Politics. Just politics.
That was the verdict this past week in Clayton County, where a new charter school had to sue for the right to open its doors to 200 students.
“There’s some folks that don’t want a charter school over there. And they’re trying their best to obstruct that,” Superior Court Judge Matthew O. Simmons explained in ordering an end to the bureaucratic machinations that had kept the Utopian Academy for the Arts from starting classes in Riverdale.
Anti-charter politics would seem to be a self-inflicted wound for its practitioners, and not only because Clayton voters approved the 2012 charter-schools constitutional amendment by the largest margin of any Georgia county. On Thursday, the same day Utopian’s students finally got down to learning, their peers in East Lake were celebrating what can happen when a community and a charter school actually embrace one another.
Last month, classes began at the dazzling new facility for Drew Charter School. The building houses students in pre-K through the 10th grade — Drew will graduate its first high-school class in 2017 — and cost $55 million in mostly private money.
When Drew became Atlanta’s first charter school in 2000, few believed such a jewel would ever be found in one of the city’s roughest neighborhoods.
East Lake was “one of the few areas of the city you were afraid to go by yourself,” former Mayor Shirley Franklin recalled after a celebratory luncheon Thursday. “Families were locked out of the economic mainstream” while other parts of the city thrived.
Times have changed, and Drew isn’t the only catalyst. But since the month Drew opened, only 11 of the 86 Atlanta neighborhoods measured by Zillow.com have enjoyed bigger increases in median estimated home value than East Lake. Then, East Lake’s median home value was virtually the same as that of the entire city; now it’s almost 50 percent above the city median.
Drew also has the test scores to be a scholastic success story. It has long been a top performer among its Atlanta Public Schools peers. At Thursday’s luncheon, Gov. Nathan Deal said Drew is tops in Georgia among schools whose students come mostly from low-income and minority families.
As that last statistic suggests, all this progress has happened while East Lake remained both a mixed-income and a majority African-American neighborhood. “The key is how do you transform a community without transplanting a community,” Don Doran, Drew’s head of school, told me Thursday. “There hasn’t been a super-gentrification.”
What there has been is a lot of work and investment by a lot of people, spearheaded by legendary real-estate developer Tom Cousins.
“I was not nearly this optimistic” about the effort to turn around East Lake, Franklin said. “This has just blown the roof off anything I thought was possible.”
Still, she believes the model can be replicated, although “it’s not easy; you have to have clear goals and a clear mission, and it’s only done through partnership and trust.”
All the more reason for people in Clayton County and elsewhere to stop playing education politics and start working together.
