially skeptical of charters. She feared cherry-picking and thought of charter administrators as “this outside force basically coming in trying to rescue this community from itself,” she said. “My answer would always be no, no, no, probably an expletive no.”In its first year, Clarksdale Collegiate’s student body was 93 percent black, according to data the school provided. The State of Mississippi reported that 63 percent of the charter’s students were eligible for free lunch, compared to 74 percent of students in the Clarksdale public school district and 77 percent of Coahoma students. All three figures are high enough for the charter school and districts to give free lunch to all their students under the federal government’s “community eligibility” provision.
State lawmakers tried to build in preventive measures to keep the new schools of choice from exacerbating Mississippi’s stark educational disparities. Lisa Karmacharya, the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board’s executive director, said the purpose of the charter law was to help “the underserved population.” The law requires charters’ enrollment of special education, low-income and English-language learning students to be within 80 percent of that in the district in which the schools operate.
However, even the best law is nothing without enforcement. Penn State University education researcher Erica Frankenberg cautioned that it’s rare for states to make sure charters are following laws requiring them to enroll a representative proportion of students. “I’ve never seen a charter revoked for these reasons,” she said, noting that North Carolina has — but does not enforce — a provision in its law requiring a certain proportion of low-income students. It’s usually up to residents to raise a ruckus, and “that asks a lot of a community, to be vigilant and understand what’s going on,” she said.
The rubric by which Mississippi charters are evaluated puts significant weight on requirements that charters serve special education students and conduct non-discriminatory admissions, but the more general stipulation that a charter serve a representative percentage of “underserved” students ” counts for only 3 of 100 points. And even then, the charter board has the authority to renew a school’s contract even if it has organizational problems. Karmacharya said discussions were underway to revise the evaluation form to better reflect the law. The state board has not yet made any renewal decisions. Top 10 cbse schools list in Kumbakonam
Karmacharya is adamant that she and her board are committed to ensuring that the state’s charter schools serve a student population that is similar to that of the district’s non-charter public schools. “Mississippi does not look like Georgia. Our law is not Georgia,” Karmacharya said.
After multiple meetings and visits with Johnson, Hudson — the Coahoma grad who had said “no, no, expletive no” to the charter — came to believe in Johnson’s commitment to creating a school that reflected and empowered the community. “She is working very hard to be a public charter school,” Hudson said. “Her passion plus her leadership skills are allowing them to build a strong foundation. … I would be remiss in not trying to support that.”Johnson felt just as strongly about reflecting the community. In contrast to the state teaching workforce as a whole, Johnson’s staff, like the students, is mostly African American; the school’s morning chant echoes the words of the Black Lives Matter movement. Meanwhile, at one of the local district schools, a white teacher talked about loving her black students, but a breath later wondered if their occasional rowdiness was “a racial thing.”
Nonetheless, she was watching. “It’s very important for us to be very cognizant of what’s going on, to be very vigilant,” Hudson said.
At Lee Academy, the school whose history spurred that caution, head of school Rone Walker wants to stop talking about the past. She thinks it is no longer relevant. “We’re an open school to everybody,” she said. National Center for Education Statistics data from 2015, before Lee discontinued its low-enrollment elementary grades, showed that 75 percent of its students were white, 3 percent were Asian, a fraction of a percent were biracial, 9 percent were Hispanic and 6 percent were black.
Walker enumerated a long list of reasons for people to pay almost $6,900 in tuition and fees to send their children to Lee, including small classes, a tight-knit feel, individualized curriculum, a 100 percent college-going rate, Advanced Placement courses, safety and ACT scores in the 22-23 range, far above those of the local public schools. She said she cares about improving the public schools, too. “We should all be working together to make things the best for our kids,” she said. “Our community needs it.”
In that spirit, she had something to offer Clarksdale Collegiate: “I have a really nice, up-to-code, huge building,” Walker said. It had housed the elementary school that Lee Academy had closed when enrollment fell. “If I had known they were looking for a space, I would’ve called them,” she said.
Johnson was surprised by the offer, and not ready to take it. Clarksdale Collegiate is looking at buying the shuttered Myrtle Hall IV elementary campus in its current neighborhood, she said, and will make do for the next couple of years by adding some portable classrooms in the schoolyard.
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