By Bill Dries - The Daily News -

The first head of Tennessee’s new achievement school district starts Aug. 1 with four Memphis schools in his five-school district.

Chris Barbic was in Memphis last week as Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam signed into law the bill that removes the cap on the creation of charter schools. The law also permits a version of open enrollment for charter schools and allows the achievement school district to establish charter schools.

The four city schools in the district are Hamilton, Frayser, Raleigh-Egypt and Northside high schools. The fifth school is in Chattanooga.

During the Memphis visit, Barbic met privately with Memphis City Schools officials and reportedly told them four other city schools will be monitored by the state more closely even though they won’t be included in the achievement school district.

He described the state’s role at the outset as “collaborative.”

“I think for the first couple of months, a lot of this is going to be learning who the players are, understanding what their concerns are and then making the decisions that are going to be best for the kids,” Barbic said, emphasizing they would be state decisions. “At the end of the day, we’re going to do the things that are going to be best for the kids. Hopefully we can bring as many people in on that process as we can. We’ll make every effort to do that. But sometimes you make decisions and everybody is not happy.”

The new achievement school district to start in August represents an important change in education leadership at the state level.

Barbic comes to Memphis from Houston where in 1998 he founded YES Prep Public Schools, a set of eight Houston-area charter schools with 4,200 students and a grades 6-12 structure.

At the outset, Barbic is stepping cautiously into any comparisons of Houston to Memphis.

“Obviously there’s a context everywhere. … Students everywhere want a teacher that cares about them. They want a place where they’re going to be challenged – where they’re going to be supported with good leadership and the right people,” he said. “I don’t think that’s unique to Memphis. I think there’s context and there are neighborhood issues and there are things that kids come to school with that are probably a little bit unique from place to place. I think the fundamentals that it takes to operate and run a great school are the same fundamentals here that would be anyplace else.”

Barbic reports to state education commissioner Kevin Huffman, who came to the Tennessee post from being a vice president of public affairs for Teach For America.

Huffman and Barbic are both former classroom teachers from outside the state who have been heavily involved in the national discussion about school reform in recent years.

This is the second get-acquainted session for state officials supervising a small set of city schools in Memphis.

The 2007-2008 school year began with 17 Memphis schools, including two of the four now in the achievement school district – Hamilton and Frayser – under a form of state control.

The school system was required by the state to replace certain personnel and send an action plan to Nashville for state approval. The state provided $10 million in new funding for performance pay incentives and a longer school day.

Then-Gov. Phil Bredesen sold the Tennessee Legislature at the start of his second term on the additional funding with a description of the schools as “failing” – not the “striving” status that his own education officials used repeatedly even as Bredesen was leaving office this past January.

“These are failed schools,” Bredesen said in 2007 as he also talked of a takeover. “We’ve never used those powers. I commit to you to take a far stronger hand in fixing these schools by aggressively using the laws we already have.”

All of that happened during the tenure of MCS superintendent Dr. Carol Johnson who soon left to head the Boston school system.

And Bredesen never envisioned the state running the Memphis schools from Nashville. He talked of the state possibly putting them in a special school district to be run by a local entity like the University of Memphis’ college of education.

After an interim superintendent, Dr. Kriner Cash became MCS superintendent and has changed principals at Hamilton High in particular on a yearly basis.