Low-Performing Schools? We Don’t Think So

Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools Superintendent James Pughsley has
finally gotten serious about bringing some of the system’s most experienced
teachers to its neediest schools. But many teachers don’t like the plan and
have no intention of teaching in the system’s lowest performing schools. The
superintendent took a beating in the media after Superior Court Judge Howard
Manning, Jr. publicly faulted CMS management for test scores that are significantly
lower than those in Wake County despite relatively high levels of funding. Coming
close on the heels of Manning’s criticisms, Pughsley’s plan has been met with
skepticism by some teachers who feel the superintendent may be merely covering
his own, um, bases.

Take the example of West Mecklenburg High. Few schools have a worse reputation
among the county’s teachers than West Meck. For those who don’t teach there,
West Meck is an illustration of everything they believe is wrong, or even frightening,
about our school system. Several CMS teachers we spoke to last week mentioned
being transferred to West Meck, or a school almost as bad, as part of their
“worst case scenario.” What would they do if told they had to teach there? They
would quit, just like 31 percent of the teachers who taught at West Mecklenburg
did last year and the year before.

The irony of the situation is that there aren’t many teachers who are opposed to Pughsley’s stated goals for the worst performing schools (known as EquityPlus schools). In fact, many CMS teachers think the goals are overdue. But according to the results of a recent survey of teachers, and our conversations over time with a variety of teachers, two things keep many of them from supporting Pughsley’s initiative: discipline problems and, perhaps even more telling, a critical lack of trust in the CMS bureaucracy.

According to a survey by the Classroom Teachers Association released this week, 94 percent of those who responded said they opposed Pughsley’s plan to involuntarily transfer teachers to low-performing schools if efforts to recruit volunteers to those schools with incentives fail.

About a third of the teachers in the Charlottte Mecklenburg school system are members of the CTA, and 424 responded to the survey. Nearly half of the respondents said that if they were forced to go to a low performing school, they’ would leave the school system. Another 38 percent said they might leave.

That’s not to say that they don’t think that low-performing schools need help. Over 80 percent said the issue of low-performing schools should be ranked as important or very important on the list of the system’s problems. They just don’t see themselves, at this time, as part of the solution.

In many ways, the results of the survey show just how wide the rift has grown between the system’s teachers and its high-level administrators. Trapped in the middle, unfortunately, are the county’s poorest kids, who are disproportionately taught by inexperienced teachers while the system’s more experienced teachers flock to suburban schools.

At the heart of Pughsley’s plan, which is still being developed, are promises to clean house at many of the county’s low-performing schools, all of which have high concentrations of poor and/or minority children. The plan essentially promises to weed out problem administrators, use “headhunter” firms to recruit better principals, and then give them wider latitude to run their schools. The schools would be staffed with extra support personnel to deal with everything from social problems to uninvolved parents to discipline.

The district will offer talented teachers from both inside and outside the district an extra $10,000 a year for three years to teach in equity schools. If they stay the full three years and meet certain goals to be defined later, they’d be able to collect the full $30,000 from an escrow account. But if enough teachers don’t volunteer to teach in struggling schools that meet “crisis” criteria, the administration would transfer accomplished teachers to the schools whether they wanted to go or not.

For a school system that barely moves when prodded, this plan is practically revolutionary. In fact, it may be revolutionary in its own right.

“There is no place we are aware of that forces teachers into low performing schools,” said Michael Pons, News Media Services manager at the National Education Association.

Eric Hirsch, Vice President for Policy at the Southeastern Center for Teaching Quality, applauded the plan, up to a point.

“You can’t just put incentives out and if they don’t work, push teachers to do something they don’t want to do,” said Hirsch. “The fact is, if you create more conducive working environments for teachers and learning environments for children, more teachers would be willing, voluntarily, especially with additional incentives, to go into these schools. You have to do both.”

School leaders say that’s exactly what CMS intends to do.

Moral Responsibility and Discipline Problems

Dot Cromwell, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Association of Educators,
doesn’t believe the system can wait until the changes in atmosphere the administration
is promising at equity schools become reality. Cromwell, an African-American
teacher who has taught in low-performing schools for 32 years, says that talented
teachers must go to low-performing schools now.

“I think these times call for drastic measures,” said Cromwell. “The bottom line, isn’t about the teachers. Who is going to benefit the most from this? Children deserve a high-quality teacher.”

Still, even Cromwell admits that the teachers in her organization are split on the issue.

For teachers like Bree Adams-Coleman, who grew up in a trailer park in a poor section of Camden, New Jersey, teaching the kids who need you the most is a moral responsibility for teachers. For four years, Adams-Coleman and has taught at Devonshire, one of the county’s 31 low-performing elementary schools.

“Police do not get a choice whether to police the high crime areas,” said Adams-Coleman. “We as teachers need to go where we need to go. I think that once they get here, they will grow to love it like we do.”

Adams-Coleman’s son attends Elizabeth Traditional elementary school, which doesn’t fall into any of the low-performing categories.

“I speak with his teachers quite frequently and the thing that amazes me is that there is a perception that our school is so much different than theirs and that there are so many discipline problems here,” said Adams-Coleman. “When I talk to his teachers who are at some of the more high performing schools, it really isn’t that different.”

“Police do not get a choice whether to police the high crime areas. We as
teachers need to go where we need to go.” – Bree Adams-Coleman, teacher
at Devonshire Elementary.

On the other hand, Jo T. Boyd, a second grade teacher at Devonshire, shares
the same passion for the struggling school as Adams-Coleman, but her description
of what it’s like to teach there is a bit different.

Boyd says that before our interview, CMS administrators gave her a sample list of questions Creative Loafing might ask her, and suggestions for how she might respond to them. Boyd, an African-American teacher who is a year away from retirement, didn’t appear to stick very well to the script.

“Every day is a battle,” she said. “We don’t have any system in place to deal with the behavior problems.”

In anticipation of the interview, Boyd counted how many times she had to stop classroom instruction to deal with an issue. “I stopped 19 times yesterday before nine o’clock to deal with discipline problems,” she said. “Nineteen times. Can you believe that? I’m a veteran teacher. What do you think these young teachers are putting up with? One year, two years, they’re out the door.”

Boyd says she’s not excited about the idea of forcing teachers to teach at equity schools or enticing them to do it with $30,000 extra over three years. She’s afraid they’ll just be there for the money and their hearts won’t be in it. Without heart, they won’t last too long, she says.

“How are you going to teach a foster child so she can get good test scores when she goes home with her brother and is raped?” she asks. “How are you going to teach a kid whose mama just died and he’s still being abused?”

Boyd says the school doesn’t have the support it needs.

“We have a part-time nurse, one guidance counselor and one social worker,” Boyd said. “We have a family service person that’s got an overload and a waiting list. Give us a psychologist who is here every day. Give us two social workers. We need help.”

Some of the help Boyd wants can be found in Pughsley’s plan, including full-time campus security associates, behavioral management technicians and nurses.

But some of it is not. Again and again in the comment section of the CTA survey, teachers named discipline and administrative leadership as their two main concerns about equity schools. But a change in discipline policy wasn’t among the changes listed in Pughsley’s plan.

Frank Machado, Chairman of the Foreign Language Department at South Mecklenburg High School, has taught at CPCC and UNCC. He has a master’s degree and 34 years of teaching experience.

“Is there any person in the world who wants to be called a motherfucker?” Machado asked. “It’s not that uncommon. The administration will simply not support discipline policies. They look the other way. They are dilettantes.”

Machado says the cost to the system has been huge.

“We have lost so many potentially very good teachers, young teachers with good preparation, good background, good knowledge of subject area,” he said. “Usually a person that wants to be a teacher has a gentle personality. They simply want to teach. They just don’t know how to react to these things.”

Stanley Frazier, principal of Merry Oaks International Academy Elementary School, has little patience with teachers who would refuse to teach in EquityPlus schools. “I wonder about their dedication,” Frazier said. “We shouldn’t even be having a conversation where we need to pull teachers to go to the equity schools. Some teachers take safe harbor and go to schools where kids will score well whether they have a great teacher or not. Now if you are truly a teacher and you are ready to test your mettle, you should be able to teach all kids.”

Missing: Trust in CMS Administration

When asked what it would take for Pughsley’s plans for low-performing schools
to work, veteran Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Board Member Louise Woods said,
“I think it’s a matter of trust.” Teachers we spoke to agree with Woods. Unfortunately,
they see trust, or rather the lack of it, as a big part of the problem.

Whether they supported Pughsley’s plan or not, all of the teachers CL interviewed thought an extra $10,000 dollars a year would be enough to attract battle-tested teachers to equity schools — if the system could indeed create an atmosphere in which they could teach. But even if the discipline problem was taken care of, these teachers have so little trust in the CMS administration, most of them didn’t think they’d ever receive a dime.

In the comments section of the Classroom Teachers Association survey, teacher after teacher said they didn’t trust CMS to deliver the money at the end of three years, or were convinced the rules would somehow be changed midway through their tenure, thus blocking them from receiving the money.

Teacher after teacher said they didn’t trust CMS to deliver the money at
the end of three years, or were convinced the rules would somehow be changed,
blocking them from receiving the money.

CTA President Judy Kidd says she doesn’t oppose the plan in principle. But
she, like many others, is skeptical of its timing. Had the administration spent
a year mulling this over, thoughtfully planning how to fix broken schools, that
would be one thing. Instead, she says, until very recently school system leaders
largely refused to acknowledge that they even had a problem on their hands.
So, given the recent condemnations by Judge Manning, it’s ironic that Pughsley
announced his crisis plan now, some teachers say.

“I think it’s a knee-jerk reaction,” said Kidd. “There are reasons [Pughsley] is going to have to force people to go to those schools and until he steps up to the plate and deals with the issues that exist — and those are leadership issues in the schools and a discipline problems in the schools — it won’t work.”

CMS is planning to to spiff up EquityPlus schools’ image of the equity schools by hiring a marketing company to develop a new brand name and image for equity schools through direct mailings and newspaper ads. It won’t work, several teachers said, unless the system is serious about addressing the challenges inside the schools as well. Until then, many teachers are waiting to see what exactly the administration will do.

Gregory Shaw, a teacher at Jay M. Robinson Middle School on Ballantyne Commons Parkway, says he purposely didn’t get his national board certification, a prestigious designation teachers can earn after a rigorous study process, because he anticipated that CMS would move board certified teachers into low-performing schools.

Shaw is about as conflicted as you can get. He loves the Ballantyne parents who sometimes offer him more help than he can handle. He won’t go to a low-performing school unless he’s forced to, he said. Even with a good principal and all the support they need, he still doesn’t think good teachers can raise these kids’ test scores that much.

But he’s also African-American, and it bothers him that low-income kids don’t have the same number of quality, experienced teachers his students do. For him, the main issue is with the administration, not the children.

“It is what is happening down at the Education Center that bothers us the most,” he said. “The constant new ideas every other day. We’re going to do this, we’re going to do that. I think teachers even at good schools are overwhelmed with these ideas that seem to come and go overnight. You go to workshops, you learn this idea to do this. Then the next year it’s another workshop. They never stick to anything.” That’s why, Shaw says, he too doesn’t believe he’ll ever see the money if he’s transferred, or that the changes will last.

In other words, it’s going to take quite an effort by the CMS administration to convince teachers that the system is for real.

Machado, of South Meck High, is a Cuban refugee who speaks with near reverence of the education he received at Garinger High School, comparing it to the private schools he attended in his native country. He has no interest in working there today, he says, but if he’s forced to go, he says he wants the bonus money up front.

“I am not going to put up with anything unless I have the money upfront,” said Machado. Years ago, he says he signed up for a career development program that promised a $500 per year increase in pay. It was a few years before the bonus actually showed up in his paycheck. A few years after that, the program disappeared — and so did the increase.

Then there are teachers like Tom Booker, head of the science department at Northwest School of the Arts. Booker got into teaching simply because he loves science and wanted to inspire kids to pursue science careers. Though he’s taught kids at all academic levels, it’s those who want to learn that really get him fired up and make the job worthwhile. Most of his low performing kids aren’t interested in science, or in learning for that matter, he says. The best he can hope to do with them over the course of a year is to at least get them to place education on their list of important things.

“That doesn’t always translate into them performing well in class, and rarely, if ever, translates into pursuing a career in science,” he said.

What if he had to teach just low-performing kids? “That really wouldn’t do it for me,” he said.

To Merry Oaks Principal Stanley Frazier, the criticisms of EquityPlus schools are a bunch of nonsense. Ninety percent of the kids at his school are on the free and reduced lunch program. Seventy percent are African-American and 30 percent are Latino, he says, yet the school has been in the high-growth category for five years, which means it exceeded its test score goals by 10 percent annually. The school has a teacher turnover rate of 10 percent, which is low by both state and district standards for regular schools. For an equity school, it’s practically unheard of. Frazier insists his success can be duplicated at other schools if teachers buy in.

But test scores and teacher turnover rates show that most equity schools aren’t as well run as Merry Oaks. For CMS administration to gain the backing of teachers, it will have to turn many of its equity schools inside out. If the system is serious about the changes, the possibilities seem endless. But it still remains to be seen how much support CMS will get in the meantime from the county’s best teachers.

Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com

This article appears in Feb 2-8, 2005.