A charter school faces the ugly history of school choice in the Deep South

CLARKSDALE — It was a rainy February morning, but Clarksdale Collegiate Principal Amanda Johnson was fired up. “You know how Ms. Johnson feels about Friday,” she told the students as she paced around the cafeteria in an “I am black history” shirt. “If you didn’t get it all done … Friday’s the day you turn it around.”

The former church youth-group multipurpose room had become a shrine to academic achievement, the stained-glass window overshadowed by bold purple banners listing the students’ future college graduation years, the school’s values and the slogan “#RUReady.” The students were just in kindergarten, first and second grade, but Johnson was projecting far into the future.

“Raise your hand if you know your stretch goal,” Johnson said — referring to students’ personal better-than-best target score on their upcoming standardized tests. “I need you to know what you’re aiming at.”

Ricky Taylor, a skinny first grader with a gap between his front teeth, raised his hand up until it practically lifted him off the bench. “My stretch goal in math is 191,” he said. Johnson hustled over and gave Ricky a dollar.

The 140 voices shrilled the morning chant, spelling out the school’s core rules: Work hard, be nice, stay safe, demonstrate urgency. “Because I matter. Because you matter. I am a scholar. And a future college graduate!”

Johnson opened the doors of Mississippi’s first rural charter school in this temporary space a year ago. Pulling students from Coahoma County and its county seat of Clarksdale, the school was a bid to cultivate the greatness she saw in these local kids, including her own daughters. They were so bright, so eager, and yet if the current statistics held, 25 percent would not graduate from high school.

But Clarksdale Collegiate opened in the face of protest. The Clarksdale school board and Advocates for Public Education, a group of local parents and educators formed to oppose the charter, submitted an amicus brief in support of the Southern Poverty Law Center lawsuit aiming to overturn the state’s entire charter law.

In a county with fewer than 27,000 residents, more than 1,300 people signed a petition opposing the school. They wanted a better education for all students, not just a few, Coahoma County lawmaker Johnny Newson told the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board.

Nationally, controversy over opening a charter school is nothing new. But in Clarksdale, it had a particularly painful resonance. In 1970, when the courts ordered schools to desegregate and controversies over busing erupted across the country, white parents in Coahoma County fled the public system for private segregation academies, calling it “school choice.”

White abandonment of the public system impoverished the public schools that served Clarksdale’s African American majority. Fifty years later, the term “school choice” still evokes injustice to the elderly African American educators and NAACP civil rights activists who led the drive to stop Clarksdale Collegiate. They saw the charter school as a new way to create a free but essentially private education for the privileged.

Despite the opposition, parents came to Clarksdale Collegiate. Ricky’s foster parents, Sakenna and Keithan Dear, worked in public school systems, but they signed Ricky up anyway. They hoped this school would support the child they were trying to adopt, who had come to them at age 3 from the children’s hospital in Memphis barely speaking, and left kindergarten at a local public school unable to read basic sight words.

Ricky had his own hopes for his new school. He wanted his teachers to pay attention to him. He wanted them to build a playground. He wanted to learn how to fly an airplane, only not too far off the ground, because heights were scary.

Like the Dears, most families who came to the charter were black, and they believed Johnson when she said her school would be different. It would, first and last, be better than the schools the area already had. Johnson was opening outside the traditional public system not to create some kind of segregated fiefdom but because that’s where she knew how to run a great school. But she faced an uphill battle against public sentiment strong enough to silence even supporters. She would have to convince them by following through on her promises, helping kids like Ricky learn to read.

From segregation to 'school choice'

In 1969, Clarksdale schools were still separate and unequal, 14 years after the Brown v. Board Supreme Court decision. But that October, the court decided Alexander v Holmes County Board of Education, ruling against the “freedom of choice” plans school districts had maintained in Mississippi and elsewhere.

In response, the Clarksdale Press-Register outlined how white parents could leave the districts. About 500 white parents attended the first meeting to discuss opening a private, segregated school; 115 registered on the spot for the future school, which would later be named Lee Academy.

When the Clarksdale Public schools reopened Feb. 2, 1970, after a one-day integration reorganization break, 574 of Clarksdale Junior High’s 585 white students did not show up, the newspaper reported. White children vanished entirely from the public schools in nearby counties — Indianola lost almost 1,000 to private schools. Mississippi’s public school enrollment fell by 23,000 students that month, the Associated Press reported.

“We never really integrated,” former high school teacher Josephine Rhymes said.

The racial divide between the private and public sector is still stark, and the decades of disinvestment took their toll. It’s no secret now that the condition of the public schools is a roadblock to Clarksdale’s revitalization, residents said. While the city has capitalized on its history as “the birthplace of the blues” with festivals and artsy shops, many downtown sidewalks are littered with shattered glass and poverty remains at 36 percent.

Schools superintendent Dennis Dupree came to the city 12 years ago, promising innovation. He brought in more than $15 million in federal and state funding. He introduced literacy and social-emotional learning programs backed by major funders such as The Walton Family Foundation. Dupree’s initiatives were buttressed by community youth programs focused on creativity, employability and college readiness.

But the grants ran out, and any lingering positive effects were not visible in test scores. Both the Clarksdale and Coahoma systems were rated F on the state’s 2018 school report cards and are eligible for state takeover. Dupree, who retired from Clarksdale schools at the end of the 2018-19 school year, declined several requests for an interview.

Amanda Johnson, a Little Rock native, came to the Arkansas side of the Delta in 2003 with Teach For America. She felt comfortable in the Delta in a way most of her TFA peers did not. Her father knew people in her district; she was close enough to her college in Memphis to drive back for church. Because she is African American, like most of the residents, “no one knew I was Teach For America,” she said. She liked the people and the culture and the history. “There’s a lot of greatness that’s here that I want to be a part of and help grow and support,” she said.

After TFA, she joined the KIPP charter network at KIPP Delta in Helena, Arkansas; when the network opened an elementary school, she became its leader. Johnson fell in love with the organization’s college-prep focus and refusal to let poverty dictate outcomes.

As Johnson settled in Clarksdale in 2010, the reasons for her to do that work in her adopted hometown multiplied. She had two daughters to educate, and she believed that high school failure rates showed that the lower schools weren’t getting the job done. She knew that she could find a way for them in the local district if she had to. But she wanted something better and different for them, and for her neighbors. Her husband, Sanford Johnson, co-founded Mississippi First in 2008, advocating for better education, a sexual health curriculum that went beyond abstinence — and charter schools. When Mississippi’s legislature voted in 2016 to let students cross district lines to attend charter schools, she was ready.

Johnson began working her connections, and her experience and low-key magnetism worked wonders. First, she got a fellowship with Building Excellent Schools, a charter leadership incubator. Using the program’s resources, Johnson planned Clarksdale Collegiate down to the smallest detail as she tackled the Mississippi charter school application process.

Clarksdale Collegiate would be “unapologetically college preparatory,” she wrote in her application. She incorporated elements that were familiar in charter-heavy places like Detroit and Memphis but new in Clarksdale, such as decking the hallways with college pennants, illustrations of the school’s core values and graphs of scholars’ academic progress, including the number of words each grade had read as tracked by Accelerated Reader, one of the school’s educational software programs.

Johnson planned an extended, highly structured day, more than eight hours, with 75-minute blocks of math — even for kindergarteners — and literacy rotations for two hours at a stretch, including daily library class. The year ran almost three weeks longer than that of the district. Clarksdale Collegiate would be lightning-focused on metrics and testing even though the official state tests on which its renewal would hang didn’t start until the third grade.

Everything would be done with urgency — a trait she observed at the charter schools she thought were most successful, places like Nashville Classical. There was no time to waste. “Kids don’t do well K through fourth and then start failing in fifth grade,” Johnson said. “What we’re doing now matters.”

Halfway through the school’s first year, parents had embraced the intensity. At report card night in February, a kindergartener danced with a stuffed unicorn as her mother frowned at her data binder.

“I think this is great,” kindergarten teacher Latasha Capers said.

“It’s great, but it can be exceptional,” the mom said.

One school’s gain

Johnson’s vision for the school has it serving about 675 children. That size would let Clarksdale Collegiate “impact change outside of our own school,” she said.

Over the next decade, it also would amount to as much as a quarter of Coahoma and Clarksdale’s current public school enrollment, and siphon off a lot of money that might otherwise go to the regular public systems. The charter school pulled roughly $149,000 in local taxes from the Clarksdale district in its first year alone, Cocke said, “and each year it will go up.” During Clarksdale Collegiate’s first year, an additional 29 students who chose to attend the school would have attended Coahoma County public schools, according to school data.

The charter may not be siphoning out white students as the old segregation academies did, but to many critics of the school, pulling resources from the traditional public schools is just as unforgivable. Donell Harrell became the Clarksdale district’s first black superintendent in the 1990s. Sitting at McDonald’s where he meets with other retired men in the mornings, Harrell said he might have supported the charter school had the district been adequately funded. The Mississippi Legislature has fully funded the state’s public education system only twice in more than 20 years. “I think at some point choice would be appropriate, but don’t shortchange public schools,” he said.

In theory, as a public school, Clarksdale Collegiate’s finances should have been about the same as the local districts. In 2017-18, Coahoma spent $9,279 and Clarksdale $8,424 in state and local per-pupil funds. The charter school received $1.2 million in per-pupil funds for its 145 students for 2017-18, or about $8,200 per child, the school’s financial manager Stacie Landry said.

However, Johnson increased the amount she could spend on her students by raising a lot of private money. Clarksdale Collegiate recorded almost $820,000 in philanthropy for the past school year, Landry said. In total, Clarksdale Collegiate had revenues of $2.5 million for 145 students in its first year, Landry said — roughly $17,000 per student.

Johnson said that much of that money went to one-time startup costs, such as stocking the library. The largest slice went to personnel: She paid teachers about 5 percent more than the Coahoma County system average, and paid her instructional aides almost double the state minimum of $12,500. Her own salary was $90,000 during the school’s first year, she said.

Critics like Harrell and Rhymes said the money would be better spent supporting schools in the district. Even A-rated Kirkpatrick Elementary, next door to Clarksdale Collegiate, is hurting for funds. Kirkpatrick kindergarten teacher Teresa Scheider implemented some of the same rules followed at Clarksdale Collegiate: Be nice, do your very best. She had the same high expectations: The state required that students write their numbers up to 30, she said, but her students furrowed their brows writing their numbers up to 100. “She’s the best teacher,” kindergartener Raniya Berry said. “We be doing rhyming words and we be doing compound words and we write stories.”

Still, Scheider seemed ground-down. Standardized examinations were something to be endured, not celebrated like across the street. “Education is not what I want it to be anymore,” she said — too much testing, not enough focus on kids’ social development, to their detriment. She no longer visits students’ homes: “I’m afraid to now,” she said.

Clarksdale Collegiate special education teacher Sakenna Dear knows the frustrations. She and her husband Keithan are Coahoma-born and -bred, and they want to stay in the area. “If you were born here, you want to succeed,” she said. She became a teacher and did the best she could working at a traditional public school, even though the leadership rarely provided meaningful professional development or transparency, she said. Then their foster son Ricky started kindergarten, and she saw how deep the problems went. He had a substitute teacher all year, who sent home bad reports about Ricky’s academic progress. Yet at dinner, Ricky described days of coloring and watching movies.

Keithan Dear, the Coahoma system’s web developer and computer technician, worried a bit about “the conflict of interest” when they applied for Clarksdale Collegiate. But “being a parent now, it’s whatever’s best for the kid,” he said. “Around here we need to try something different.”

When Sakenna Dear brought Ricky in to register, Johnson invited her to interview for a job. She did, and took it. She wanted something different for herself, too.

The new face of school choice

One way that Clarksdale Collegiate is different from the choice schools of the past is in the composition of its student body. In its first year, Clarksdale Collegiate’s student body was 93 percent black, according to data the school provided. The State of Mississippi reported that 63 percent of the charter’s students were eligible for free lunch, compared to 74 percent of students in the Clarksdale public school district and 77 percent of Coahoma students.

Coahoma High graduate Adrienne Hudson, who runs the education-improvement group RISE MS, was initially skeptical of charters. She feared cherry-picking and thought of charter administrators as “this outside force basically coming in trying to rescue this community from itself,” she said. “My answer would always be no, no, no, probably an expletive no.”

Mississippi lawmakers tried to build in preventive measures to keep the new schools of choice from exacerbating Mississippi’s stark educational disparities. Lisa Karmacharya, the Mississippi Charter School Authorizer Board’s executive director, said the purpose of the charter law was to help “the underserved population.” The law requires charters’ enrollment of special education, low-income and English-language learning students to be within 80 percent of that in the district in which the schools operate.

However, even the best law is nothing without enforcement. Penn State University education researcher Erica Frankenberg cautioned that it’s rare for states to make sure charters are following laws requiring them to enroll a representative proportion of students. “I’ve never seen a charter revoked for these reasons,” she said.

The rubric by which Mississippi charters are evaluated puts significant weight on requirements that charters serve special education students and conduct non-discriminatory admissions, but the more general stipulation that a charter serve a representative percentage of “underserved” students ” counts for only 3 of 100 points. And even then, the state may renew a school even if it has organizational problems. Karmacharya said discussions were underway to revise the evaluation form to better reflect the law. The state board has not yet made any renewal decisions.

Karmacharya is adamant that she and her board are committed to ensuring that the state’s charter schools serve a student population that is similar to that of the district’s non-charter public schools. Johnson felt just as strongly about reflecting the community. In contrast to the state teaching workforce as a whole, Johnson’s staff, like the students, is mostly African American.

Critics like Hudson came to believe in Johnson’s commitment to creating a school that reflected and empowered the community. “She is working very hard to be a public charter school,” Hudson said.

As the school’s first year drew to a close, everyone at Clarksdale Collegiate felt good. Ricky walked with his fellow Vanderbilt University homeroom students past his achievements, which papered the walls around him. He smoked through the ST Math computer program and beamed from a Scholar of the Week photo. He had earned a popcorn party, a trampoline trip and a special recess.

Clarksdale Collegiate had lived up to his hopes. The night before, he vroomed around the Dears’ circular driveway on the bike he’d learned to ride without training wheels in three days. He paused briefly to gush about first grade. “My favorite thing to do in school is to play on the playground. We finally have one! Finally finally finally,” he said. He also loved science class, though “it’s not like real ones. I want to make potions and stuff. That’s what a real scientist does.”

But that was OK. “I love school so much I just want to hug the school,” Ricky said. He zoomed off again.

Sakenna Dear felt much the same way, both for the changes in Ricky and for herself. Johnson “really sets the tone and makes school fun,” she said. “It pushes me as a teacher and administrator to want to do more.”

Johnson rejoiced in May over the kindergarten scores: 78th percentile in reading and 81st in math on the nationally used Measures of Academic Progress test. Her vision was on track. Only one staffer was leaving, while 68 people had applied for the 15 jobs that would be available when the school reopened in July after a short summer break. Clarksdale Collegiate had a wait list at every grade, with 88 applications for kindergarten alone.

“I hate telling people they’re on the wait list — which is a good problem to have,” Johnson said. Maybe, she thought, it meant the community was coming around.

Ricky Taylor, however, would not be coming back. His adoption was finalized in April, and he had a new name.

“Ricky Dear!” he said. “Dear, like the rest of my family.”

He had already begun to write it on his worksheets.

This story has been updated since first published to correct the title of Keithan Dear, who is the Coahoma system’s web developer and computer technician, and to clarify support for a lawsuit filed by the Southern Poverty law center.

Emmanuel Felton contributed to this report.

This story about Clarksdale, Miss., was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.