The atmosphere at the Mississippi Capitol got tense for a few moments Thursday when Sen. Kenneth Wayne Jones, D-Canton, leader of the Legislative Black Caucus, questioned the legitimacy of Gov. Phil Bryant's education policy recommendations.

Lucien Smith, the governor's deputy chief of staff, outlined Bryant's package of suggested reforms during the Democratic Public Policy Forum on Education, co-hosted by the Mississippi Democratic Trust and the Legislative Black Caucus. Those reforms include how students should be promoted, scholarships and performance-based compensation aimed at producing better teachers, $3 million for early childhood education, and school choice, including vouchers and charter schools.

"We've been asking for health and education reform for a long time," Jones said. "So when did white conservatives start getting so adamant about educating African American children and, in the same breath, deny health care? You can be smart, but if you get sick, you're going to die? That makes us not trust the process itself."

Smith said he understood the skepticism given the state's history. "We view this as the single largest economic development and quality-of-life issue in our state, and there's a huge population--white and black--that we're failing," he said. "... We want to do it because we want every Mississippian to have a better life and have opportunities that the current system denies them."

Jones wasn't the only one skeptical of the charter-school bill under debate in the Legislature. The state Senate has already approved a bill revamping the state's charter-school laws, and it's likely to pass the House, soon. Charter schools, which are privately run but funded by public tax dollars, had detractors and advocates on the six-person panel.

"For far too many children, education, which is supposed to be the ticket out, does not work as well as it needs to," said Kenneth L. Campbell, president of the Black Alliance for Educational Options. "... Unfortunately, none of us has the solutions on how to fix it. There is no magic pill that you can take."

Closing the educational achievement gap between white and black students, which Campbell said has stalled at 20 percent to 30 percent for decades, is key to addressing the crisis. "We've made very little progress in closing this gap," he said.

"We have set up a system that cannot do what we want it to do at this particular time," he said, referencing a "two-tiered" education system, where those with money, power and influence have choices others don't have. People with means can send their children to private schools, for example. Campbell believes Mississippi should see charter schools as one method to provide choice to parents who don't have them now. But, he said, they won't solve all of the problems in education.

Two speakers brought up concerns about how charter schools would work for children with disabilities. Pam Dollar, executive director of the Coalition for Citizens with Disabilities, cited two studies that showed charter schools have a lower percentage of disabled children than public schools. Resources to care for those children are vital, she said, to not go back to a system where disabled kids are excluded from educational opportunities with their able-bodied peers.

"We don't want to go back to a system of segregation," Dollar said.

Mary Troupe, director of the Coalition for Citizens with Disabilities, agreed.

"We really have some concerns," she said, accountability and transparency among them. "Individuals with disabilities, their families and educators of children with disabilities have not been at the table," in the state's charter-school discussions.

Eden Heilman, a New Orleans-based senior staff attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, echoed Dollar's and Troupe's concerns when she described how the charter schools in New Orleans, La., have largely failed students with special needs. New Orleans instituted charters after the levees broke in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, leaving much of the city devastated. With one of the worst school systems pre-Katrina, she said, the school had nowhere to go but up, but the system only works for some.

"Children in New Orleans who are intelligent, who are well-resourced--and by well-resourced I mean they have an involved family and parents, they have access to technology at home--those folks have been able to navigate the system, and they've done well," Heilman said. "What we've also seen, though, is that those children who are the most costly and difficult to educate--those children who don't have involved families, children with disabilities--those children are being dramatically left behind."

Mississippi should learn from the mistakes Louisiana made, she said, one of which is the system's structure. New Orleans now has multiple school districts under its charter setup, each of which operates autonomously. That requires duplication of resources, from food contracting to psychologists, leading to a high level of inefficiency. The SPLC--which is suing the Louisiana Department of Education on behalf of New Orleans parents--has also seen cases where kids are discouraged from attending some schools or have been pushed out of schools because of their disabilities or "generally being undesirable students."

Public-interest lobbyist Pam Shaw advocated for non-political oversight of Mississippi's charter schools. Specifically, she believes the Institutions of Higher Learning, not the Department of Education, should be the authorizing agent for charters. "It should be a research-based organization that everyone agrees is non-partisan," she said.

Shaw also wants to see a detailed fiscal impact analysis for any district considering charter schools, which should be made public information before a charter is granted. Charter opponents cite evidence that charters siphon much-needed funds from public schools leaving them financially unstable.

"The Mississippi Legislature has not kept its commitment," regarding funding public schools, said Sen. David Jordan, D-Greenwood. The Mississippi Adequate Education Program, or MAEP, the formula that provides additional funds for the state's poorer school districts, has a $1 billion deficit because the lawmakers have not fully funded the formula for eight of the 10 years the formula has been law, he said.

"Here we are going to a new model where we actually split the resources that we have when we haven't done an adequate job with a single (model)," he said. Jordan cited instances where public schools have worked well to educate children. "All this stuff about public education not working is not so. ... There are too many unanswered questions about charter schools," he said.

Only about 17 percent of charter schools have been successful, added Rep. 
Alyce Clark, who moderated the forum. "Let us look at what we're thinking about doing," so that we don't go backward, she said.

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