Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed Brian Haas of Del Ray Education in the studio to describe the process by which a charter school receives approval in the state of Tennessee, and the current status of their efforts.
Leahy: In the studio, Brian Haas, who’s with Del Ray Education, which is in the process of helping Founders Classical of Brentwood and Founders Classical of Hendersonville get their applications through so that we can have a couple of classical public charter schools in Williamson and then one in Sumner County. Now, you’re kind of at the very last step of the process today, correct?
Haas: Yes. Today is the final vote by the State Appeals Commission on both of our applications.
Leahy: Yes. It’s called the Tennessee Public School Charter Commission. It was established under a 2019 law. It used to be that here in Tennessee if the state school board denied a charter application, you would go and apply to the, I think, the Tennessee State Board of Education.
They changed that in 2019 because of all the time and effort that it took to review it. And so now this is a nine-member board. They’ve got a staff. And so once you are denied at the local education agency or county level, describe to our listeners the process that you’ve gone through. Let’s focus on Founders Classical of Brentwood here for just a moment.
Haas: Sure. So we were actually denied twice; we had the option [for an appeal], we got an initial denial at the county level, then we get an appeal at the county level. And after a sort of half-hearted renewal, or review, of the appeal, we went on to the state.
We have 10 days after that denial to appeal to the state. And then it’s actually kind of a similar process. There is a committee, a review committee that is set up, and they actually go back and review both our application and the reasons provided by the district for denial.
There’s also the nine-member commission. They don’t review the reasons for the denial. They do a de novo review of the application on their own. And then the review committee makes a recommendation to that commission on whether they should deny it.
Leahy: Now, who’s on the review committee?
Haas: It’s basically three folks, and then there are some others.
Leahy: Are they staff members?
Haas: Yes.
Leahy: So they’re all staffers.
Haas: Yes.
Leahy: Okay, so none of them are elected in the review committee.
Haas: Correct.
Leahy: And so did you ever get a good explanation from Williamson County as to why your application was denied?
Haas: Their public claim on it is that we didn’t meet the state-provided rubric for scoring the application. They said that we did not meet the state standards for a lot of this.
Leahy: This is me talking to you. It seems to me all they do is … this is subjective, and they make it up out of thin air. But that’s just my view.
Haas: There are criteria, but yes, a lot of the criteria are left up to them because you’re reviewing a variety of disparate things. Like if you’re just looking at the curriculum piece alone, I mean, think about all the potential things you can do to try to teach reading to children.
And so to try to come up with a scoring apples-to-apples comparison, it’s almost impossible to do. So, yes, a large part of it has to be.
Leahy: They basically just don’t want competition, it seems to me. My words, not yours. So, now, the review committee of the Tennessee Public School Charter Commission set up in law as an appeal process for charter schools that get denied by the county school board. These are unelected bureaucrats. The review committee has recommended against your approval. Why?
Haas: Again, they’re saying that we don’t – and this is speaking about an organization that’s been doing this for a total of 23 years, operating Founders – and they’re saying that the organization behind it is not qualified to operate the schools successfully.
Leahy: How many schools do you have?
Haas: Twenty-one schools.
Leahy: Twenty-one schools operating successfully. And how many of those are Founders Classical?
Haas: I’ve got a total of 90 schools.
Leahy: 90 schools.
Haas: Twenty-one are Founders.
Leahy: Okay, so they operate 90 public charter schools.
Haas: Yes.
Leahy: And they’ve been doing it for like 20-odd years, and 21 of them are classical, Founders Classical.
Haas: Yes.
Leahy: And the staff is saying you don’t know how to run schools?
Haas: Correct.
Leahy: Do they point to any terrible schools of those 90?
Haas: No, there are certainly some schools that are better than others, but all of the schools perform better than the district schools that they’re in, even in areas where you have high counts of English language learners.
Leahy: And let me just stop for a moment. That’s a very low bar for K-12 public schools, because they all perform pretty poorly, even in Williamson County, which is purportedly the best K-12 public school system in the state. Actually, I just saw a recent report that says it’s third-best. But their scores are really not that great.
Haas: According to an article that I just read about a month ago in the local mainstream newspaper, they are just getting back to their pre-COVID numbers, which were 67 percent of students reading at or above grade level and performing at or above grade level in math.
So that’s two-thirds of your kids are performing at grade level. That means a full third of them are not. And we actually ran some stats on a Founders school in a comparable district, with comparable demographics, which is Frisco, Texas. Ninety-two percent of those students were at or above grade level.
Leahy: Frisco, Texas is an affluent suburb of Dallas, in the north of Dallas. We’ve got friends and family that live there. I think Frisco, Texas is very comparable to Williamson County.
In fact, I think the city of Frisco is about 200,000 population. Williamson County is 240,000 and growing, but very affluent. And I think it’s a very good comparison.
Haas: And it’s also regarded as one of the top public school districts in the state of Texas. Yet the Founders school has seats for about 1,000 kids and has another, I think it’s 1,500 students on the waitlist.
And this again is one of the top-performing districts in Texas. They’ve got 1,500 students on the waitlist to get into the school.
Leahy: Texas does it a little differently than we do here in Tennessee. Here the local education agencies, usually at a county level, there they have independent school districts that are based at the city level for the most part.
Haas: Yes. Similar. Some of them are at the county level, and … they do operate as a fairly separate entity. In terms of the charter school process in Texas is completely different than here.
The charter school application process is approved at the state level from the very beginning. There is no application at the local level. You go straight to the Texas Education Administration and apply.
Leahy: And the approval rate there, I’m guessing, is higher than it is here in Tennessee.
Haas: It is, but it’s also very stringent. It’s very difficult. In fact, there are a couple of pretty high-quality charter operators that I’m familiar with, one of which applied here simultaneously with us in Tennessee in three counties. And they’ve actually been denied in Texas at the state level.
Leahy: Now, today is a big day. You’re going from here, there’s a meeting of the Tennessee Public School Charter Commission.
And the nine commissioners are going to vote on both Founders Classical-Brentwood and Founders Classical-Hendersonville and make that known today. Is that right?
Listen to today’s show highlights, including this interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
The public school system throws money around on useless and often questionable expenditures with our so much as a blink. They are unwilling and completely apposed to children actually being educated by people who can educate. The race to the bottom and turning these United States into a third world s— hole continues. Thank your local and National Democrat Party.