Author: Steve Johnston

Dec. 2, 2010

Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, above, casts a shadow in this community. People will listen to him.

He’s got a lot on his mind, so he doesn’t have to take on the task of rebuilding community accord to sustain public education. But it sure would be splendid if he gathered together all those who are respected by the people, and had them literally stand behind those who take on this centrally important task of rebuilding community accord to sustain public education.

Earlier this week the mayor hosted a screening of “Waiting For Superman,” a movie with lots of messages, among them that a community dare not wait for Superman to fix their children’s educations.

But this community is regularly driven to do extraordinary things when its leaders ask for sacrifice to achieve a goal that makes good sense. So, Mister Mayor, stand behind a Superwoman or whomever it takes to rebuild community accord to sustain public education.

Wednesday’s Town Hall, conducted by Mayor Foxx at the Charlotte Museum of History, was dominated by economic development topics of deep concern to those who live on the east side. The Observer’s Steve Harrison’s story on the event is here. A text cache is here.

But as Harrison noted, the mayor did address some education issues Wednesday. A number of questions from the floor led Foxx to talk about education.

He said, for example, that when parents fail to read to their infants, the public cost of teaching those children to read rises. Adults, he suggested, don’t want to pay more for education, which leaves their children at a disadvantage as students in other societies spend far more time in school and leave school better prepared.

Indeed, Foxx said, low U.S. rankings on quality of education compared to other developed nations “suggest that we’re going to have to rethink our whole approach to education…. Some of it is being relentless in expecting children, regardless of what they bring into the schoolhouse, that they be successful… and doing what it takes to get them there.”

Foxx said he had publicly and privately suggested that the school board delay decisions about school closings that they made amid deep controversy in November. But Foxx said he had not taken a position on the details because the rest of a very much larger revenue shortfall situation was not then known, and won’t be until May or June. But he added this:

“What I’m really concerned about is that, in an environment in which you are looking at the possibility of $100 million in cuts, the issue of facilities, even if you resolve that one, you’ve got a hundred million other issues to get resolved. It’s a really really broad set of issues, many of which we don’t even know about what they are.

“I personally don’t feel I have the luxury to just focus on one aspect of this. It’s the whole thing. And at the end of the day, I do believe that our school board, our superintendent, I do believe that what they’re trying to do, trying to do, is get to a place where we can preserve academic gains. But it’s just a brutal situation with respect to resources.

“And if the resources ultimately end up being different, [and it is] between a kid having a chance to go to college, and to have a life dependent on society, then this community really needs to spend some time wrestling with whether $100 million in cuts is palatable.

“I really think that is a question we may end up having to ask: Can you accomplish what we want to accomplish in that kind of environment?”

Nov. 28, 2010

This day ended, as above – spectacularly.

It began in an equally spectacular way.

John Cleghorn casts a shadow in Charlotte. Will people listen? Will they follow?

Some know the Rev. Cleghorn because he once wrote speeches for banker Hugh McColl. Today, more know him as the pastor, in a town with hundreds of vacant buildings, who made something happen to allow his flock to host a shelter for homeless women.

Caldwell Memorial Presbyterian stepped up this fall to answer a community problem. With volunteers from across the city, they spruced up an unused part of the church campus and are now hosting an overflow shelter for homeless women served by the Salvation Army’s Center of Hope.

This morning, the Observer Viewpoint page carried an edited version of his Nov. 14 sermon in which he addressed another community problem: the “scab” pulled off by the recession that has been covering up race and class divisions over public schools, and how budgets should be balanced during this recession.

Rather than replace the scab, Cleghorn seems to be leading in another direction.

He writes that “we have only just begun a very difficult process,” that “a full and frank dialogue” is needed, that “we should not pretend there is not anger and frustration,” that the “anger is justified,” that we “must ask whether we have really made the kind of commitment to all of our children to provide an education that prepares them for the world they will inherit, much less, more fundamentally, to earn a decent living or get a job at all.”

From the pulpit, the pastor’s message was one of hope, built on the foundation of Isaiah. Perhaps that hope got muted by the editing necessary to fit the piece into the the Viewpoint space. The Observer column was perhaps more didactic:

“We must reach even deeper inside ourselves and our community to do the hard work that gets past emotions and delivers us all to a place of reconciliation across race and class and neighborhood, where we can stop shouting and start working together.”

John Cleghorn casts a shadow in Charlotte. Will people listen? Will they follow?

Nov. 2, 2010

It’s always hard to get everyone to the table. CMS needs to do a better job than it did during the “comprehensive review” to make a place at the table for everyone who eventually wants to come.

“Eventually” — because people will come at different times and on their own schedule. Organizations that achieve success in this area plan around that fundamental human behavior.

I won’t rehash the failures of the last months. I’d rather encourage people to look forward to the next time that we as a community need to thoroughly discuss something. The lessons learned from your comments might help community discussion happen. They might even be used quickly if CMS scratches the school-closings still on the “comprehensive review” table.

Thorough discussion may not, of course, lead to consensus. But consensus is a strong basis for action, and it rarely forms in the absence of discussion. In a democracy, anyway.

This community has tools at its disposal to have a far broader discussion about CMS’s future than those used in the last months.

Perhaps my favorite is a series of video booths scattered throughout the city, open during business hours of the locations that shelter them. The booths would allow people on their own time and with their own friends to enter the discussion. A monitored time-delay loop onto the mothballed CMS TV cable channel would allow civic discussion with immediacy.

There’s a casserole dish in the Levine Museum’s collection to remind us that pot-luck dinners were a key listening tool used when a citizens committee was helping the U.S. District Court find desegregation solutions. A similar committee should be in place quickly today to do a similar kind of work on a different issue.

We don’t have a District Court today, actively watching over the rights of groups without power, that could create the committee. But we do have a mayor, a county commissioners chair and a Chamber of Commerce leader who know that this kind of work needs to be done.

Now.

Oct. 29, 2010

What if a lawyer went to court – N.C. Superior Court Howard Manning’s court, say – and said:

Your Honor:

CMS is under court order not to use race in assignment of children.

In most of its school assignment decisions, CMS uses commonly acknowledged boundaries like major streets, highways, creeks and such that define its neighborhoods.

The vast majority of the neighborhoods defined by this method are racially identifiable.

When CMS creates neighborhood assignments, it has used neighborhoods as a proxy for race and ends up using state power to revive Jim Crow.

Citizens need immediate relief from this violation of the court order.

Please issue an order barring further assignment of children based on neighborhood boundaries, and order CMS to file with the court within 90 days for court approval a new method of assignment of children to its schools that will ensure that no child’s assignment is determined solely by her or his place of residence.

Sept. 20, 2010

Here’s the next big question for CMS:

What do you do with a schoolhouse that nobody wants their child to attend?

Ask nine school board members, 50 corporate executives and half the members of the local association of homeschoolers this question:

Where would you NOT send your child to school? Compile all the names and you’ll have an airtight list of the facilities in question.

Multiply that number by 437 or 783 or whatever number of children are in each building and you’ll get a handle on the size of the problem that CMS faces, and the number of parents who today feel cheated by CMS.

If you think your CMS home school should be on the list, then you are one of the thousands of parents who must think that school board members are nuts to value home school assignments so highly.

Even the parents who are most vociferously in favor of assignments closest to home will start hopping up and down if the school closest to home suddenly becomes unacceptable to them for any reason.

One of the first stops on the road toward greater parent involvement and higher student achievement is to stop assigning children to schools nobody wants to attend.

What to do with those schoolhouses?

The most pressing need is to move to the biggest of those facilities the programs with the longest waiting lists. Some of those popular programs are in buildings of very limited size. The board is going through that list right now, so it should have all the details on the table soon. Moving those programs so they can grow will make more parents enthusiastic – a key ingredient to parental involvement in children’s education.

There are expenses, of course, in moving programs from one building to another. Perhaps the foundations that are currently looking for ways to be helpful could step in and cover those costs. The goal would be to close schools that nobody wants to attend, retire those names, and move into those spaces the programs that lots of people want to attend.

Indeed, the way around schools that nobody wants to attend is for everyone to choose where they want their child to go to school.

It sounds so simple. The details are complex. But the problem in CMS since – well, since CMS was created – is that so many people have assumed that the details are too complex or too costly that no school board has really examined how it would go about giving every parent a real choice. Perhaps now is the time to do just that. Perhaps those foundations that are currently looking for ways to be helpful could help with that as well.

Sept. 18, 2010

I heard this week an illuminating story about addressing children’s needs.

It’s a story about a day in an elementary afterschool program. On this particular day, teachers had been having great difficulty controlling students all day long. As the teachers passed the children on to the staffer supervising the afterschool class, they all but said, “Good luck,” and then left.

Well, said the afterschool teacher to the children, who would like to have a parade? All the hands shot up.

Well, we will need instruments to have a parade. So go get some instruments.

The children were perplexed. There were no drums or clarinets or tambourines in the classroom.

Well, you decide what the instruments will be.

One child came back with a ball. Another came back with a piece of paper to wave. Every child decided on an instrument and came back.

Well, where shall we have our parade?

The children talked and decided they needed a big space. They settled on the parking lot in front of the school.

Well, who should lead the parade?

More talk. They decided the teacher should lead, because the teacher was the tallest.

And then they raced outside, lined up and had their parade. And by the time they got back from parading around the parking lot, they were ready to focus on their homework and other activities.

The teacher’s damn-the-lesson-plan attitude put the children’s needs first, and led to a splendid outcome.

But equally important, the teacher set up something on the fly that became the children’s own. It was the children who decided on the instruments, for example. They picked who would be at the front of the parade. And each time they made a decision, they had done so for a reason that they themselves identified. It was classic experiential learning in communal decision-making.

Perhaps it behooves us to allow parents to have more control over where their children go to school. If they did, they would be more invested in the education that goes on there.

Imagine how empowering it would be for the school board to say to each parent: We’re not telling you where to educate your child. Why don’t you tell US? If you want your child to go to one particular school, let’s try together to make that work.

Since the mid-1970s, every CMS magnet school had one incredibly powerful attribute: Every parent was there for a reason. They knew what the reason was and they were determined to make that educational experience work.

For some, the magnet meant a curricular offering. For others at the same school, it meant a child’s proximity to a parent’s workplace. There were all sorts of reasons.

Imagine if every CMS school could tap into that power. And if every child were learning in such an empowered environment.