With Chattanooga's Howard School of Academics and Technology, as well as four schools in Memphis, having long performed well below what their students are capable of, the state of Tennessee is bringing in a man it hopes can guide those schools to greater achievement.
Chris Barbric will help manage the low-performing schools in Chattanooga and Memphis and will try to replicate in Tennessee the academic successes that he had at schools in Texas.
We wish him the very best in that endeavor. Depending on how things go this school year, he could decide next year either to turn Howard and the other schools into charter schools -- freed from the bureaucracy of traditional public schools -- or he could seek to have the state take them over completely.
Either of those options would obviously be a major change at Howard, and neither should be undertaken lightly. But considering the difficulties that children face in life if they quit school or fail to learn much in their classes, serious measures are plainly warranted.