What Is Omni Prep Thinking?

This past spring saw a glimmer of hope for charter school accountability in Tennessee and Memphis. For the first time state law would require several under performing charters to be closed down due to performance. These schools had continually under performed on state assessments.

Among those schools was Omni Prep academy. Run by the brother of US Senator Cory Booker, the school has consistently scored below the county average:

At Omni Lower, just 13.6 percent of students are proficient in math and reading. Student performance decrease by 4.4 percent in reading and 1.1 percent in math this year. Omni Middle had the highest amount of growth of all of the closing charters, with 28.6 percent of students reading on grade level, a 9 percentage point increase, and 31.1 percent proficiency in math, a 17.6 percentage point improvement from the previous year.

An important part of building a charter school sector that can ensure quality choices is ensuring that schools that under perform are shut down, which is why I supported this legislation from the state.

Why not give them another chance? Its simple really – charter schools are put in place to try different methods and strategies of educating students. If they don’t work, they should cease to exist. Research also suggests that charters that struggle early on will continue to struggle. Failure to shut down consistently low performing charters therefore makes perfect sense.

That’s why I was surprised when the SCS Board voted to allow Omni Prep to stay open in June. Omni Prep lobbied heavily at the state capitol for an exemption this year, which resulted in the state bouncing the decision back to Shelby County. And rather than close down a school that has continually under performed and send a message, the district chose to keep it open and give them another chance to improve their scores.

At the same time, the district chose not to approve Omni’s application to open a high school to complement its middle and elementary schools. While the district failed to take a stand on the quality charter issued, at the very least they chose not to allow an organization running struggling schools to expand.

That’s why I was even more surprised, shocked even, when I read today that Omni Prep is essentially slapping the board in the face by appealing their rejected charter application to the state board of education. They cited as their reason an “unfair process” that led to them not being approved.

This whole situation strikes me as almost comical and I hope the huberis being displayed by Omni isn’t being lost on some of the folks over there. You almost get shut down but receive grace from the board, and then turn right around and bash that same board for not allowing you to open a new school when your existing ones continue to struggle? That takes some chutzpah.

One would think that Omni would be happy simply with the opportunity to improve their existing schools. But apparently that isn’t enough.

Next steps are that Omni can appeal to the state board of education. Regardless of whether Omni believes that the process was correctly followed by SCS, I can only hope that the state sees the same thing that SCS apparently did the second time around – a charter school that by all rights should have been shut down but was given a second chance to improve its existing schools. Lets hope that Omni wisens up, gives up on this tangent and spends its energy where it needs to be – on improve the outcomes for the kids that it already has before expanding.

On a statewide note, this is also a perfect opportunity for the board of education to send a message to future charter operators who may pursue a similar path by saying “no.” The board needs to take a stand and say “we will only approve applications for schools with a legitimate track record of success.” To do otherwise will open the flood gates for similar challenges in the future, and may spell the beginning of the decline in the quality of Tennessee’s charter school sector.

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