by Jim Brown
This commentary is the transcript of extemporaneous remarks made at a special school-board forum on charter schools last Thursday night.
y name is Jim Brown, and I’m also a retired school
teacher. First of all, as we look at charter schools, I’m going to tell each of you
to take a look at public education and see what it is.
Public education in the United States is the only institution in the world that culls nobody. We take them all, just like the statue [of Liberty] says. And we want it that way, because that’s what our founding fathers wanted. And anyone who would challenge that ought to pay attention to some things.
Look at Memphis city schools: How many people know that we had over 1,100 in Memphis city schools who got college scholarships and over $14 million in scholarships just last year? That is larger than most of the towns in the state of Tennessee. It is also larger than many of the school systems in the state of Tennessee. So tell me how poorly we’re doing!
Someone mentioned that charter schools were better at teaching the difficult students, the troubled students. If they are, I welcome that. And we will give them four or five thousand students tomorrow.
Don’t take money from public schools. If you want to start a charter school, start it, but this is another way of segregation, whether you like it or not. Because it’s stratified segregation, and any kind of segregation is wrong.
Just a few years ago we had a lot of private schools. Most of them fell by the wayside, and we had to take them back. Those who think that public education is afraid of the challenge, or that we’re afraid of competition, they’re wrong! We had competition in this town from parochial schools and from private schools, and we welcomed it. Because if you closed one private school down today, it would cost us between 20 and 30 million dollars tomorrow to take up that slack.
So let’s look at this realistically. And get your legislators to look at this realistically.
Would you want your child to be taught by a teacher who’s not certified? Would you want your child to be in a building, and this is true now . . .If you had less than 300 in a building, that building does not have to meet the state fire regulations.
Do you want to have a charter school, where, if the parents have to furnish their own transportation, they get reimbursed from it at the public schools’ expense?
There are charter schools in this country, in Arizona and in Michigan, that I know, that do not have to furnish a gymnasium. A cafeteria. Or transportation. And Mr. Wilson, you mentioned that somebody wants to have a charter school, just for special-education students. We cannot do that with public funds, because the Carl Perkins Act would not allow us to do that to expressly design a school for a target population.
I think this bill was very well written but very poorly conceived. I’m somewhat appalled at the people who are outside the educational system who are constantly bombarding our professional educators about education.
In closing, I would like to have the hands of all the people in this building who went to public schools. Well, I want to tell you what public education did for you, whether you like it or not. Public education made you what you were and gave you the chance to be what you are today.
I’m going to close by saying something very nice about charter schools: A mangy old dog won’t bite the hand that feeds it. Don’t bite public education! n
(Jim Brown, an ex-Marine and ex-educator, is a Republican who was elected to the Memphis Board of Education in 1995 to represent Frayser and Raleigh. The “Mr. Wilson” referred to here is Justin Wilson, from the staff of Governor Sundquist. Wilson was on hand to help explain the administration’s charter school bill in the legislature this year. The Carl Perkins referred to is a former congressman from Kentucky, not the late Tennessee rockabilly artist.)