ESTEM chief says districts can ally

John Bacon, the chief executive officer of eSTEM Public Charter Schools Inc., said Monday that the time is right for cooperation among Pulaski County's traditional school districts and independently operated charter schools.

Speaking to the state-appointed Little Rock Area Public Education Stakeholder Group that is tasked with promoting collaboration among different kinds of schools, Bacon said he is constantly looking for new approaches for improving education for students, and that it is incumbent upon him and others to share those ideas.

He said he disagrees "wholeheartedly" with contentions made earlier to the group that the time has passed for any cooperation between the Little Rock School District and the nine charter schools and charter school systems operating within the district's boundaries.

"The time for sharing of ideas is now," Bacon said. "The time for us to get serious about making sure every child in this community has a quality education is now. That is not an either/or discussion. That is not a traditional public school versus public charter school discussion. It's an all-of-us-together discussion.

"It's going to involve identifying strengths and weaknesses on all parts of the community and our public education environment to determine what we need to do differently -- what do we need to do that if something is working for a set of students or a set of families, or a population of students, how do we ensure that becomes the norm rather than the exception," he said.

The seven-member 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 that 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 wasteful use of taxpayer funds.

The charter school leaders invited to Monday's session said their different schools have different purposes -- college preparatory, drop-out recovery or a focus on serving students from low-income communities. They described the racial and ethnic diversity of their student bodies and the increasing percentages of their students who have learning disabilities or who are learning English as a second language.

Bacon told the group that the Little Rock community has long embraced school choice, dating back to the 1980s when special-program magnet and specialty schools were first created within the Little Rock district.

"We have to make sure we have varied choices for all our families," he said. "To answer the question 'Do all students have access to an achieving school? We have all seen the data. We have all seen the performance. I think we can all say the answer to that question is 'no.' What are we going to do about it? To me that is expand choice. Make sure we are focusing on every school, every student and providing quality options for all of our families."

The charter leaders described how they have collaborated among their systems, suggesting those and other efforts could be expanded to include the Little Rock district.

ESTEM is working with the state Department of Education to "grow its own" teachers in the science, technology and mathematics fields, Bacon said. The system is also partnering with the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville to develop school leaders for schools in low-income communities in the Little Rock School District and around the state.

Luanne Baroni, principal of the LISA Academy Middle School, said LISA has hosted Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, or STEM, fairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and has also organized communitywide conferences to help students with special education needs to transition to post-secondary jobs and other opportunities.

Tina Long, superintendent of Little Rock Preparatory Academy, described joint teacher-training programs for charter and traditional school faculties in Portland, Ore., where she previously worked.

Members of the stakeholder group asked the charter leaders about how they select and finance sites for their schools within the district, how they provide services for special education students, how they use state aid that is intended for closing the achievement gap between students of different races, and what barriers to cooperation they have encountered.

The stakeholder group is to help select the research facilitator and has been working since June -- listening to charter and traditional school proponents --- to identify the specific questions and issues that it wants to assign to the researcher. The group decided at the end of its meeting Monday to invite Jordan Posamentier, the deputy policy director for the Center on Reinventing Public Education, to its Aug. 29 meeting to make a presentation on the kinds of services his organization could provide in regard to research and at what cost.

The center, which is is based in Seattle and affiliated with the University of Washington Bothell, is a research and policy analysis center that works to develop systemwide solutions for public education, according to its website. That website highlights one of the organization's publications, What States Can Do to Promote District-Charter Collaboration.

According to the introduction to that June 2016 publication, states "can help create conditions that make it possible to work together to create common performance measurements across schools, streamline application and enrollment processes, and more efficiently deliver quality special education."

The article introduction also says that collaboration between a district and charter schools is difficult but a state can help by removing laws and policies that are barriers, create financial and other incentives for collaboration and provide "political cover" for districts when collaborations are controversial.

Metro on 07/26/2016

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