Push for charter takeover of failing schools comes to South Carolina

Here’s one idea to turn around perennially failing public schools in South Carolina: Lump the lowest-performing schools into a newly formed statewide district, loosen up the rules to allow for experimentation, and entrust the schools’ management to private companies and nonprofit organizations.

The idea is picking up steam in Palmetto State education circles. Well-connected insiders from Charleston philanthropists to state education leaders have started pondering the creation of just such a “turnaround district.”

Meanwhile, others are wary of private interests taking charge in public schools, particularly since this model has garnered mixed results in other states from significant gains in post-Katrina New Orleans schools to continued failure under Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority.

No state legislator has introduced a bill to create a turnaround district in South Carolina, although some have traveled to Tennessee with representatives of StudentsFirst South Carolina, a lobbying organization, to see a similar plan in action at inner-city Memphis schools as part of that state’s Achievement School District.

StudentsFirst South Carolina Director Bradford Swann said lawmakers could create a turnaround district as part of their answer to the state Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in Abbeville County School District v. South Carolina, which found the state had violated its own constitution by failing to provide “minimally adequate” education in impoverished rural counties. The court ordered the Legislature to present it with a plan to remedy the situation, kicking off a debate over policy solutions and ruffling the feathers of some Republican leaders who saw it as an overstepping of judicial authority.

“I will talk to anybody and everybody on this,” Swann said. “In large part, a lot of people want to see if the state goes this route out of the Abbeville discussion.”

Locals will get some face time Wednesday morning with key players in the turnaround school district movement during a panel at the Meeting for Charleston’s Children, a forum organized by local education advocates.

Ted Legasey, director at-large of Lowcountry philanthropist Anita Zucker’s Tricounty Cradle to Career Collaborative, said he isn’t advocating specifically for the Tennessee or Louisiana model, but he wanted to look at plans that have worked in other states. He helped organize the event through his own group, the Movement for Effective Schools for All Charleston’s Children.

Legasey highlighted some grim statistics in Lowcountry schools. Chief among them: 2015 scores on the ACT Aspire test showed that only 38 percent of third-graders in the tri-county area were reading at or above grade level — a crucial predictor of high school graduation rates and career success, according to some education researchers.

Whatever route the state takes in fixing its failing schools, from withered neighborhood schools in Charleston County to chronically underperforming districts along the I-95 corridor, Legasey said change is desperately needed.

“We can’t just lean on our school system and expect a school district to fix this all by themselves,” Legasey said. “The system of education today was never designed to educate all children at the same level. ... It has to be fundamentally engineered to attain that kind of an outcome. A public school district can’t reinvent itself all by itself.”

Still, some education advocates in South Carolina are not thrilled at the prospect of private organizations managing a public good.

“I have some real concerns about abdicating responsibility to these outside groups,” said Millicent Brown, a longtime educator and co-coordinator of the Charleston-based Quality Education Project. “The way we handle our schools has always been reflective of how we handle poor and minority communities. So this idea of marginalizing school districts speaks to a bigger issue for me, and that is how quickly the problems get relegated to somehow being somebody else’s fault or somebody else’s to correct.”

The Tennessee model

StudentsFirst, which reported $16 million in revenue to the IRS in 2013, has begun to throw its financial weight around in South Carolina. The group has contributed $25,000 to South Carolina political candidates and parties since coming to the state in 2013, including $2,000 for S.C. Education Superintendent Molly Spearman’s 2014 campaign.

The group’s national parent organization was created by former District of Columbia Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and has pushed in other states to link teacher pay to student test performance, repeal teacher tenure and eliminate classroom size caps.

While cautioning that no two states’ turnaround districts should be identical, advocates such as Swann have pointed to Tennessee’s Achievement School District as a success story. Created by the state legislature in 2011 and funded in part by a federal Race to the Top grant that ran out in 2015, the Achievement School District has absorbed dozens of schools identified as performing in the bottom 5 percent statewide, promising to “catapult” them into the top 25 percent.

The Achievement School District sought community input as it chose charter operators for each of its schools, ranging from local nonprofit organizations to nationwide charter management groups like the Knowledge Is Power Program.

“In the last four years, Memphis has taken 60 of the worst 66 schools in the city and has a turnaround plan in place for them,” Swann said. “You never could have done that without this mechanism.”

But a December 2015 Vanderbilt University study found few statistically significant improvements in Achievement School District schools run by the state or by charter management groups, while noting that systemic change could take several more years to take hold. The study did show some initial gains in “Innovation Zone” schools that were still managed by their local school district. Democrats in the Tennessee legislature have begun a push this year to dismantle the Achievement School District, citing the lackluster initial results.

Michigan’s Education Achievement Authority, another turnaround district created in 2011, is also on the chopping block as detractors point to high staff turnover, declining enrollment, unimpressive academic results and an FBI investigation that found a vendor was involved in a kickback scheme with the EAA’s principal.

Meanwhile, lawmakers in Georgia and North Carolina are considering creating turnaround districts this year.

Adapting to South Carolina

Rep. Robert Brown, D-Hollywood, traveled to Memphis last year with StudentsFirst advocates and several fellow members of the House Education and Public Works Committee to see Tennessee’s Achievement School District in action.

“It looked promising. It looked like the children were enjoying learning,” Brown said. “I was especially pleased with their conduct.”

He added, however, that any such plan in South Carolina would likely have to focus on entire school districts — especially in small rural counties where every school is performing poorly.

Asked about the possibility of an Achievement School District-style program in South Carolina, Spearman said current accountability laws already allow her office to take over struggling schools, but that she supports the idea of adding more “tools in the tool belt.”

“Charter should be added, the public-private partnerships, whatever would work,” Spearman said.

She also cautioned that South Carolina could not simply copy and paste the Achievement School District model from Tennessee, where many of the lowest-performing schools are in urban areas like Memphis.

“The communities are so different, and of course most of our priority schools are scattered across South Carolina in very, very rural areas, so I will be working with those local communities,” Spearman said.

A North Charleston experiment

In some ways, Charleston County is testing parts of the turnaround district model on a small scale at two high-poverty public schools in North Charleston, Meeting Street Elementary @Brentwood and Burns Elementary. While still in its early stages, Brentwood has shown dramatic improvements in test scores among kindergartners.

In a unique private-public partnership that eliminated teacher employment protections and came with an infusion of philanthropic funding, the district has given a local nonprofit organization, Meeting Street Schools, the freedom to do its own hiring and firing and to try out some reforms that academic researchers have championed for years. Like many Tennessee Achievement School District schools, Brentwood has enacted extended school days and an extended school year, and it has placed two teachers in every classroom. The recent move to expand the program to Burns Elementary came over protests from staff who said they had been asking for similar reforms for years.

Spearman said she likes what she has seen so far.

“We’re open to all models,” Spearman added. “It’s a model that is very intense and may not work everywhere because of the expense that it’s incurred there, but certainly where there are folks, philanthropists, who are ready to support it and a community is open to it, I think we’re going to see more use of it in South Carolina.”

Reach Paul Bowers at (843) 937-5546 or twitter.com/paul_bowers.