In Birmingham Schools, More Days Of Drama

The schools of Birmingham, Alabama, have seen many days of drama. Sometimes, behind that drama lies a tangled and complicated web of connections across many education factions.

Birmingham’s early battles.

From the beginning, Alabama’s constitution called for segregated schools. When Brown v. Board of Education first chipped away at segregated schools in 1954, Alabama was one of the states that dragged its heels to avoid compliance; in 1956, the legislature eliminated the state’s responsibility to provide any education at all.

In 1960, a Black barber in Birmingham brought suit to be allowed to enroll his two sons in a white elementary school. Armstrong v. Birmingham Board of Education dragged on until 1963, when the courts ruled that Alabama needed to get its desegregation plan in gear.

The following September, Armstrong arrived to successfully enroll his two boys. 300 of the school’s 345 white students stayed home, and that night, a bomb blew up the home of civil rights activist Arthur Shore. To avoid total chaos, the district closed briefly. When it reopened, Governor George Wallace had ordered the Alabama State Troopers to block Black students from entering white schools, prompting President Kennedy to send in the National Guard.

Armstrong’s case was not finally settled until 1983, when a U.S. District judge declared that Bermingham schools were “unitary” and no longer in need of desegregation. In the meantime, white flight had reduced Birmingham school enrollment from 70,000 to 43,000 and Black students from 50% to 80% of the school population.

Alabama advocacy for choice

In 2000, the Black Alliance for Educational Options was launched. Margaret Spellings’s US Department of Education gave them unsolicited grants for three years (2002-2004) totaling $1.5 million; their mission was “to actively support parental choice to empower families and increase educational options for black children.” It was also backed by money from the Walton Family Foundation and the Bradley Foundation, longtime supporters of charter schools and choice.

In 2011, BAEO was working in Alabama, part of the push that eventually brought charter school laws and school choice to the state.

But within a few years, BAEO was splintering and struggling for funding; in October of 2017, it announced it was folding and on December 31, 2017, its Facebook page noted “Today is the last day for us.”

As BAEO’s was winding down, Black Alabamians For Education (BA4E) was founded to continue the advocacy for school choice in Alabama with a mission “to equip, inform and empower Black families with information on accessing a high quality education.” (They actually filed with the IRS as “Black Alabamians for Educational Options.”)

How big is BA4E? They list their address as “Suite #403”at a Birmingham address that Google maps shows as a one-story UPS store. But they have plenty of connections. They were part of the AAA Coalition, a group that advocated for the Alabama Accountability Act, a tax credit scholarship school voucher program. The coalition included many players in the school choice arena, including Excel In Ed (Jen Bush’s choice group), American Federation for Children (the Betsy DeVos choice group), Ed Choice (formerly the Friedman Foundation), Catholic Education Partners (the church’s choice advocacy group), the Alabama Policy Institute (free market think tank), and a couple of charter school organizations.

BA4E’s closest working relationship is with New Schools for Alabama, an organization whose mission is “to support the growth of excellent public charter schools in Alabama.” NSFA’s CEO is Tyler Barnett, who started his career with two years in Teach for America and went on to several choice and reform-related gigs around the country before landing in Alabama. Their work focuses on providing training, development, and technical assistance to launch new charter schools.

NSFA is a successor to Alabamians for Public Charter Schools, a group formed in 2013, and actually filed its 2018 IRD 990 form as the Alabama Coalition for Public Charter Schools, with most of the same directors and with Barnett as executive director. (Barnett does not appear on non-profit registration records for Alabamians for Public Charter Schools, but several NSFA directors do, including Emily Schultz, then of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools).

In 2019, the Alabama Coalition for Public Charter Schools, “doing business as” NSFA, applied for a grant from the federal charter school grant program (CSP). That’s the grant program that has faced criticism for waste and fraud and a lack of oversight; last year, the Biden administration added regulations to put additional guardrails on CSP’s spending of public tax dollars.

For NSFA, the CSP program represented a considerable financial boost. Their IRS 990 form shows that in 2015-2017, the group took in a total of around $80,000 in gifts and grants. In 2019, that total was over $2 million. NSFA reported that their CSP grant would be for $25 million.

In their grant application, NSFA explained that it would “quarterback” with the lead partners: the state department of education, Insignia Partners (a consultant group that works extensively with charter school operators), and Black Alabamians for Education. Their application promised two “primary strategies”— first, to “recruit, train and support aspiring charter leaders to start new schools in Alabama” with an emphasis on Birmingham, Montgomery, Mobile and Huntsville, and second, to recruit successful charter management businesses to start new schools in Alabama. The big goal: launch 15 new charter schools in 5 years, targeting those four communities.

BA4E would be responsible for grassroots activism and community engagement; the proposal said that “the organization will commit 100% of its time” to NSFA’s project. In other words, BA4E was to work full time for NSFA, harnessing its mission “to equip, inform, and empower Black families with information on accessing a high-quality education” in service of NSFA’s mission to use its CSP grant to seed new charter schools in Alabama.

In particular, BA4E was tagged to “build a presence” and “identify potential supporters” in the community, targeting regions in which potential leaders and allies for charter school growth could be cultivated.

The main contact for monthly check-ins would be Neonta Williams. An army veteran, Wiliams had worked in several community service jobs before landing at the Nashville office of BAEO as Family and Community Organizer. When BAEO folded, Williams spent six months leading Nashville Rise before founding BA4E.

A decade of new struggles

In 2012, the district was taken over by the state, citing financial issues. A federal lawsuit followed, with state superintendent Dr. Tommy Bice fighting to make the takeover stick. Bice retired in 2016 and moved on to the post of Education Director for the Mike and Gillian Goodrich Foundation; in 2019, he opened the largest charter school in the state, i3 Academy, located in Birmingham. The Goodrich Foundation wrote a letter of support for the NSFA grant application.

The state takeover lasted about two years. While it was under state control, the state was also pushing for a charter school law, finally passed in 2015.

In 2019, Birmingham City Schools board member and pubhlic school activist Terri Michal looked through the CSP application and discovered that it included reference to a charter school using a building sold to the by BCS; Michal was unaware of the sale.

So she turned back to the board of the Alabama Coalition for Public Charter Schools (NSFA’s previous name) and found the name J. Michael Carpenter, a founder of Bloc Global, a real estate company that BCS had hired during takeover to sell surplus companies, creating the appearance of a direct pipeline for charter developers to get their hands on. That may also explain how NSFA knew that a charter had bought a district building and a board member did not.

Then, in 2021, Neonta Williams ran for a seat on the Birmingham School Board. She labeled herself an “education reform advocate,” and responded to the issue of her educational priorities:

I had so many people say, ‘How can a charter school supporter run for a public school system?’… Because I’m not a supporter of schools. I’m a supporter of parents. And regardless of whatever option they choose… it should be quality.

Williams won the election 2,064 to 1,608. The incumbent that she defeated was Terri Michal. And Williams’s day job was still to devote 100% of her time to helping NSFA launch charter schools, including schools in Birmingham.

Entanglements between public and private schools emerged almost immediately. In Alabama, charter schools can only be authorized by certain local school boards or the state charter school commission that can override the local board’s decision. Freedom Prep applied to the Birmingham board to open a Birmingham campus in 2022.

Freedom Prep is one of the charter schools with which NSFA says it has a relationship, and Freedom Prep’s application indicated that they had already met with ”an elected BCS School Board member, and a Black Alabamians for Education representative.”

In January of 2022, the Freedom Prep application came before the BCS board. Superintendent Dr. Mark Sullivan recommended the board reject the application, which they did. Williams praised the charter, but voted against it, citing the newly-elected board’s need to become better equipped for charter school oversight. Freedom Prep turned to the Alabama Public Charter Schools Commission for approval, using some of Williams comments to support their application, and in May, they were approved.

People I have spoken to in the community were troubled by Williams’s involvement as someone was hired to promote charter development as well as serving to represent the interests of the public school system. [I reached out to Williams by e-mail for a response; if that response comes, I will add it to this piece.]

In 2022, the Alabama Policy Institute complained that Birmingham’s board was denying most charter applicants.

Also in 2022, former board member Terri Michal filed a complaint with Alabama’s ethic commission, arguing that Williams’ charter advocacy with BA4E for NSFA was in direct conflict with her role as an elected board member and charter school authorizer. The ethics board determined there was no evidence of a violation.

But controversy continued. In February of 2023, at a board meeting, Birmingham parent David Perry spoke during public comment to ask the board to investigate allegations that Sullivan was engaged in “inappropriate relationship” with a board member. Perry was chief of staff and finance director for Governor Robert Bentley from 2011-2014 and serves as Treasurer of the Birmingham Education Foundation; he’s also married to Emily Schultz, currently executive director of Alabama Families for Great Schools, an organization that works to promote and support charter schools in Alabama.

Sullivan hired a lawyer to defend himself; that lawyer sent a letter to the board’s counsel charging that a board member was working with a community group to discredit Sullivan. Perry insisted that he was not connected with any such group, that he had no direct knowledge, that he was just hearing “from all over the community” that the board was “paralyzed by their inability to deal with the issue,” though it’s not clear what “dealing” the board would need to do. No evidence was presented, and all parties denied any such relationship (nor is it clear that such a relationship would be an ethics violation if it did exist). Callers to local radio shows said it was just “the charter people” trying to get Sullivan out of the way.

“They were told and told not to go ahead with it,” one local critic told me, “but they went ahead anyway.”

But Birmingham remains one of those school districts where it is simply one thing after another. Today, they have about just under 22,000 students enrolled; of those, 19,166 are Black. 70% are eligible for free and reduced lunch. State test scores lag behind the rest of the state (and Alabama lags behind the country).