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Schools Chart A New Journey

Editorial
Commercial Appeal
November 23, 2011

Can teaching techniques that have been developed for students who choose to attend a private or charter school be transferred to students who have no choice in the matter?

Tennesseans will eventually find out.

Two Memphis nonprofit organizations that are currently running private and charter schools are the vanguard for the experiment.

Cornerstone Prep, which operates a private school at Christ United Methodist Church, and Power Center Academy, a charter school in Hickory Hill, will find out in January which schools among those in Tennessee’s new Achievement School District they will be in charge of converting to charter schools.

The conversions will be part of a bold strategy that will soon put perhaps as many as 18 city schools under the direct authority of the ASD, either as charter conversions or state-run schools, by the time Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools consolidate in 2013.

That initiative, along with aggressive moves by charter school organizers themselves, could have 20 to 30 percent of local schoolchildren enrolled in charter schools by 2020, up from 6.5 percent today.

For the new city-county unified school district, the net result will be a smaller school population and less money to spend.

At the converted schools and the start-ups, in some cases educators with little teaching experience will be in charge of schools with especially challenging student bodies.

If they fail, the price will be high, indeed.

Memphis must develop a more sophisticated workforce if the city wants to compete for the high-tech jobs that drive successful urban economies.

And the community can ill afford to maintain the current infrastructure for a school district with a student body that shrinks and revenue that diminishes with every new charter school admission.

The issue is of understandable concern to current and future members of the school board. They’ll eventually have to make some radical adjustments if schools in the Achievement School District are brought back under the traditional public school umbrella.

It’s a bit scary, but, still, reassuring to know that state and local officials are not standing still as the demands on public education increase.

Few worthwhile goals can be reached without some degree of risk.