The following should be required reading for the folks on the various committees currently attempting to fix Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, because they’re not going to see it anywhere else.
Brain teaser: As a parent, if you only had two choices where would you send your kids to school? Your first choice is Mecklenburg County. Your second choice is Pitt County, a largely rural armpit of a place in eastern North Carolina where the percentage of people living below the poverty line is double what it is here. Pitt County spends about $100 less per student than Mecklenburg does.
Six years ago it would have been a toss up. Today, the correct answer is … Pitt County. Sounds nuts, but it isn’t. At the end of last year, the composite score on state tests for Pitt County schools was 82.2. For Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, it was 64.7. White kids in Pitt County trounced their Mecklenburg counterparts by 10 points. Among black kids, it was a massacre. In Pitt County, 72 percent of African-American children got passing scores. Only 47 percent did at CMS.
Parents of white kids in Mecklenburg County may think they can escape low-scoring schools by moving to the suburbs, but here’s the kicker: North Pitt High School is 66 percent African American, and 67 percent of the students are poor enough to qualify for free and reduced lunches. Last year, the school had a 79 percent composite score on its state tests. That means North Pitt posted a higher score than three of the five highest-scoring high schools in Mecklenburg County. That feat is even more astounding when you consider this: The three Mecklenburg high schools North Pitt High outscored are majority white with fewer than 30 percent of the kids on the free and reduced lunch program. Yes, you read that right.
There isn’t a high school in Pitt County that scores below 71 percent on state tests. In Mecklenburg County, 10 out of 17 high schools score in the 50s and below.
It wasn’t always that way in Pitt County. Back in 1999, North Pitt posted a dismal 46.5 percent score on state tests. Like CMS, the student bodies at half the high schools in the system scored below 60 percent. But that was before the system initiated intensive reforms and low-cost efforts to target ninth graders. In just five years, Pitt County educators turned the school system around while put-upon CMS leaders whined about how many poor kids they had to educate and how they just didn’t have enough money to do it. And Pitt County was one of several poor school systems in the state that cleaned CMS’ clock.
If you spent the last five years watching this circus like Judge Howard Manning has, it would eventually push you over the edge, too.
Manning is the judge who presides over the Leandro case, in which poor school districts and more affluent ones such as CMS are suing the state for more money. Over the last couple of months, Manning has been pouring over test scores on state Web sites on his own time. He’s been known to publicly berate CMS in the past. But this week, he finally snapped and threatened to shut down four of the system’s worst performing high schools if they post low scores again this year and if school leaders refuse to remove their principals.
As usual, Manning explained his reasons for this in excruciating detail in a 17-page letter that highlighted the five-year accomplishments of poor counties. And as usual, it all made perfect sense.
But also as usual, by the time the elites around here got done with him, it was Manning, not them, who came off looking half-cocked. That’s because the statistical meat of Manning’s arguments never sees the light of day in media reports around here. School leaders know that most people don’t know about Pitt County, or that our scores lag the 10 points behind the state average.
CMS leaders insist that they are aware of the problem and that they are genuinely trying to fix it. But that’s what they say every year, so it’s impossible to tell if they really mean it this time.
And it’s the opposite of what they were saying earlier this year, when they were running around town trying to counter “negative media impressions” about the school system in gooey interviews about how CMS was actually a premier school system because it beat state and national averages on another test called the NAEP. The critical difference that never gets mentioned is that only a select fraction of students takes the NAEP, while more than 90 percent take the state tests.
Howard Manning is not demented, nor is he an extremist. He’s just a guy with a big soap box who cares enough about this county’s kids to draw a line in the sand and take the inevitable pummeling for it from local elites. That’s what makes him so dangerous.
If he keeps this up, some in the expect-less-at-CMS crowd might be without employment. Now that would truly be an educational crisis.
This article appears in Mar 15-21, 2006.
