By Bill Dries - The Daily News -

The leader of a charter school company from out of state asked Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam in Memphis last week if there is anything he and other charter school leaders in the room should know about Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools.

Haslam laughed along with others from the area in the room at the New Consortium School of Law and Business on the north side of Court Square.

Then he began explaining the ongoing consolidation of the county’s two public school systems.

“There’s a whole lot of politics and community feeling around that,” Haslam said. “That being said, I think there’s some really good people working on the advisory committee. … I’ve been incredibly impressed with their work.”

But Haslam also said the state’s Achievement School District – a grouping of the state’s perennially lowest performing schools in a district in which the state either collaborates with local school districts or runs a state-controlled charter school within those existing schools – can help with consolidation.

“We’d be less than honest if we didn’t say that’s a factor in everything happening here,” Haslam added later in talking about the impact of the coming consolidation on the Achievement School District.

ASD superintendent Chris Barbic has already announced Memphis City Schools will have one state-run elementary charter school and one state-run middle charter school in the 2012-2013 school year. Schools in Chattanooga and Nashville are also part of the ASD.

Gestalt Community Schools, which operates Power Center Academy charter school in Hickory Hill, was selected as the operator of the new Nexus Learning Academy.

Cornerstone Prep will operate the elementary school.

The charter schools are different than other charter schools in that they do not require the approval of local school districts. The plan is to phase them into existing schools a grade or two per school year until the entire school is converted to a charter school.

Some time this month or next month Barbic will announce which elementary and which middle school in MCS have been selected.

“We’re wading into it a little this year,” Haslam said later of the state-run charter school process. “We’re kind of knee deep this year. We get waist deep next year. I think the initial operators of anything make a difference.”

The charter school gathering in Memphis was to recruit charter school operators for what comes beyond “waist deep.”

“I can promise you that when you’re looking at a place to go that Tennessee has a full commitment to the purposes that fit your organization,” Haslam told the 30 people in the room. “We would love to have you here as a partner.”

Haslam used the analogy of a relay race to talk about recent education reform efforts in Tennessee including the elimination of any cap on the number of charter schools.

“Some of the things … that it might be hard for a Republican to get done – he got done,” Haslam said of his predecessor, Democratic Gov. Phil Bredesen. “I’m not sure I could have, quite frankly. We’ve worked really hard and we’ve hired people who are really going to be the change agents.”

Haslam was referring to his decision to make two appointments at the state level who were already nationally known in education reform circles, specifically for their work with charter schools.

Tennessee Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman was a distinct break from the practice of selecting education commissioners who came directly either from the state education hierarchy or from another state’s education commission structure.

Barbic is also nationally known for his work with charter schools specifically in Texas before being hired by Haslam.

During the last year of Bredesen’s second term of office, he proposed and the Tennessee Legislature passed a law raising the limit on the number of charter schools the state can have.

Haslam followed up in 2011 with legislation doing away with the charter school cap entirely.

“Tennessee had one of the worst charter school laws in the country,” Barbic told the Memphis gathering last week.

For the current year’s legislative session, Haslam is proposing more flexibility for local school districts by letting them eliminate average class size mandates for each school but keep in place the maximum class size limits.

The average class size mandate wouldn’t be waived as a state requirement. It is something school systems could use on an individual basis.

“If they want to kind of re-engineer the schools to make that happen, they should have the flexibility to make that happen.”

He is also proposing eliminating state and local teacher salary schedules based only on teacher seniority and training.

“Now in education the only way you get more pay is you get a master’s, you teach longer or you become a principal,” he said of the legislation. “I think there should be other ways to distinguish between teachers – by how hard the subject is, where they teach, how well they teach it.”