Good day, CharterFolk.
Today we are pleased to share with you a Contributor Column from Roblin Webb, Founder and CEO of Freedom Preparatory Academy Charter Schools.
We provide a brief bio for Roblin below.
Roblin Webb is the Founder and CEO of Freedom Preparatory Academy Charter Schools in Memphis and Birmingham, Alabama. She grew up in Camden, Arkansas, earned her undergraduate degree from Rhodes College in Memphis and her law and masters degrees from Rutgers University. She was a Building Excellent Schools Fellow in Boston in 2007 and has worked for New Leaders New Schools. Contact her at rwebb@freedomprep.org.
Let’s get straight to her post.
Why Expand Charter Schools Across the South? Because Our Ancestors Won’t Let Us Rest.
In my office at the headquarters of Freedom Prep Charter Schools, the charter school network I founded in Memphis in 2009, is a wall of precious historical photos. They feature Black children and their Black teachers, striving for excellence, in a time when every American system worked against them. My favorite, a 1935 photo of the Pee Dee Rosenwald School in Marion, SC, is pictured below.
These are the ancestors we honor in our work every day. They remind me what my people went through to get an education, how proud they were and how transformative education can be.
They are the reason I launched Freedom Prep, and part of the reason that I decided to expand Freedom Prep to Alabama this year. We opened Freedom Prep Birmingham in September with 39 kindergartners.
The other part of my decision to expand to Alabama happened when I was trying to say no to that very same expansion.
I had traveled to Montgomery, mostly to be polite and say no to the local partners in person. But they changed my mind with two things.
One was a visit to the Legacy Museum, built on the site of a former cotton warehouse where enslaved Black people labored; you can feel the energy there. It was a stark reminder that my work – and my passion, from the time I graduated from law school – is civil rights. I see improving education for Black and brown children as the civil rights issue of our time.
The other part happened when I visited a school in Montgomery. It felt like home, in both good and bad ways.
It felt warm because of the way the adults truly cared for the children. But it also felt like home in a not-so-positive way because what the kids were doing was so far behind where they should have been.
I saw super-caring adults, but also folks who were just not aware of what’s possible for children. It’s not for lack of effort, it’s lack of exposure to what’s truly needed to prepare our kids for college. (Yes, I’m still a big college-prep believer.)
I realized that day, as I had realized years before when I came back to Memphis after spending time in a fellowship in the Northeast, that nothing is going to change for our children unless people like me, who have been fortunate enough to be exposed to phenomenal schools and places that have far more funding, dedicate themselves to making that change.
Our expansion into Alabama has not been easy.
So many structural issues and systems need to change, starting with each Southern state’s per-pupil funding formula. Tennessee has done some work on that, which has been helpful, but it’s still not enough.
There’s got to be an influx of higher per-pupil funding from the state as well as philanthropic funding, both locally and nationally. As successful charter networks in the Northeast have shown, it’s not cheap to do this work well. It costs a lot to do what we need to do for kids who come from generational poverty.
In addition to funding issues, we’ve got to create an environment where innovative organizations that serve students well can thrive. Organizations across the South are so steeped in the old ways of doing things that they sometimes don’t even realize how difficult they make it for us to move forward. Lord knows I know how a loophole works, but it’s difficult even for me to figure out how to jump through the hoops and do what I know we need to do for our kids.
Finally, the bureaucracy is unreal, and is a steep impediment to true growth and what kids really need. No, I have not been a teacher or principal, which I actually think has made me far more innovative, because I had no set pedagogy, no set philosophy about how children should be educated. I saw what was working at established charter networks in the Northeast and on the West Coast and thought: Let’s do that.
That’s the philosophy we need to guide our work: You’ve authorized us, now let us operate. Let us figure out how to do our work in the best interest of the children.
The educational environment in some Southern states hasn’t changed in many years, so it’s important to be intentional and focus deeply on advocacy at every level – local, state and national. We have to show traditional education organizations what’s possible, because they can’t imagine what they haven’t seen or experienced. Before we opened in Alabama, we invited Alabama visitors to our schools in Memphis to see us in action. We’ll ask them to come back as our work there progresses.
Still, I am hopeful.
Yes, racism still exists in this country, and it is structural. But I’m not one of those protestors who fights it head-on. I prefer to try a different way, to build the infrastructure that prepares our children to be in positions of power so they can change those racist systems forever, through hard work and their amazing example.
Like Bria, who just graduated from Vanderbilt Law School. And Gaisiry, a nurse at the children’s hospital in Memphis. And little brother Elijah, a teacher in one of Freedom Prep’s own elementary schools.
They’re all living witness to the success of the work we do at Freedom Prep. They are my daily inspiration.
Because I’ve realized that instead of fighting for people, I can help give them the tools to fight for themselves. And giving Black and brown children the most effective education possible, one on par with the best public and private schools in the country, is the absolute best way to do that.