A state-appointed committee on Little Rock area schools quizzed members of a University of Washington-based group Monday about their research on school district/charter school collaborations in other cities and how that work could be done here.
"We have worked with a number of cities across the country and we think there are some similar situations in Little Rock, south of the river, where we might be able to provide some additional insight," Jordan Posamentier, deputy policy director for the Center on Reinventing Public Education, told the Little Rock Area Public Education Stakeholder Group.
The stakeholder group -- at the direction of the Arkansas Board of Education -- is looking for a research group to answer questions on how best to attain quality education, cost efficiency and attractive campuses for a diverse student population in an area that is served by both charter schools and traditional public schools.
The 25-year old Center on Reinventing Public Education, which operates on philanthropic and federal grants, started when its founder, Paul Hill, found that certain magnet and parochial schools in the northeast part of the country were achieving remarkably high outcomes with high-poverty and high-minority student bodies, Posamentier said. Hill found that the schools had flexibility to manage the staff, time, program design and resources. The problem was that there were so few of the schools. Finding ways to create systems that produce additional excellent schools over time became the heart of Hill and his organization's work.
Posamentier said the center works with schools in large metropolitan areas and small suburbs on a variety of issues such as talent or funding, or on creating an array of quality school options. Some of the locations have "compacts" between traditional school districts and charter schools. Austin, Miami-Dade County, New Orleans, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Nashville and Tulsa are among the cities with collaboration compacts. Some of those cities are also "portfolio" cities, a center label that denotes a particular approach to solving problems, Posamentier said.
Sean Gill, research analyst for the Center on Reinventing Public Education, said the most typical areas of collaboration between traditional school districts and charter schools are the use of a common school accountability system, a single school enrollment system and cooperation in providing special education services to students.
Gill said that collaboration can give a school district help in providing high quality schools in all neighborhoods and exposure to charter expertise. Charter schools benefit by improved access to facilities and a reduction of political tension, as well as exposure to school district expertise. Communities benefit from more high quality school options, better services for special-need students and streamlined information about schools.
Antwan Phillips, a member of the Little Rock group, told Gill that it seemed as if the research group approaches its work with the mindset that charter schools are higher quality than traditional schools.
Gill responded that there is a "huge variation" in the quality of charter schools and that all schools need to be held accountable and intervention provided when they are not up to standard.
Posamentier said that the center staff is often met with distrust and "gets flack from both sides." The center has been called "a district apologist" by some and "charter advocates" by others, he said. "We don't pick sides," he added.
Stakeholder group member Dianna Varady said people have left traditional schools in Little Rock for reasons that are 50 years old and not related to academics. "How can you help with that?" she asked.
Posamentier said the best way is to ask parents directly and overlay their responses with other information about the schools and city.
In response to other questions, Posamentier said the center, if selected, may not be able to answer every question posed by the stakeholder group. The staff will develop a scope of work and timelines on what it can do, he said, and also make suggestions on other research groups that have expertise in areas that the center does not.
The seven-member Little Rock area stakeholder group was created when the Arkansas Board of Education voted in April to hire a "research facilitator" to make nonbinding recommendations on how the education board might better manage decision-making and communications in regard to traditional public schools and independently operated, publicly funded charter schools.
The education board called for that advice in the wake of heated debate earlier this year over applications by the existing eSTEM and LISA Academy charter schools to open new campuses within the boundaries of the Little Rock district, which is operating under state control because six of its 48 campuses were labeled as academically distressed. One of those six schools has since dropped off the distressed list.
The charter-school operators said the nearly 3,000 new seats at four new campuses -- which were approved by the state Education Board -- are needed to help relieve long waiting lists of students for the charter schools. Baker Kurrus, who was then the superintendent of the Little Rock district, argued that the charter schools duplicate facilities and services already available to students in the traditional public school district and, as a result, are expensive and a waste of taxpayer funds.
Besides Phillips and Varady, members of the stakeholder group, who will meet again Sept. 26, are Chairman Tommy Branch, Tamika Edward, Ann Brown Marshall, Jim McKenzie and Leticia Reta.
Metro on 08/30/2016