Education Week: Memphis-Shelby Schools Merge Amid Uncertainty

While plans are forging ahead this summer for joining Memphis' 140,000-student school system with the surrounding suburban district, school officials also have to take into account the possibility that the unification might be temporary.

The Memphis and Shelby County, Tenn., districts officially merged July 1. For one year at least, the unified district will be the nation's 14th largest, and the planning for the merger has involved board members and district leaders from both legacy systems.

The merger stemmed from the city schools' desire to be more financially stable.

"The merger gave us the opportunity to identify inefficiencies. Our community had to come together to improve and invest in the schools," said Kenya Bradshaw, a fellow with the Minneapolis-based Policy Innovators in Education Network, who served on a transition planning committee for the new district.

However, several municipalities in the surrounding county will vote next month to determine whether new school districts will be carved out of the newly unified system starting in 2014-15. Differing racial demographics have also emerged as an issue.

Although district officials say the system is ready to open schools' doors in August, the possibility of those further changes has affected the planning, said Daniel Kiel, a law professor at the University of Memphis who also served on the transition planning committee.

"There's so much uncertainty about whether the new municipal districts are going to exist," he said.

Read the full article here.

The Endangered School District

The Endangered School District: The Promise and Challenge of Redistributing Control of Public Education

Abstract: One constant in American public education reform has been the existence of a single local entity – the school district – with operational responsibility. In some places, that is changing. Fueled by undercurrents in education reform such as the embrace of broader school choice and an increase in state involvement in local education, as well as federal political alignment supporting these undercurrents, some communities are embracing a radical structural reform that redistributes operational control across a series – or portfolio – of autonomous entities.

In such communities – typically large, urban school systems serving a student population that is largely poor and made up of minority students – the term “district” no longer applies. The broad, district-wide authority of a school board and superintendent is being dispersed to a variety of operators, including state education departments, private (i.e., charter school) operators, and the preexisting district itself. Each operator enjoys substantial or even total independence from other operators, generating an autonomy that has not existed within the traditional district structure.

The Endangered School District describes the causes and ramifications of such a substantial departure from the traditional district model and offers case studies from two communities – New Orleans, LA, and Memphis/Shelby County, TN – at the epicenter of urban education reform. Building on scholarship evaluating the theory of expanded school choice and operational autonomy, these case studies help demonstrate the practical challenges of applying these theories beyond isolated schools to entire educational communities.

There is great disagreement about the wisdom of transitioning toward a portfolio model for public education. The Endangered School District simply accepts the development as the emerging trend that it is and offers insight from two communities for making the most of such a radical structural change.

First, the article describes the undercurrents that are enabling the portfolio strategy and the ramifications – administrative, legal and philosophical – of moving away from the traditional district model. After introducing the case studies, the article next examines the respective new models in depth in order to evaluate whether either can deliver as a strategy to increase educational opportunities for students. Specifically, the article identifies the dangers that these structural reforms may simply reorganize the stratified educational systems they seek to eliminate or that they may not be financially, legally, or politically sustainable over time and on such a large scale. Rather than merely identifying these challenges, the article then goes on to identify legal structures – such as state laws or bilateral agreements between public school authorizers and public school operators or even among operators themselves – that can help minimize these risks.

This article appeared in the Boston University Public Interest Law Journal.  The full article is available here.

A Conversation With....

Daniel Kiel is a professor at the The University of Memphis' Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law. Pierre Kimsey sits down with Daniel to talk about his latest documentary film project, The Memphis 13, a look at the desegregation of Memphis City Schools fifty years ago, featuring interviews with all 13 pioneering families and other key individuals.

Atlantic: In Memphis Classrooms, the Ghost of Segregation Lingers

Samantha Crawford, an 18-year-old high-school senior, doesn't like to use the word "ghetto" to describe her neighborhood in the center of Memphis, Tennessee, but she can't think of a better one. In Binghampton, people drink and hang out. They are transient, moving from apartment to apartment and job to job. Many don't work at all. Samantha speculates that few have finished college, or even high school.

In the past two years, though, Samantha has begun to look at her neighborhood as an inspiration. "It's not about where I stay, or wherever I come from, but what I'm going to make of it," she says.

Samantha once earned only Bs and Cs. Now, she makes straight As. She had dreamed of college, but wasn't sure how she'd get there. Now, she's feeling overwhelmed by the choices available to her. In the past few months, she received five college acceptance letters, along with a scholarship to a local community college.

Read the full article from the Atlantic here.

NY Times: Merger of Memphis and County School Districts Revives Race and Class Challenges

When thousands of white students abandoned the Memphis schools 38 years ago rather than attend classes with blacks under a desegregation plan fueled by busing, Joseph A. Clayton went with them. He quit his job as a public school principal to head an all-white private school and later won election to the board of the mostly white suburban district next door.

Now, as the overwhelmingly black Memphis school district is being dissolved into the majority-white Shelby County schools, Mr. Clayton is on the new combined 23-member school board overseeing the marriage. And he warns that the pattern of white flight could repeat itself, with the suburban towns trying to secede and start their own districts.

“There’s the same element of fear,” said Mr. Clayton, 79. “In the 1970s, it was a physical, personal fear. Today the fear is about the academic decline of the Shelby schools.”

“As far as racial trust goes,” Mr. Clayton, who is white, added, “I don’t think we’ve improved much since the 1970s.”

Read the full article here.