Pender: Education politics: Lawsuits, no collaboration

Mississippi is trying to do something new — at least new to this state — with public education, so it makes perfect sense there’s already a lawsuit filed to put a stop to it.

I’m referring, of course, to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s lawsuit claiming the state’s funding of charter schools is unconstitutional.

The Mississippi Legislature, after years of debate and partisan and regional fighting, passed the Charter Schools Act in 2013. To date there are three charter schools in the state, all in Jackson. Two opened last year; one just opened this school year.

A charter school is a publicly funded school established by teachers, parents or community groups under the terms of a charter with state authorities. In exchange for being able to operate outside many of the regulations traditional public schools have to follow, the charter agrees to meet performance goals set out in the charter. Mississippi requires charters to be run by nonprofit organizations, which appoint a school board, and they are overseen by a seven-member state appointed board. They’re funded by the per-pupil tax dollars that would have gone to a public school for that student.

Will they work as proponents claim? Will they provide a release valve for children trapped in failing regular public schools and force those schools to get their act together to compete? Or will they fail and just suck already scant resources from the public school system?

We don’t yet know. If they’re shuttered by the litigation, we might never know.

But given Mississippi’s perennial spot at or near the bottom rung nationally in education, aren’t they worth a try? Really, isn’t anything worth a try to improve Mississippi’s public education? There’s an old shade-tree mechanic’s saying in the South when nothing will work to get a truck running and the mechanic is ready to try anything: “I’d be willing to wee-wee on a spark plug at this point.” Mississippi should have reached that point of willingness to try most anything with public education long ago.

Mississippi schools have been underfunded, are underfunded and likely will be underfunded for at least the near future. And they all said, “Amen.” But funding isn’t the only problem, and in the meantime, we should be willing to try most anything to see if it moves the needle.

I suspect for the foreseeable future, charter schools can help in some areas of the state — definitely in Jackson — and won’t even fly in others. I think their spread would be far slower than opponents fear and they won’t “herald a financial cataclysm for public school districts across the state,” as the lawsuit warns.

Why this lawsuit now? I’m not sure. But it reeks of the same old hardheaded politics that have stifled public education policy innovation for decades, not of strictly altruistic or constitutional motivations.

The litigation promises to drag on, and the state Supreme Court will ultimately rule on the constitutionality of charter school funding. A ruling years ago that said a law forcing Pascagoula to share tax dollars with other school districts was unconstitutional looks promising for the plaintiffs. But the high court has also in other cases tended to take a more general view of constitutional education provisions in favor of lawmakers.

This legislative session, lawmakers expanded the act to allow students in school districts rated C, D and F to cross district lines to attend a charter school anywhere in the state — with their tax money following along. This might have been a bridge too far, too soon. Maybe that decision should be revisited.

But a chief claim of the lawsuit is that a school can’t receive state or local tax dollars unless it is “regulated by the state superintendent of education and the local school district superintendent.”

What about the Mississippi School for Math and Science, the Mississippi School of the Arts and the state schools for the deaf and the blind? Those are all governed by the state Board of Education, with no local districts or superintendents controlling them. What about all the failing schools the state has had to take over? Would they be affected if the court upholds that argument?

I’ve said it before: Mississippi reserves its most bitter, most partisan, most no-holds-barred politics and fighting for public education policy. There’s almost never collaboration or compromise or even communication across political lines with education.

There’s usually just fighting and lawsuits.

Contact Geoff Pender at 601-961-7266 or gpender@jackson.gannett.com. Follow @GeoffPender on Twitter.

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