This story appeared first in Ann Doss Helms' weekly newsletter, which comes out each Monday. Sign up here to get it to your inbox first.
If you know anything about charter schools in North Carolina, you know many of them provide elementary, middle and often high school. The K-12 model is common for private schools as well. The goal is to offer continuity and potentially ease what can be tough transition years.
So the charter school operators who serve on North Carolina’s Charter School Review Board were taken aback when Charlotte’s Movement School network came to them with an unusual request this month. Movement, which locates its schools where they’re likely to serve large numbers of minority and low-income students, wanted permission to phase out its only middle school to concentrate on pre-K-5 schools. (Read more about the Movement changes here.)
Movement School CEO Kerri-Ann Thomas told the board the network has decided to “place our bet” on the early years by adding prekindergarten, providing a strong elementary school education and then handing the kids off to a “partner” yet to be named.
Movement hired Thomas from Achievement First, a chain of K-12 charter schools in the Northeast that has a reputation for getting disadvantaged students ready for college. She told the review board that the model has proven to have a drawback.
“We’ve seen the backlash of our students staying in the same institution and then going off to college,” she said. “And then you see how they struggle because they’ve only been a part of this one institution, this one way of doing something, so that when they are then placed in different environments and different institutions, they then have a challenge.”
That sent me on an internet expedition. What I learned was that Achievement First, along with a handful of other chains known for success with low-income students, had discovered that raising test scores, logging high graduation rates, helping students get accepted to college and even lining them up with scholarships often wasn’t enough.
For instance, Achievement First found that while 97% of its graduates were going to college, only 30-50% were finishing. That was far better than an 8% college completion rate for low-income students nationwide, but the chain concluded it needed to do much better. Achievement First responded with a pilot project designed to help students develop the skills that might help them thrive in a new environment. Efforts to give middle school students additional autonomy proved especially challenging, a report on that project says.
Achievement First and other charter chains have also tried to address the college completion gap with additional supports for their alumni as they move through college. What they haven’t done, as far as I can tell, is conclude that their kids would have been better prepared if they’d switched schools.
Equity never gets easy
I ran this by Cheryl Turner, the longtime head of Sugar Creek Charter School, which Movement is modeled on (and which is exploring a memorandum of understanding to provide middle school seats for Movement students). Her school spans K-12, and she says there are intensive new challenges at each grade span. And yes, she says, first-generation college students from fragile low-income homes do tend to struggle in college.
“The question is would they struggle less if they had gone someplace else,” she said. “The disadvantages are the same. That’s not going to change whether they have them here or they have them someplace else. The difference then becomes do they struggle more, or are they at least better prepared and do they have some support systems that they wouldn’t have had.”
Here’s the hard truth: The advantages or disadvantages that fate hands children compound at every step of the way. That means each step is important … but it’s never enough.
So yes, early childhood education is vital, but it doesn’t change the fact that some elementary students will have stable lives, plenty to eat, good health care and support in learning, while others will face trauma, deprivation and distraction.
Excellent elementary schools lay the groundwork, but when adolescence arrives some kids will have enrichment from home and peer groups that value achievement, while others will struggle to survive. In high school some students will get private tutoring, coaches to help with exams and college essays and checks from parents to cover college costs, while others will work to support their families or care for younger siblings. And even young adults who have overcome obstacles for their entire lives will have a tough time finishing college if they don’t have financial, practical and emotional support.
In other words, if we’re serious about providing educational equity, we can’t provide a boost and sit back. The needs just keep getting more complex.
None of this is to disparage what Movement is trying to do. You’ve got to admire a local business that’s putting millions of dollars into giving kids better odds of success.
But it’s also worth noting that school districts don’t have the option of carving off which chunk of the challenge they’ll tackle. They must work with everyone in their community — even as lawmakers push options that can leave traditional public schools with the kids who need the most help.
