Tennessee Withholds $3.4 Million From Nashville Schools Over Charter Refusal →
This is a fascinating situation to watch unfold, especially because things like this don’t happen every day. I found this particularly interesting:
(early in the article)
The metropolitan Nashville school system has 81,000 students, about 70 percent of whom receive free or reduced-price meals, according to the district. In addition, nearly one-quarter of the district’s students come from homes where English is not the native language. That level of diversity and economic hardship, the district says, is one of the reasons the district repeatedly rejected an application by Great Hearts Academies to open a charter school, saying that affluent students would be over-represented in the proposed school’s population because of the school’s proposed location.
(then further down the page…)
In a July 27 blog post, the district, in a letter to the state school board explaining its rejection of Great Hearts’ proposal, delved into the demographic issue more deeply. It highlighted the makeup of 12 Great Hearts schools in Arizona (where Great Hearts Academies is based) listed black students as less than 9 percent of their total enrollment; none of the schools listed Hispanic enrollment as greater than 23 percent of their total enrollment; and all but one of the schools had less than 13 percent of its students receiving free and reduced-price meals.
In addition, among the schools identified by the no more than 8 percent of Great Hearts students are in special education programs, and no school had more than 1.2 percent of its students in English-language-learner programs.
