Author: Steve Johnston

July 12, 2010

Here’s hoping that the good people of Charlotte-Mecklenburg can talk out some guiding perceptions before they need to decide on guiding principles.

For it is perceptions that have long shaped the principles of CMS school assignment policy. And created the massive separations by race and by economics that are embodied in the attendance numbers below.

I was reminded to start with perceptions by an aphorism long connected with former chair and current CMS board member Joe White.

People want to go to their neighborhood school, he often says, as long as it is a good school. By extension, even the most rabid neighborhood-schools advocate will exercise other options if the neighborhood school does not have a reputation of being a good school. So what factors contribute to a school’s reputation?

Any school’s reputation is composed of truths and falsities – along with stories about one-time realities, both good and bad, that no longer apply. Example: A school can suffer from a reputation for bad plumbing long after the problem is fixed. So what are the realities and the perceptions that mix together to create a reputation? Your thoughts? Here’s the list so far.

Test scores. That’s a reality, right? Only, we all know that school-wide averages on the state achievement tests are a blunt and misleading instrument. I am reminded of the principal of a high-flying CMS school who realized that the cause for a huge reported school-wide achievement gap was a group of six students. Three of those were fine. The other three were way behind but making progress in self-contained classes for the hearing-impaired. The test scores of the three students gave the school a reputation for “bad” test scores.

Schoolhouse condition. We all have stories about children thriving in unattractive circumstances. But adult perceptions are deeply important in attracting and retaining both staff and parents. For decades in CMS, adults with choices shunned run-down schools. The CMS building program of the last 30 years has largely removed building conditions as an issue. But any parent visiting a schoolhouse who sees unkempt conditions has every reason to be suspicious that the neglect goes deeper.

Neighborhood condition. Adults are highly sensitive to crime statistics, visual neighborhood conditions, what their neighbors say about the neighborhood surrounding the schoolhouse, the potholes in the streets, you name it. Some or absolutely none of these pieces of information may be good cues to a school’s classroom learning environment. But that will not stop adults from pre-judging a school’s excellence based on neighborhood conditions.

Poverty statistics. For the non-poor of all ethnicities, children of poverty appear to be the default guide to whether a school is good or bad. If this were not so, why do boundary lines sort out the poor so carefully from their wealthier immediate neighbors? If this were not so, and when the statistics on poverty and race track each other so well, why would the numbers below look the way they do?

Supt. Peter Gorman has written these words:

In the years since 2008 when he included the comments above in his State of the Schools address, most of Gorman’s time has been spent slashing budgets. Perhaps he hasn’t had time to mobilize Charlotte-Mecklenburg leaders to answer his challenge. But he also hasn’t risked the wrath of well-connected parents by doing what every police and fire official does every day – assign personnel to where they are needed most. That would mess with another key perception of this age: that my child deserves the best, irrespective of other community needs.

Readers not steeped in North Carolina history may not know that the writers of the N.C. Constitution created a mandate that every child should have access to a sound basic education. A Superior Court judge, Howard Manning, oversees a long-running court case on this topic. In previous sessions of that case he has accused CMS of inflicting “academic genocide” on low-income children. Manning has the support of the N.C. Supreme Court, and will not shut up or go away.

My own perception is that CMS will forever fail this constitutional mandate so long as it isolates its highest-needs students. That’s in large part because adults with choices, both teachers and parents, will shun those places, and so the children will not have what they need to get a sound basic education. But it is also because children learn from each other. And we have cut high-needs children off from the children who can teach them, and learn themselves in the process. We do none of the children a favor by doing so.

Adult perceptions are getting in the way of educating our children. Delivery of education is effectively controlled not by guiding principles but perceptions, most of which boil down to adult fears of “the other,” the “not like me,” the “less than me,” the “not my kind.”

So let’s talk through those perceptions. If they were discussed at length in public forums, held up to the light of day, who would champion them? They would fall away of their own weight.

Then we could talk about guiding principles.

– – –

CMS enrollment ’09-’10
Schools in descending order of white enrollment at the end of the first month of the school year, fall 2009. Source: N.C. Department of Public Instruction.

July 8, 2010

Here’s a message for, oh, 150,000 or more parents of CMS students:

You are, each in your own way, heavily involved in the education of your child or children. We need you to tell school board members exactly how you are involved.

Your messages will tell school board members that there are a wide variety of ways in which you participate in educating your children. And that variety is precisely the message that they need to hear.

There’s no single way. And it’s narrow and dumb to assume that all parents have time during the day to serve milk and cookies in a classroom.

Where are the mythbusters? It’s simply a myth that, if a parent is not at a PTA meeting, that the parent is not involved in a child’s education. (For many, many years I worked second shift. I was NEVER at PTA meetings. That does NOT mean I was not involved in my children’s education.)

Educators gripe about parents who miss teacher conferences, who don’t volunteer. Those things do happen. But are the missed appointments and volunteer opportunities scheduled only during the workday? Some people can easily leave jobs during the day; others can’t. Perhaps educators and school board members need to be reminded of the realities of life from a parent’s point of view.

Confront any school board member and I’m sure they will say that they understand that parents working two and three part-time jobs to get by are unable to attend this and that. But what are they saying? They are saying that they understand that the parent is unable to perform up to their expectations.

Is there an unexamined problem with the expectations?

School board members don’t work the restocking shift at Walmart. Among the nine current CMS board members, they’ve earned more than 20 post-high-school degrees and certificates. Five don’t appear to be holding down jobs. They can take time to be in schools. Can’t everyone?

So tell them. Can?t everyone?

Tell Trent Merchant, an at-large member. Tell Kaye McGarry, an at-large member. Tell Joe White, an at-large member. Tell Rhonda Lennon, the District 1 member. Tell Richard McElrath, the District 2 member. Tell Joyce Waddell, the District 3 member. Tell Tom Tate, the District 4 member and vice chair of the board. Tell Eric Davis. the District 5 member and chair of the board. Tell Tim Morgan, the District 6 member.

The above is a silly exercise. Many thousands of the parents that the school board needs to hear from may not even have e-mail. Or they are so miffed from being not being welcomed at their child’s school that they wouldn’t write a letter to any school board member. Or they remain angry about the lousy education that THEY received from CMS. Indeed, the ill will toward the system harbored by Mecklenburg residents who did not in the past receive a quality education here may be one of the most difficult and unaddressed problems that CMS faces.

Some CMS school board members reach out to these very parents. They don’t set up forums; they go individually to places where the parents already are. Their job is to listen. And they do. May their number on the board increase.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

A teacher who says he had a great principal and spectacular success with an honors class this year is leaving for another state for family reasons. His parting comments:

Most teachers are not as fortunate. They hate working for CMS. But he didn’t say why teachers hate working for CMS, just that he thinks very few teachers will explain why because they are afraid of losing their jobs.

So if any of what he says is true, how are we the public supposed to agitate for fixes if we can’t even be sure what’s broken?

The stakes are high: If higher student achievement is tied to more effective teaching, and I have no doubt it is, we shouldn’t expect effective teaching if barriers to effective teaching are left in place.

So what how do we proceed?

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

A group of educators is gathering energy to fight off expected pressure on Westerly Hills Elementary during the upcoming school-closings debate this fall. More such groups will no doubt spring up anon.

There’s an entry relevant to these situations in the Great Book of Realpolitik. It reads:

Tell suburbanites: We’re happy to have you come to our schools — we all paid for them, after all — but if you want YOUR neighborhood school, don’t even think about closing OURS.

June 30, 2010

One of Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s lowest performing schools has done wonderfully well in recent years with one group of students.

Year in and year out, the children who were consistently at or far above grade level – indeed, as of a year ago 100% percent of them – were the children who had entered the school as kindergartners and were still in that school in fifth grade.

These children lived in the same challenged neighborhood as their underperforming peers. Their families were far more LIKE the families of their peers than they were different.

The one thing that uniquely set these children up to succeed even as their peers were failing was the stability of their school assignment. If the family moved, at least they stayed in the neighborhood, which allowed the student to remain grounded at one school.

Many grownups who reminisce about their school years recall teachers who had taught their older sisters or brothers. Or who knew their families. Or were their Sunday School teachers.

These are NOT useless stories. They are a narrative of connectedness. These connections help children grow and learn. The teacher who knew your older sister knew a lot about what it would take for you to learn even before your first day in the classroom.

So here is a modest proposal. Let’s make it a priority to keep children going to the same school through that school’s terminal year. There will always be exceptions, and if parents really want to move their child when they move across town, fine. But for struggling learners, would it not be a good thing to ensure them some stability in their educational life?

Just a modest proposal.

June 28, 2010

Savor this: A group of parents is compiling voting records of school board members. And they plan to publicize the results! A little Congressional Quarterly in our midst. How delightful! Transparency and accountability in one tidy package. Let’s hope they have the stamina to keep it going for years and years and years.

Saturday, June 26, 2010

A man named Pete (no, not that one) writes that his group was leaving a workplace at 6:30 p.m. local time in a port city on China’s northern coast.

“A whole bunch of kids went tearing by on bicycles on their way home from school. I asked my Chinese colleague if that’s when their kids get out of school. Yes, he said. But he was surprised I asked.”

June 26, 2010

An interesting effort is under way to challenge the reassignment decisions that have resegregated CMS schools.

The effort will remain a private affair for awhile, but it might have some public impact in the longer term.

It’s private because it involves an appeal of a single individual’s high school reassignment. Those challenges are heard privately by a small panel of school board members. Hundreds are heard annually, and the hardship claimed usually has to do with transportation or afterschool care or participation in sports. Such individual appeals rarely have wider impact and generally do not become public.

But this case might be different.

The student was affected by the last Board of Education’s 2009 decision to reassign about 200 black students from Hopewell High School to West Charlotte High. The reassignments will make Hopewell whiter, and West Charlotte blacker.

The appeal to the school board reportedly will make a case that reassignment from an integrated educational setting to a segregated setting will create an educational hardship for the student.

West Charlotte will have less than a handful of white students this fall, more than 80% black students and the remainder from other minority groups. In 2008-9, West Charlotte was 87% black, Hopewell 40% black and 47% white.

With the school board publicly quite comfortable with its resegregative policies, this appeal will in all likelihood be denied. The panel hearing the appeal will clearly comprehend that a favorable decision will create a sturdy precedent for a possible cascade of appeals from students who have been reassigned since 2002 from mostly integrated elementary, middle and high schools to the mostly economically or racially segregated schoolhouses operated by the district today.

The appeal might, however, coincide with a short-term moratorium on the Hopewell-to-West Charlotte reassignments as the board elected last November reassesses this decision by the previous board. A moratorium would bring the issue into the public realm, and put the Hopewell reassignment decision back on the table at a time when the board has committed to a “comprehensive review” of its practices, including reassignment.

And the appeal could create a new opportunity for litigation that would challenge the resegregation of schools as an educationally unsound result of the local board’s assignment policies. Such litigation, whether undertaken on its own or opened as part of the ongoing Leandro litigation in the N.C. Superior Court in Raleigh, could certainly attract the attention of Judge Howard Manning, who oversees the case. Leandro has resulted in some supplemental state funds for underfunded districts, and has put a number of districts, including CMS, on Manning’s hot seat over their failure to provide what the N.C. Supreme Court has defined as the “sound, basic education” mandated by the N.C. Constitution.

Faced with the prospect of litigation, the current majority of the school board might be tempted to use its current comprehensive review to remove any policy foundation on which such a challenge might gain legal footing. A severe narrowing of the policy grounds for student reassignment appeals might do the trick.

But the board has put itself in a dinghy on a choppy sea. The first three public forums during its comprehensive review have reportedly been dominated by parents urging substantive diversity. At a time when some board members seem bent on eliminating opportunities for voluntary diversity, there have been calls from parents for involuntary means to ensure diversity at all schools, in all classrooms.

Have the public forum crowds been unrepresentative of Mecklenburg’s parents? No doubt. But putting a finger in the wind may not be sufficient grounds for school board policymaking. The community remains at risk of becoming a national laughingstock for its failure to educate all its children. Even more important: One family believes that the life prospects of their child are at stake.