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- The state of education and education funding in Memphis, tonight on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] I'm Eric Barnes at The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by Natalie McKinney.

She is co-founder and executive director of Whole Child Strategies.

Thanks for being here.

- Thank you.

- And Terence Patterson is president and CEO of Memphis Education Fund.

Thank you for being here again.

- Thank you, good to see you.

- Along with Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

We'll talk today about education, about funding, about the impact of COVID, and as we were talking before, I mean, I always want to believe we're post-COVID, but obviously we are very much, as you said, mid-COVID before we started, and there's big talk of changing funding from the state.

You're a part of that Terence, but first just let's talk real quick, and I'll start with you, Natalie.

Give me the 30-second or so, what does Whole Child Strategies do?

- We are a place-based, neighborhood-based organization that supports, organizes, mobilizes, and engages community led solutions in identifying and addressing the root causes to why children are not getting to school every day on time and ready to learn.

So it's really dealing with the out of school factors.

- The out of school factors, okay.

And I'm reminded, and viewers know that I quote this all the time, but it really has always stuck with me, Dorsey Hopson, former SCS superintendent, one time talking about the challenges of education said, "You know, Eric, we deal with kids who maybe "didn't have dinner, didn't have their books, "walked to school in the rain, "got to school late, "and now we've got to teach them, and we have to deal with all those things before."

And so I'm happy to have you on and talk about those things, literally, the Whole Child stuff, so thank you for being here.

Terence, Memphis Education Fund does what?

- Yeah, so we are focused on Memphis.

We're focused on improving public education.

We are a non-profit investment fund.

So we make investments that support improving public schools, whether that be traditional school systems or also charter schools, and then we also are a convener.

We believe that we should bring people together.

We should learn from best practices around the country, but then we should also have conversations and dialogue in our communities here in Memphis to make sure that we're talking to each other and we're always striving for continuous improvement.

- We've done a lot of shows on education in the now I think 11 years that we've been doing Behind the Headlines, and Memphis, long, you know, before we started this, it was teacher town, it was ground zero for all this innovation, experimentation, and testing, the Gates money, the ASD, all kinds of things.

What do we know now?

And you were also at, for however long at, I don't mean that dismissively, for how long at Shelby County Schools, you were director of policy and at the Legacy Memphis City Schools.

- Total of 10 years between the 2.

- Yeah.

I'll stay with you.

What works?

- I think we need to, I don't think we've found out what works yet.

We know what doesn't work.

We know that just focusing in on school buildings, focusing just on teachers, focusing just on school leaders, focusing just on curriculum is not the end all, be all to make us lessen the opportunity gap for our less advantaged children, right.

So that's why the work I do, because I think there's research out there and it's been out there since we started reform back in the 1990s, that about 60% change in test scores are due to out-of-school factors we've gotta deal with, and that just translates to poverty, and the stressors that go along with that.

- Yeah.

What works, and what doesn't?

- Yeah, so I think focused investment does work, making sure that you are identifying challenges in a particular community, in a particular school building, and you are very focused on that particular school building, community and those children, right?

This is not a one size fits all approach that we can take.

I think the other thing that's really important is that school choice matters.

We need to make sure that we are providing an option for every student in his or her community to be able to have a higher quality option.

And so I think those two things, as we think about the emerging public school system, if we can focus on those, I think that's helpful.

And then one thing that we've always known is that the most important factor is the teacher and the leader in that building, and how can we better support our teachers and also support our school leaders to making sure that they have the resources that they need to deliver for children.

- Bring it to Bill.

- Natalie, it is, I don't think anyone with any kind of knowledge at any level about education would deny that that what happens before the child comes to school and after the child leaves school is just as vital to making what happens while they're in school relevant to them and something that is productive for them.

But is there a tendency in education sometimes to say, yes, that has to happen before and after school, but we're just going to focus on K through 12, and try to find other people to do the before and after part of it?

Is the problem so big that people have a problem understanding the scale of it and how to scale it?

- I think you asked a very important question.

I think what we have to understand is that education is a factor in making sure that we ensure that children have productive adult lives.

It is not the key.

It is one of many systems that have to operate interchangeably, interoperably in order for us to do what we need to do with children.

So I think we need to ensure that we're not just focusing on the education system to do something they don't have the expertise or the resources to do.

So when we talk about healthcare, when we talk about mental healthcare, when we talk about transportation, when we talk about food insecurity, the school, the education system was never built to do those things.

- Right, and those things are not extras.

Those are part of the whole cloth, for lack of a better term.

- So this is about systems change and this is about transforming systems.

This is about systems becoming aligned.

I think we far too often look at one system and say, you know, here's my problem, you need to take care of all my problems, when you have other systems that are out there that were designed to meet those issues.

So how do we think about it less so in a vertical manner, but think about it in a horizontal manner?

How do those all align and connect.

And it's complicated, but that doesn't mean we don't do it.

- Right, right.

Terence, in terms of the fund doing things that it wants to do, are there limits when the Tennessee legislature specifically says, You have to do this and you can't do this?

Does that limit what you try to do with public schools?

- Not necessarily, right?

Because when we think about how we can support our public schools, and most importantly, how we can support our students, we think directly about student needs.

And when we think about those student needs, oftentimes, it's making sure that the curriculum matches.

It's making sure that it's focused on the social and emotional needs of students.

But I think what's really important for us is, if you look back a decade ago, Tennessee, Memphis had 69 or so schools that were on a failing schools list.

We have now cut that number in half.

Does that mean that those schools are now at the top of the list?

Not necessarily, but certainly we are making improvement, and we have found ourselves in a generational challenge, and it's not going to take a year or five years to get out of this thing.

But what we are seeing is that whether the legislature makes certain rules or guidelines, we still can invest directly in our school systems, we can still make sure we are supporting choice, and we can make sure that we're doing things that are important to support the needs of the student.

- Natalie, to his point about failing schools and the work that has happened over a lot of years on this, what I've heard people say about the pandemic so often is that it pointed to problems that were already there.

It didn't really create a lot of new problems.

So from your organization's work, did we lose ground in the pandemic or did we gain a sense of urgency?

- I think we gained a sense of urgency.

I think it illuminated many of the problems.

I think for me, I always say, Don't let a crisis go to waste.

And so it actually got people focused on the people who had immediate needs and realized, people realized, oh, this has always been there.

It was just, now it's amplified, and now we can actually start meeting those needs.

Because part of our work is stop coming top down.

Ask the people who are being impacted by these systems, ask them what are their needs and then focus those resources there, and I think that this allowed us to do that.

- So many questions.

The system, I'm going to go really deep for a second.

Give me real specific examples, and I'm only guessing of, when you talk about aligning the systems and approaching a whole, I mean, does that mean working with, it's not having the teacher do everything, right, and it's not necessarily, I assume, having the school system do everything.

It's sort of saying, do we have a healthcare needs, a child with asthma that's preventing them from getting to school?

Do we have food insecurity issues, so we've got to work with the food bank to take care of that so they can come to school.

And I'm just making those kinds of things up.

But is that, walk through maybe an example or two of what that means.

- So I can give you a real life example.

So during the pandemic when we were trying to figure out how do we ensure that children have access to the virtual learning, right?

So you needed, in order to have access to the internet, you have to have power, right?

You have to have your MLGW.

So what we did is we took data, we found out where students were living using their addresses, and we worked with MLGW through one of our partners to ascertain what houses had power or not that were associated with school-aged children being in it so that you could make sure that we could then put, get the resources like from the CSA to make sure that they had money to pay for those MLGW bills.

So that's what I'm talking about, yeah.

- And do you get resistance?

Do people, you can name names, I'm not asking you name names.

Are there people that say, Well, that's a nice to have, or that's unnecessary?

- I think we do.

I mean, I don't think anyone tells me that, but-- [laughing] - I've been curious, the pushback, because I think it sounds so, it sounds great, and it sounds commonsensical, but I guess there's some people are like, well, people need to take care of themselves and lift themselves up by their bootstraps or something.

- So that's a falsity that we just need to all just stop saying.

It's like, we know that we had systems that were created to do exactly what they're doing, which is the have, the have-nots, right.

- Yeah.

- And so, because we know that these systems were set that way, we can't then say, they're working exactly how they were supposed to work, and now you can't say, you know, well that's because, you know, you're further victimizing the victim and blaming the victim for a system that was built this way.

So when you think about some, and I'm not blaming anyone for all of these things, but I'm thinking about, think about the benefit system, right?

When you think about people who are on, who get help, who get benefits.

Food, SNAP, [overlapping discussion].

Part of you getting benefits, qualifying for benefits is that you're looking for a job.

As soon as I find a job, you decrease my benefits to the point where I cannot sustain myself.

So I'm actually able to sustain myself better if I'm on the benefits.

So that doesn't make any sense, but that's the way the system was built.

- Yeah, yeah.

You talked, Terence, about choice and the importance of choice.

And so in Memphis, and I went to, I think you all host Memphis Guide, is that-- - Memphis School Guide.

- Memphisschoolguide.org.

It was fascinating.

My kids are in college and out of college now, but it was just fascinating.

And it includes, it was a reminder of, you know, everything from private schools, charter schools, suburban schools, Shelby County schools, within Shelby County, you've got different types of schools.

Is that choice overwhelming for parents?

And part of, I think, what memphisschoolguide.org tries to do is kind of walk parents and families through the choices they might make and how they might go to an optional school or a charter school and find the right child.

But is there too much choice now?

- No, so they can never be too much choice, and I think that's one of the things that we've struggled with as a system is trying to identify and make decisions for parents and for communities.

And what we've tried to do is make sure that we lay out all of the choices, give all of the information, because that's another piece, is that there is so much information and making sure that parents and communities understand where the information is, make it easily accessible for them to make the decision so that we aren't making decisions for other folks.

So it's not necessarily overwhelming, but it's just important, and it's something frankly we've just failed to do on a consistent basis.

And one thing I did want to highlight because Natalie made a really good point in terms of why it's challenging.

It really comes down to partnership.

And if we can strengthen partnerships, I think it will help us all really put our resources together to support children.

And then the second thing that's really important is this notion of innovation.

When we think about the system and the pandemic, one of the big challenges that we face was that there was a lag in how we were leveraging technology in our classrooms.

Another one was the school calendar.

If we had had a different type of calendar, perhaps, where we didn't have a long gap, perhaps there could have been a more continuous engagement with the school system and students.

And so I think if we can continue to think about partnership and then innovation, I think we continue to do our best, again, to just serve kids and serve our communities.

- Let me bring Bill in.

- In terms of school choice, we've had several discussions here about housing that revolve around where people want to live and where people choose to live.

Do you think there is a divide when it comes to school choice, where parents and children have to attend school and where they want to attend school?

- Yeah, that's why we do our work.

I mean, we don't believe that where you live should dictate the quality of the education that you can get.

I mean, every child should have access to a multitude of options, whether it's an optional school in his or her community, whether it's a charter school in his or her community, or whether it's a traditional public district school.

And I think that is the challenge.

And this is not just an education challenge.

This is a broader community challenge that we have got to wrestle with and solve for.

But when we think about our work, our job is to make sure we're supporting all of the schools in the system of schools so that what you just described won't happen.

So that if I live in 38104, I have access to great schools.

If I live in 38126, I have access to great schools.

And right now that's not happening.

but we are making progress.

I mean, we are making sure, and we're working closely with the district and other school leaders that if there are great schools in certain communities, what might it look like to replicate those schools in other communities?

And if there are underperforming schools, let's take action on those underperforming schools and allow those students to go to higher quality options.

- Natalie, your thoughts on that.

I mean, some folks might look at that at that gap and might say, Well, the answer is transportation to the better schools.

- Yeah, and I'm glad that you asked that question and I'm glad you put it the way you did, because I think people don't think about what choice in the way that we have done it so far, what that has really done to the system.

You brought up a great point that if I live here, I shouldn't have to go across town to have a choice of a traditional or optional or charter school.

It should be a good school within wherever I live.

And so that's, I think we've done a little bit of a disservice to ourselves and we need to pull back and think about how do we make that happen?

Because now the choice is, I'll give you an example.

We live in Vollentine Evergreen.

Our choices for our children were Vollentine Elementary School, and for high school, was Manassas.

Our children, but neither one of those, just recently Vollentine became an optional school, but Manassas had one AP course, one.

My oldest son, we had to take him across town to White Station so he could have access to multiple AP courses.

And so that's a disservice.

I would love for my children to go to school in the neighborhood.

Matter of fact, they might've been on time.

[laughing] If I could just walk up to the corner and say, Bye.

And so we have to think about what choice looks like.

Does choice mean that I have to get my kid to the best school because this is where the best schools are in these particular neighborhoods, or it's choice really about making sure that I have access and opportunity within my community, and I like the latter of those things.

- That's why the work that the district is doing around Re-Imagine 901 is so vital and crucial, because it is taking a look by community what do we need to make sure that all students are being served?

And we can support that work, making sure that there are the right choices, giving community input, giving feedback, but then also pushing and asking tough questions and saying, Hey, why does that community have those four or five really good schools and this community only has one AP class?

And I think it's not until we start having those conversations that we can see the map change and evolve so that this true definition of choice is one that works for all parents and not just a certain group of parents and families.

- I think a month ago or so, Governor Lee called for a full overview of the state's funding formula.

This gets back to BEP.

What is it again, Bill?

- Basic Education Program.

- Someday.

And in my 14th year of doing Behind the Headlines, Basic Education Program, it goes back, but this, and I'm just going to quote from that, what the statement from the governor, which was, "The state's funding formula is to focus "on the student investment strategy "that emphasizes all students rather than systems "empowers parents who engage "in the child's education outcomes, "ensures all students are prepared "for post-secondary success, and reflects Tennesseeans' values."

There are 18 subcommittees around the state working on what that means.

It sounds good, but I don't really know what it means.

And you are on one of the subcommittees, Terence.

What is, I can't, it's one of those things that sounds really good in the open, but what does that mean?

You know, yeah, of course we want those things, but how does that translate?

- Well, the first thing is what is the BEP?

I mean, when you look at, it's too darn complicated.

It's got 46 factors.

- This is the current BEP?

- The current formula.

If you ask five people walking down the street, they probably couldn't tell you how to calculate it or what it means.

If you ask folks that work in this every day, it would be a challenge for me to explain to you how the funding formula works.

So one, it's too complicated.

We've got to break it down and make it, it's complex, but we've got to make it understandable.

The second thing is, when you look at the other states across the country, not even just our neighbors, the funding that Tennessee students are receiving, it routinely is in the bottom 10 out of 50 states in terms of the money that our students are receiving, anywhere from $9,000 to $11,000 per student.

So we've got to invest more in our children.

So I think if we can make the formula less complicated and increase the resources that are going to students that are matching what the student's needs, then we can make progress.

And oh, by the way, the formula has been around for 30 years or so and hasn't really been changed.

And so I think this is a moment again to innovate and evolve how we think about it.

And what's important is that we need to base it on the students' needs.

It should be an equitable formula.

Not every student needs the same things, right?

There are certain students that may need greater levels of support from a social-emotional standpoint.

There may be gifted students that need certain resources.

And so that formula really should focus on the diverse needs of the students in a diverse set of communities.

- Somebody who I was talking to about this change and the way this is worded, and this kind of, this guiding principle said, Oh, they want vouchers.

Is this, I mean, basically if you're going to be more student-centered and family-centered and parent-centered, and you have, you know, legislature and a governor who, you know, it's a super majority of Republicans and there's a lot of pressure to go down the voucher road, is that part of the conversation on the subcommittee you're on, is that we need more vouchers to give parents more choice?

- Yeah, so not a part of the conversation at the moment.

What's important is listening to the community, making sure we understand what parents and students need, and it's really about investing in our students and our public school students and making sure they have the resources that they need.

- Well, what, go ahead, you were gonna say... [speaking faintly] [laughing] [overlapping discussion] - Yeah, we have an opportunity to be innovative.

So when we talk about student needs and we talk about the different systems, if the governor is thinking about really, really addressing student needs, he has multiple funding streams to do that in, right.

So education needs to be around education.

When we're talking about social and emotional mental health, we're talking about maybe using TANF funds, or human resources, looking at all of his streams of income to address student needs, because it's not just in the building, but it's also outside of the building.

And with the, in case of the BEP, it's on 2.0, 2.0 was never fully funded.

So because it was never, and that's, I know 10 years, well now, what is it, 15 years ago, it was never fully funded.

But I think when you're on that committee, because I wasn't invited to that.

[laughing] When you're on that committee, we have an opportunity to really think about how do we address student needs.

They're not all in the school.

They are outside of the building as well.

So as you said before, you bring them in the building, but if they don't, if they've slept in the car, or they've slept on somebody's floor, or if they didn't have heat, or if they didn't have food, I don't care how many resources you put in the building, I don't care how many good teachers you put in the building, you are not going to get that child to engage.

- Just a minute and a half.

Bill, you have the last question.

- Terence, you're on the urban education subcommittee, and I'm reminded that the pendulum seems to swing in BEP, because we've had two major lawsuits.

One was by the urban school systems, and then the other one was by the rural school systems.

So what I'm hearing you saying is that more money and a simpler formula, but mainly more money might end the pendulum swinging to a great degree.

- Yeah, that's absolutely right, but before we make any decisions, and this is why these subcommittees and community engagement is so important, we need to listen and hear from the community.

I mean, certainly those are two sort of big pieces that are really important, but we also need to understand what should go into the formula.

What's important outside of the classroom that we could bring closer to the classroom.

So yes, those are really important.

And at the end of the day, it's about equity, but it's also about making sure our students in Tennessee and in Memphis can compete, not just with the rest of the country, but with the world.

And when we look at how our students are receiving resources, it just pales in comparison to our counterparts, and we'd be doing students a disservice if we didn't evaluate this and we really didn't crank it up and try to make a better formula.

- I have so many more questions, but we're right up against the clock.

I think I'm going to leave it there.

Again, Natalie McKinney from Whole Child Strategies, thanks for being here.

And Terence Patterson, Memphis Education, thank you for being here.

Bill, thank you for being here.

That is all the time though.

If you missed any of the show, you can get it at wkno.org, or you can search Behind the Lines on YouTube.

There's also a full podcast of the show that you can get on The Daily Memphian site, iTunes, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks, and we'll see you next week.

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