Charter founder gets real with admission about improving schools
“Let’s just be real,” Chris Barbicwrote last week when announcing his resignation as superintendent of Tennessee’s Achievement School District.
Then Barbic admitted what skeptics of charter schools have preached for years — “achieving results in neighborhood schools is harder than in a choice environment.”
Barbic, as founder of the highly acclaimed YES Prep charter school network in Houston, was used to starting schools from scratch, enrolling students whose parents chose to send them there instead of to their zoned school. Charter schools in Texas are supposed to be open-enrollment, meaning they can’t set admission criteria, but some people argue that charters benefit simply from enrolling children with more motivated parents.
Tennessee presented a different challenge for Barbic. There, he was charged with launching a special school district that included the state’s lowest-performing schools. A key part of Barbic’s mission was to recruit charter networks to step in and improve the schools. However, he ran into some trouble as most charter operators have a start-from-scratch model, rather than taking over existing schools. Even YES Prep withdrew from the experiment.
“As a charter school founder,” Barbic wrote in his resgination letter, “I did my fair share of chest pounding over great results. I’ve learned that getting these same results in a zoned neighborhood school environment is much harder.”
Houston ISD Superintendent Terry Grier picked up on Barbic’s comments and tweeted, “Chris Barbic–courage to tell truth!”
The Houston advocacy group Community Voices for Public Education also weighed in, taking Barbic’s statement as an admission that his success was “due more to smoke and mirrors.”
In fact, Barbic’s resignation letter does not go that far. He stands by his philosophy that good teachers and principals can make a significant difference in improving student achievement, despite the challenges of poverty.
“The ‘poverty trumps education’ argument sells our educators, and more importantly, our kids way too short,” Barbic wrote. “And it is perhaps one of the most dangerous propositions that exists in our country today.”
Barbic also appeared to take another dig at his former charter network for pulling out of Memphis.
“It’s time for more high-performing charters to step up,” Barbic wrote. “These are agile, fast-learning organizations that get better faster than big bureaucracies. I applaud the charter operators who have stepped up to do the important and difficult work of neighborhood school turnaround. We need more organizations to follow their lead.”
Barbic’s successor at YES Prep, Jason Bernal, left the top job shortly after recommending the withdrawal from Memphis. Bernal now will face a challenge similar to Barbic’s, but in Houston. Grier has hired Bernal to oversee HISD’s lowest-performing middle and high schools as a chief transformation officer.
Grier’s own reform program, called Apollo, has seen mixed results. Twelve of the 20 original Apollo campuses met the state’s academic standards in 2014. One of the Charter founder gets real with admission about improving schools - K-12 Zone:
