The 21st Century Principal

Here’s some more evidence that our North Carolina State Legislature despises traditional public schools and favors charter schools that don’t have to play by the same rules as other public schools. Yesterday, the North Carolina House voted to allow charter schools to once again play by different rules.
While traditional public schools have been required to disclose to names and salaries of all its employees to newspapers and the other media under public records laws, it seems our legislature does not believe charter schools should have to do the same. The bill passed by the North Carolina House does not require charter schools to disclose the names of employees with the salaries with public records requests. The logic used to justify this measure by NC Representatives Charles Jeter and David Lewis? “Disclosing the charter school salaries by name creates a hostile work environment.” (See “NC House Votes to Block Charter Employees’ Names with Pay.”)

As far as I am concerned, the logic and intentions of this legislature is clear. It simply despises public schools. period. Through this bill, our legislature finally admits, though tacitly, that it “wants to create a hostile work environment” in traditional public schools, because they are unwilling to protect public school employees from some “theoretical hostile work environment.”

Once again, this North Carolina Legislature proves its hostile intentions toward traditional public education. For the past several years, all employees in school districts in our region have endured having their salaries publicly available in data-bases located on newspaper web sites. Has it caused a hostile work environment? I’m not sure it has. Most of us don’t even bother to access that data anymore. But the fact that our political leaders somehow want to hide how charter schools operate and spend money, definitely shows hostile intentions toward traditional public schools.

These two state legislators, Jeter and Lewis, prove that what they really want to protect is how charter schools actually spend public money. Charters in our area have been known to pay exorbitant salaries to administrators. One charter in Charlotte, North Carolina recently imploded due to bloated administrator salaries. (See “Troubled StudentFirst Charter School Closes Abruptly")

If anyone needs names and salaries disclosed it is public charter schools. Because they are not required to play by the same employment laws as traditional public schools, the public has an even greater interest in making sure these schools do not waste tax payer money. Perhaps this is once again that the signs of intelligent life in our North Carolina Legislature grow even dimmer.

NC Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest’s proposal to fund teacher pay raises by collecting donations and selling special license plates is now a bill proposed by the North Carolina Senate Education Committee. The proposed bill would collect money from individuals and businesses and place these funds in an endowment. Lieutenant Governor Forest stated in May that his idea was “a creative response to tough economic times.” Now, Republican Senator Jerry Tillman has bought into the idea by starting that they are “looking for ways to build up and enhance education dollars…"

Instead of looking for “creative" ways to fund teacher pay and education in general, I suspect Forest and Tillman are looking for “creative ways to avoid adequately funding public education.

They don’t won’t to fund education the way it should be funded because they do not want it to exist.

It’s clear that our North Carolina Legislature still continues its anti-public education campaign with Lt. Governor Forest and NC Senator Jerry Tillman in the lead. For more info, check out “NC Bill Asks for Donations, License Plates to Pay Teachers More."

I think I have been fairly clear. I am no fan of Race to the Top. I have never been due to its over-reliance on standardization of education, over to the top emphasis on testing, and its hyper-focus on competition. Just like its older cousin, No Child Left Behind, at the end of the day, Race to the Top will most likely go down in the history of education reform as just another failed and misguided educational reform. As someone who has worked in trenches with teachers since its inception, I have seen no improvement in education, but I have seen a great deal of deterioration in working conditions of the schools.

The biggest problem for those of us working in the schools brought on by Race to the Top has only brought is the enormous amount of new regulation, new restrictions, and new mandates that take more of our valuable time that could otherwise be used teaching and working with our students. For example, in North Carolina we now spend even more time prepping students for tests and administering tests, because in our state we subject our students to more standardized tests than has ever been done in state history. The education practitioners in the schools are also having to spend an enormous amount of time learning new software and data collection programs, purchased with Race to the Top funding, and these programs still are not fully functional and are too often causing data errors and more work staff in the schools. Because of constant glitches, staff have to take even more time trying to make this technology work. The constant failures of all this technology only adds to the burden our teachers  face in the classroom. This added technological burden comes at a time when teachers have more students in their classrooms than ever, and less instructional materials and text materials than ever, all because of a governor and state legislature unwilling to fund education in North Carolina. I scratch my head in wonder, because the philosophy behind charter schools, for which Race to the Top advocates, is to allow schools to operate with less red tape and less restriction because that is somehow better, yet our own government and state department of instruction turns around and heaps more regulation, more state mandates, and more red tape on how we operate. If that regulation is so bad, then why keep pushing more and more of it? Go figure! Ultimately, what Race to the Top has done to those of us in the schools is heap a ton of new rules, a gaggle of new mandates, a host of floundering new software and data systems, and an extra large dose of standardization and testing on our heads. 

In a time when we should be emphasizing the personalization of education in North Carolina, we're still trying to turn our schools into efficient factories to churn out students with high test scores. Somehow our leadership has come to believe that high test scores is the only equivalent to being college and career ready, when in fact, such thinking may only mean students are good test-takers. Instead to pursuing the false promises of standardization, we should be turning our schools into places where innovation, creativity, and collaboration thrive. Such schools are the opposite of standardized, one-size fits all schools we currently have.

What is the answer? The answer is, perhaps its time to let go of this fetish that if we somehow test students more and hold teachers accountable to those test scores no matter what, our students will learn more. We keep ramping up the testing, changing standards, but we cut instructional materials and professional development funding. We keep thinking that if we make the test stakes high enough, somehow teachers will miraculously rise to the occasion. What's happening instead is teachers are saying, "I quit," leaving the profession and/or moving to other states in increasing numbers. As a school leader, it becomes harder and harder to promote teaching as a career opportunity.

What our state leadership does not fully understand is that this massive increase of teacher turnover in North Carolina isn't just about pay; it's the working conditions too. With all this standardization, testing, and mandates coming down from Raleigh due to Race to the Top, it is getting less and less fulfilling to be a teacher and educator in North Carolina. Teachers are being treated more and more like factory workers whose job is to work on a assembly line and churn out students with high test scores. If they don't, then they're branded less effective or worse. Teacher professional judgment has been slowly replaced with test scores and systems of test data. In a word, being a teacher in North Carolina has become less about being a professional, and more about being an assembly-line worker, and if production isn't met, then you're out! The working conditions caused by Race to the Top and our state's efforts to meet its mandates has made being an educator in North Carolina much, much less palatable.

What then is the way out? In years past, these kinds of reform measures usually run their course and those pushing it move on to other things, then they slowly die out. This time, my fear is that our public education system will not survive. Race to the Top's push to standardize, its push to elevate testing to an even higher level of importance than No Child Left Behind, and its incessant focus on using competition to try to better education is leaving our schools tangled in a mess of new testing. It is leaving our teachers demoralized and dejected. It is turning our students off to schools and education. It is turning our schools into places of discord and competition instead of collaboration. It is making it much more difficult to personalize and meet the needs of students because we are too busy trying to meet the needs of latest federal or state mandate. I can only hope that our public education system survives it all.

Yesterday, North Carolina Gubernatorial candidate Pat McCroy released his plan to reform education. Basically, that plan suffers from a total lack of new ideas and innovation and simply carries the Republican Party line of trying to privatize public education. Here’s the basic components of McCroy’s ed reform package taken from a document on his website entitled “A Passion for Education: The McCroy Plan for North Carolina Schools.”

• Educational Choice: McCroy describes his version of choice as: 1) Choice between a college ready diploma and a career ready diploma, 2) Expanding virtual classes for public, private and homeschooled students, 3) Streamlining the charter school approval process so that its faster.
• Use tests to determine whether 3rd graders should be promoted and a proficiency test for all ninth graders: McCroy would use the results of tests third graders take to determine whether they would be promoted to fourth grade or not. He would also implement some kind of proficiency test in reading and mathematics for ninth graders. Those not passing would take remedial courses, but he does not say that they would not be promoted.
• Merit Pay for teachers: McCroy would change the pay system for teachers in North Carolina to “reward teachers for the job they do instead of the number of years they teach.”
• Grading Schools: McCroy would use what he calls “unbiased,objective exams” in reading and mathematics to grade schools. Schools would be graded for both proficiency and growth according to McCroy’s plans. In his school grading scheme, half of a school’s grade would be based on proficiency levels, and the other half would be based on growth.

So what is wrong the McCroy Plan for North Carolina Schools? Here’s some things for starters.

• It lacks any specificity at all. It isn’t a plan at all. It is at best a policy statement. I would shudder to think that anyone can reduce their plans for education reform to only three pages. That indicates either a superficial, incomplete understanding of the troubles facing public schools in North Carolina, or it indicates an acceptance of a boilerplate reform plan from special interests and political parties.
• McCroy’s plan relies on measures that have been tried and failed or that fly in the face of research. North Carolina has tried to stop social promotion before and discovered that they just didn’t want to base a student’s future on the results of one test of dubious reliability and validity. Placing such weight on state testing also violates the state’s testing code of ethics. Also, North Carolina has tried the old high school proficiency test idea for many years with the old competency tests high schoolers had to take and pass to graduate. That ended because it wasn’t working. North Carolina even tried a form of merit pay by giving teachers bonuses based on test scores, but our politicians canned that when budget times got tight. Then there’s the research cited by authors like Daniel Pink and Dan Ariely that point out how futile merit pay is any way.  Grading schools was tried under No Child Left Behind, and we all know how successful that’s been for the past decade.
• It follows the standard boilerplate Republican platform that ultimately seeks to privatize public education. One thing you can’t accuse McCroy of is straying from his Republican handlers. But because of that, his entire education plan is a “status quo” plan. There’s not an ounce of originality or thought put into it. It is more about furthering a political agenda than genuinely reforming schools. If it were, there would be innovative and thoughtful ideas in it, not a rehashing of what Republican governors are doing around the country already.
• McCroy’s plan is still caught in 19th and 20th century education models. He is still hung up on classifying students by superficial grade levels, and by using “tests” to determine the “defectiveness” of products (students). Those not making the grade are recycled back through the process again. This plan still at its core believes you can grade and classify students by groups. It sees a system of education that pushes students through like factory parts.
• McCroy’s plan keeps the faith in the power of standardized tests to accurately and infallibly measure the progress of students. McCroy’s thinking about assessment is still caught in the 19th and 20th century model of assessment. He would take our state back to bubble sheets that determine the individual fates of students, in spite of the fact that we’ve had a decade of that under No Child Left Behind and it hasn’t worked. The “unbiased, objective exams he calls for are the tools of schools that are test-prep factories, not schools that are educating students for the 21st century.
• McCroy leaves a lot of things unsaid in his education plan. For example, how is he going to pay for merit pay schemes when our state has been unable to give anyone a raise in four years? I know he says they’ll look for places to trim in order to pay for it, but he forgets our budgets have been cut for the last few years. He also says nothing of school vouchers, which I know he supports. When politician presents a plan for something that is so vague and unspecific, you can’t help but wonder what he is hiding.

For once, I just wish a candidate for state or federal office would step away from the party line and develop a truly innovative education agenda and plan instead of relying on party apparatus to write that plan. As a twenty-plus year educator, I have to say both political parties are guilty of listening to special interests, political parties, and think tanks funded by individuals with overt or covert agendas. The “status quo” that McCroy says is so unacceptable will only be perpetuated by his unoriginal, stale, partisan education agenda that he outlines in this plan.