JACKSON — The Mississippi Senate is expected today to debate a bill to expand charter schools in the state, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves said Tuesday, hours after the bill was approved in committee.
Members of the Senate Education Committee sent the bill forward after removing a provision to allow online charter schools.
The committee also agreed to an amendment Tuesday that would let charter schools sponsor pre-kindergarten programs, although no state money is now provided for students 4 and younger.
No other amendments were offered, though some committee members and others continue to say they want to allow school boards in districts that are rated “successful” to get a say in whether charter schools are established. As drafted, the bill allows only “high performing” or “star” districts, the two highest ratings on the state scale, to get a veto over potential charter schools.
“My preference would be that charter schools are targeted to less-than-successful districts,” said Sen. David Blount, D-Jackson, a committee member. When asked why he didn’t offer an amendment to that effect, he described Tuesday’s committee meeting as “the beginning of the process.”
John Buchanan, the superintendent of the Petal school system, one of the state’s four “star districts” said he “would like to think” that students don’t need to leave his district to get a good education. He questioned whether 120 of the state’s 152 school districts should automatically be eligible for charters, and students from any district could enroll in a charter.
“I’m still a little concerned about the number of school districts that would now be eligible for charter status,” said Buchanan, who attended the meeting.
Blount did successfully amend the bill to disallow virtual charter schools, institutions that would offer classes entirely online. Virtual charters have been under attack by Nancy Loome, executive director of the Parents’ Campaign. She and others, including state Superintendent Tom Burnham, say virtual charter schools have poor records.
“The data is going to tell you over and over that expecting young people to work independently, your rate of success is not going to be very good,” Burnham said, citing early struggles in the state’s own online program.
Loome has particularly attacked K12 Inc., a publicly-held Herndon, Va., firm that hired a lobbyist to push for virtual charter schools in Mississippi.
“We cannot afford to let someone in with such a history,” she said after the committee voted Tuesday. “They are the worst of the worst.”
Tollison voted in favor of the amendment, even though he has supported virtual charters.
“Technology needs to be part of the classroom. Technology is here,” said Tollison, who has handed out the same pro-virtual charters material to committee members that a K12 Inc. lobbyist has provided to reporters. The lobbyist could not be reached for comment Tuesday.
Burnham said the removal of virtual charters eased one of his concerns, but said the state Board of Education still wants successful districts to get a voice. He also said he’s concerned because as many as half of all teachers in a charter school could be exempt from state teacher licensing, as long as those teachers had a bachelor’s degree.
“The single most significant difference in a child’s academic growth is a highly competent teacher,” Burnham said.
The bill approved Tuesday also requires Senate approval of the seven members of a new state board that would approve applications for charter schools and oversee them.
Though Reeves and other Republican leaders are heavily pushing charter schools, some education groups remain heavily opposed.
The Mississippi Association of Educators, for example, is against the bill because it allows so many uncertified teachers, excludes charter schools from the Public Employees Retirement System, and exempts charter schools from state laws governing the disciplining and firing of teachers.
Others voice fears that the bill is a Trojan horse to re-segregate the state’s educational system. The bill has a provision that says a charter’s student population can’t vary by more than 25 percentage points from the racial composition of a district it serves, which would appear to ban an overwhelmingly white charter school in an overwhelmingly black district. But Leroy Johnson, executive director of Southern Echo, is not persuaded.
“This vote this morning, as I see it, was a vote to create two distinct public school systems,” said Johnson, whose group works to improve African-American communities. He said he believes that private and religious schools could close down and reopen as charters.
“They are setting up a system that is separate and unequal,” he said.
