Democratic State Senator Rodger Smitherman is an outspoken opponent of new charter schools legislation. Photo courtesy of Smitherman’s Facebook page.
District 18 Democratic Senator Rodger Smitherman warned about the “detriment, division and re-segregation by race, economics and gender in Alabama’s public K-12 schools” he said will result from charter schools legislation scheduled for the impending session of the Alabama Legislature.
“This bill to create the School Choice and Student Opportunity Act and to create the Alabama Public Charter School Commission would recreate separate but unequal public schools in Alabama,” Smitherman said in a press release. “It will not improve education performance for our public school students, and it will place millions in the hands of so-called ‘non-profits’ that would not have real accountability when it comes to spending public dollars.”
Smitherman urged parents, educators and others opposed to charter schools to write their representatives, and “to pack the hearing chamber in Montgomery on Wednesday, March 4 to take a stand for our children.”
The Senate’s Education and Youth Affairs Committee will meet at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday in Room 727 of the Alabama State House for a public hearing on the Alabama School Choice and Student Opportunity Act, also known as Senate Bill 45. After the public hearing, the committee will vote on the bill.
Republican State Senator Del Marsh (Anniston) pre-filed the School Choice and Student Opportunity Act, Senate Bill 45, to “create an application process for the establishment of public charter schools, both new and conversion, and the establishment of the Alabama Public Charter School Commission,” according to a press release from his office.
Marsh and other charter schools supporters contend that such programs will be good for the state and its students. “All charter schools in Alabama will be held to the highest level of accountability,” he said in his statement. “Excellence will be demanded. If a school does not meet the expectations set in their charter, they will be closed. In addition to meeting performance standards, they would also be required to submit their school’s finances for independent audit on an annual basis.”
Among other things, the bill would put a cap on the number of some categories of charter schools for five years and establish a new state board to review and even overrule local school boards when they reject charter school applications.
According to Marsh, charters are among the “innovative options” educators need to better manage schools and “a positive step toward improving the quality of education in Alabama. … Alabama’s children are the building blocks of our future and they should be given every available option to succeed. That starts with a quality education. While there is no silver bullet to cure all problems in education, giving community leaders another tool in their belt ensures that no child’s dreams are limited by a lack of educational opportunities.”
Republican State Senator Del Marsh, who pre-filed the School Choice and Student Opportunity Act, believes that charter schools will have a positive impact on the state. Photo courtesy of Marsh’s Facebook page.
But Smitherman and other opponents of the plan say that charter schools not only don’t work, but they also harm public school students by taking money out of their schools. “We have faculty and staff in Alabama to educate our students,” he said. “We don’t need to give away our public education dollars to groups that want to enrich themselves instead of enhance the quality of education for our children.”
Smitherman pointed to what he called “troubling” evidence from systems around the country.
“In Pennsylvania, they’ve found that academic performance in traditional schools averages higher than charter schools, and charter school students in that state also spend less time learning to read than their counterparts in traditional schools,” Smitherman said. “The bottom line is that some of the charter schools in places such as Milwaukee, with the oldest system in the country, are actually hurting instead of helping the students by subjecting them to a curriculum of only reading and test preparation taught by inexperienced teachers with a high propensity for rapid turnover.”
In his statement Monday, Smitherman said he is “very concerned about charter schools’ drain on public education dollars, lack of transparency and lack of innovation, and structure that allows bad charter schools to continue functioning.”
Again pointing to the example of Pennsylvania, Smitherman said that taking money from public schools — $14.8 million — and giving it to charter programs “hurt the local schools and caused a significant drain on a district that already was struggling. At that same time, the charters were supposed to be bringing innovation, but that is yet to be realized, according to published reports.”
He also contends that charter schools that perform badly are not easily eliminated. “In Pennsylvania, 51 percent of the charter schools that had been opened for 10 years in 2013 had the lowest acceptable ranking for academic performance and they continued,” Smitherman said.
Charters, he said, re-establish “separate and unequal” schools. He noted that in Florida there are charter schools which are essentially serving segregated student bodies. “There are white charter schools, black charter schools and Hispanic charter schools in Florida. Students are more likely there to attend one-race schools. That’s a textbook definition of segregation,” Smitherman said.
Like some other charter schools opponents, Smitherman said the program would also result in marginalizing certain students. “Those schools are allowed to pick and choose their students and weed out those who don’t fit certain patterns,” he said in his statement. “This means that students with special needs or with other delays are often left out of the loop.”
The U.S. Department of Education last year issued guidelines noting that “the Federal civil rights laws, regulations, and guidance that apply to charter schools are the same as those that apply to other public schools.”
In a letter last May, Catherine E. Lhamon, assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education, wrote that, among other things, the federal government mandates that “charter schools may not discriminate in admissions on the basis of race, color, national origin, or disability.
“As a general rule, a school’s eligibility criteria for admission must be nondiscriminatory on their face and must be applied in a nondiscriminatory manner,” Lhamon wrote. “In addition, a charter school may not use admissions criteria that have the effect of excluding students on the basis of race, color, or national origin from the school without proper justification. Charter schools also may not categorically deny admission to students on the basis of disability.”
Marsh’s bill does contain anti-discrimination language: “A public charter school shall not limit admission based on ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, income level, disability, proficiency in the English language, or academic or athletic ability.”
But under Marsh’s bill, charter schools can limit enrollment for various reasons — the school is too small for the number of students who want to go there, for example — and in cases where enrollment will be limited, charters can fall back on “a random selection process.” Another provision in the bill allows charters to “give enrollment preference to children of a public charter school’s founders, governing board members, and full-time employees, so long as they constitute no more than 10 percent of the school’s total student population.”
Smitherman also took aim at what he called “one of the most egregious goals” of SB-45: the establishment of “a separate board of education to oversee the charter schools.”
The bill calls for the creation of the Alabama Public Charter School Commission, an “independent state entity” that would have the ability to override decisions of local school boards if they turn down an application to create a charter school.
“We do not need a dual system of education in this state for our K-12 schools,” Smitherman said. “We need one system that works for all.” Smitherman contends that “the key to improving public education in Alabama is in accurately assessing the needs for improving and funding initiatives to make those improvements happen.”
