In search of diversity

Board of Education says Haas Hall not making grade

Haas Hall Academy, the four-campus public charter school that draws high-performing students focused on advancing themselves into college, isn’t making the grade when it comes to serving a diverse Northwest Arkansas population.

That’s the word from the Arkansas Board of Education, which a week ago unanimously rejected a diversity report from the open-enrollment school with campuses in Fayetteville, Springdale, Rogers and Bentonville

It’s the latest in a long and tense relationship between the academy, founded in 2004 by its superintendent, Martin Schoppmeyer, and the state’s Board of Education, which is responsible for monitoring these “public schools of choice” that are nonetheless dispatched from following many of the regulatory structures that apply to traditional public schools. The trade-off for those freedoms, necessarily, is a need to report back to the state in ways that demonstrate how the charter school is meeting the needs of local students — i.e., all students who either are or could be part of the student body at the charter.

Part of the price of open-charter admission is an ongoing expectation that charter schools will clearly demonstrate how they’re making a difference in educating young minds, and not just for students cherry-picked from traditional public schools.

Charter schools are, and never should be, set-it-and-forget-it institutions.

State officials have tried holding Haas Hall accountable for its student and teaching populations, largely because there’s a nagging suspicion the school can do better in spreading its achievement to a more diverse collection of students without upsetting its high achievement in graduating kids and sending them off prepared for college.

The school runs a lottery enrollment process that is designed to remove subjective selection of students from the process. Without pointing to any specific infractions, state leaders have worried that the process has not produced a diverse student population, nor has hiring at Haas Hall produced a diverse talent pool among educators.

The worry, expressed in many different ways over the years at the Board of Education, is that Haas Hall is exceptional because it takes exceptional students from local public schools and not necessarily because they’ve captured educational magic in a bottle.

We think that’s probably a overly negative analysis of what goes on at Haas Hall, but given some seriously stark differences in demographics when comparing the greater student population of Northwest Arkansas with the population of “scholars” taught at Haas Hall, it’s easy to be concerned.

Charter schools are not private schools. If they were, whose business would their educational practices and policies be? They do not have the power to tax directly, as local school districts do, but open-enrollment charter schools receive local, state and federal tax dollars to operate as public schools. Communities and their residents have a vested interest in making sure those tax dollars contribute to the kinds of schools they need, to build up educational opportunity for a wide swath of students, not just a chosen few.

Haas Hall serves nearly 1,000 students in grades seven through 12 at its four campuses.

At the Feb. 15 meeting of the Board of Education, Haas Hall representatives showed up for their annual effort to present details on student enrollment demographics and explain what they’re doing to increase diversity. It says something about the relationship between the board and Haas Hall that much of the school’s case was presented by its lawyer.

Fitzgerald Hill, a board member, found disappointment in the report on diversity in Haas Hall’s faculty.

“You have to be intentional,” Hill said. “I applaud everything you have, but there’s only a certain group of people that are getting exposed to these awesome educational opportunities you have.”

School officials said they were spending thousands on advertisements in English and Spanish to make potential students aware of Haas Hall’s opportunities. They’re attending educational festivals where students can be signed up directly.

But the Haas Hall report on diversity was short on information requested earlier from Schoppmeyer, board members decided. By rejecting it, the board gave Haas Hall a new appointment in April to try, try again. Rather than getting poor marks, it appears the board gave the school an “incomplete.”

As with any grade, it’s not necessarily simple to pinpoint what the problem is. Is Haas Hall truly failing in its diversity efforts, or is its leadership incapable or unserious about showing its work, perhaps emboldened by its national recognition as the best high school in the state by U.S. News and

World Report each of the past seven years?

That’s something to be proud of and demonstrates many positives happening within the walls of Haas Hall. But one of the serious questions of public policy when it comes to charter schools — operating independently of local school districts — is whether they serve the greater community good.

Charter schools exist in uneasy tension with local public school systems. Expression of such concerns are usually tamped down by public school officials who want to go along to get along in a region that has much support for alternatives to traditional public schools, whether that comes from the strong-on-school-choice Walton family or rank-and-file residents.

If Haas Hall can be accused of anything beyond being a strong educational institution, it seems at times to have a chip on its shoulder that its excellence does not serve to quell continued questioning about the student population it serves and whether its leaders are working hard enough to diversify its teaching staff and student population.

The answer to that is simple: Tough.

The state is right to continue the pressure to serve the greater community in a more thorough way, to drive the school’s leadership toward policies and practices that find ways to bridge racial and socio-economic gaps.

Haas Hall officials have consistently said the schools’ student population is reflective of those who choose to apply. It’s clear that answer is not enough.

Clearly, state officials believe Haas Hall delivers an overall positive in the world of K-12 education in Northwest Arkansas. Why, otherwise, would they have approved the school’s expansion from a single campus in Farmington in 2004 to four serving the region’s largest cities now?

But just graduating high-performing students — ones perhaps likely to succeed in any reasonably appropriate educational setting — is just a portion of Haas Hall’s responsibility to serve the public. It’s got to work harder on the missing pieces.

Diversity is hard work. It cannot just be the responsibility of the traditional public school systems.

Haas Hall cannot truly be an exceptional educational institution in Northwest Arkansas until its student body and faculty more seriously reflect the region’s diversity, in both its daily work and its student achievement. Then, when it’s being lauded as the best school in Arkansas, nobody will feel the need to put an asterisk within its educational statistics.