For nearly a decade, Mecklenburg County has tried to heal the racial wounds of the past with bricks and mortar. While suburban schools in the fastest growing areas of the county burst at the seams, the community methodically rebuilt historically black schools that had been long neglected. Even when it became obvious that some of these schools were only partially full, the county didn’t stop building, because to tear one down without replacing it would have been a slap in the face to African Americans.
Hundreds of millions of dollars in voter-approved bonds later, things look starkly different at many largely poor, largely black schools. The leaky pipes, faulty thermostats and stench of old, rotting carpet that had become an urban school trademark are mostly gone. Today many of these schools have shiny computers, new library books and sprawling media centers, all built and distributed according to exacting standards so that everything is at least equal to those at schools in the suburbs, and sometimes even better. On paper, it looked like the African-American community was finally getting somewhere. Equity-obsessed political and educational leaders were so confident of this that last fall they turned their attention to the suburbs and put together a bond package that began to address overcrowding in suburban schools.
But all wasn’t well at many of those new, predominantly African-American schools. Inside, the educational rot continues, although this time it isn’t in the walls or the carpets or the pipes. It’s in the one place nobody wants to talk about fixing: the classroom. Last year, a study by Creative Loafing found that the one factor experts agree is the most important to providing equity for poorer schools — good, experienced teachers — had gone virtually unaddressed by the school system. A year later, an updated study shows that all the window dressing still hides a systematic educational disparity so stark that it shocked some school board members when they first learned about it last year.
When it comes to teacher talent and experience, this district remains a caste-like, three-tiered school system that breaks down with surprising predictability along class and racial lines. Suburban schools with white majorities are still stacked with the system’s most experienced teachers and have the greatest number of teachers with the much-sought-after National Board certification. Schools with the highest concentrations of minority and poor children, called Focus schools by the system, are the dumping grounds for young, inexperienced teachers who leave in a seemingly endless stream only to be replaced by more fledglings just like them. The rest of the system — which includes schools with more balanced populations in terms of race and socioeconomics — still lags behind the majority-white suburban schools in the county’s highest-income zip codes, but not as far behind, on average, as the county’s majority black schools.
After CL wrote about the problem last year, the school system briefly toyed with ideas for moving the experienced teachers who teach suburban kids into inner-city classrooms. In June, the county commission declined to fund a $17 million plan, which combined incentives to attract teachers to low-income schools and included mandatory transfers.
Then this fall, a whole new set of statistics came out that showed what was going on in CMS’s inner-city classrooms during the 2004-2005 school year, while political leaders flirted with addressing the teacher problem. At Garinger High School, where 70 percent of the student population is on the free- and reduced-lunch program, a new crop of fresh-faced teachers straight out of the college dorms showed up to do combat with a new class of inner-city freshman. Nearly 40 percent of the teachers at Garinger had less than one year experience and nearly half had less than four years experience.
Peter Komarisky, a biology teacher at West Charlotte High School with 15 years experience, is blunt about why this happens. “Experienced teachers avoid the inner-city schools like the plague because they get no support,” he says. That leaves first-year and inexperienced teachers to fill the slots the departed leave behind.
“The organization and support that new teachers should get, they don’t,” said Komarisky. “They are stuck with larger classrooms with lower-achieving children. That happens more in inner-city schools.”
Veteran CMS teacher and department head Frank Machado, who retired last year after more than two decades in the classroom, says new teachers don’t have a clue what they are going to be facing in the classroom, because the schools those teachers graduate from aren’t preparing them to handle students. Machado believes it takes most new teachers at least three years to learn how to control a classroom well enough to actually teach in it. Meanwhile, the kids in those classrooms often don’t learn much, said Machado.
“I can tell you what I think is going to happen,” Machado said of Garinger High School. “Out of those [40 percent of] teachers that are first-year teachers, half of them will be gone from one year to the next.”
Machado may have guessed right. By the end of the year, 25 percent of the teachers at Garinger had left the school. They weren’t the only casualties. Only 43 percent of students at the school tested on grade level last year. And nearly 30 percent of kids on the free- and reduced-lunch programs didn’t graduate system-wide.
Komarisky sees the effects of teacher attrition on freshmen the first week they show up in his class. He says it is not unusual for him to see kids coming out of the eighth grade who haven’t had a permanent math teacher in three years. Those kids can’t do basic math, he says.
What’s Race Got to do with It?
Across town at suburban Butler High School, where fewer than 20 percent of the students are on the free- and reduced-lunch programs and more than 70 percent are white, inexperienced teachers are more of a rarity. Only 12 percent of the teachers at Butler were in their first year, and 77 percent of the kids there tested on grade level.
Is there a link here?
Renowned education researcher William L. Sanders thinks so. Sanders, a senior research fellow with the University of North Carolina, says the findings of decades of educational research point to one simple truth. “We looked at percent minority kids in schools and the percentage of free- and reduced-price lunch kids in those schools,” Sanders said. “We’ve looked at differential class size, location of buildings, urban versus rural or suburban settings. The differences in teacher effectiveness just dominates all of those other factors when you’re looking at the rate of progress kids make.”
And teacher experience is the most important factor in teacher effectiveness, said Sanders. “If you’ve got students in the average beginning teacher’s classroom compared with students in the average 10- and 15-year veteran teacher’s classroom, you will expect to see a large, measurable difference in the progress the kids make,” Sanders said. “So consequently, if you’ve got schools that have a disproportionate number of beginning teachers, you would expect those schools to have lower rates of gain.”
For kids trapped at schools like Garinger, the stakes are huge and the odds aren’t good, Sanders said. “The sequence of teachers that kids get in math will have more to do with their achievement in math than probably any other factor,” Sanders said. “So if a kid gets a sequence of highly effective math teachers, you will see their achievement level ramp up very rapidly. If you see another kid with equal ability get a sequence of relatively ineffective teachers, you will see after three years the difference in achievement level between those two kids be huge, not trivial.
“It becomes a probability game,” said Sanders. “What is the probability that a kid over five or six grade levels is going to catch two or three very weak teachers? If a kid catches two weak math teachers in a row, unless there is some kind of major intervention, the kid just about will not recover from that. Anything that changes those probabilities of kids getting sequences of ineffective teachers over time will have a major, major impact on the child’s achievement level.”
The education experts Creative Loafing talked to emphasized that not all new teachers are necessarily bad teachers. But research consistently shows that new teachers tend to dramatically improve their ability to help students progress during their first few years of teaching.
In his years as an administrator, Machado said he often saw first-year teachers who couldn’t control their classrooms come close to being fired, but then grow into talented teachers over the next three to four years. But that doesn’t do much for the kids stuck in their classrooms during the transition period, particularly if those kids were already poor and at a disadvantage educationally.
Some school board members — in particular, School Board Chairman Joe White — repeat the mantra that students can get a good education at all of the system’s schools. But can they get an equal education? If what the experts say about teacher experience is true, the answer to that question could be disturbing for a community such as Mecklenburg County, which has sunk more than $7 billion into its schools in the last decade.
On first glance, the number disparity doesn’t look that bad. At the county’s Focus high schools, which earn the “Focus” designation because they have high percentages of poor and minority students who struggle academically, 31 percent of the teachers were in their first year. At the regular, or non-Focus schools, which have varied economic and racial make-ups, 20 percent are first-year teachers.
But those numbers hide a starker racial reality. At high schools that are more than 70 percent black, 31 percent of the teachers are in their first year and 45 percent have less than four years of experience. Meanwhile, at high schools with white enrollments more than 70 percent, the percentages of inexperienced teachers are half that, with 15 percent of teachers in their first year and 23 percent with less than four years of experience.
These averages don’t even begin to capture the difference between so-called Cadillac schools such as Davidson International Baccalaureate and Focus schools like Marie G. Davis. At Davidson, only 17 percent of teachers have less than four years of experience and 75 percent of students are white. At Davis, 96 percent of the students are black, 94 percent qualify for the free- and reduced-lunch programs and nearly 53 percent of the teachers have four or fewer years of teaching experience.
“I think that’s wrong,” said Tom Tate, a new school board member who was elected this fall. “It’s just wrong.”
One of the highest honors a teacher can earn is National Board certification (NBC). For this, teachers must pass an extensive series of performance-based assessments and analyses of their classroom abilities. It’s a time-consuming process, so arduous that many teachers don’t make it, and so valuable that those in North Carolina who do are paid 12 percent more just for having NBC certification.
Last year, Dan Goldhaber, a labor economist with the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, released the results of a survey of 600,000 North Carolina elementary student test scores over a three-year period. His research team found that low-income or minority students showed gains as high as 15 percent on their year-end tests when taught by NBC teachers when compared to similar students whose teachers attempted but did not earn certification. Teachers don’t qualify to compete for board certification until they have at least three years of classroom experience.
Even though Mecklenburg County was second in the nation two years ago in the number of board-certified teachers, the county’s Focus schools lag far behind suburban schools in numbers of NBC teachers. At Butler High School, 21 percent of the teachers are board certified. At Garinger High, only 3 percent are.
The problem isn’t news to Gerald Johnson, publisher of area African-American newspaper Charlotte Post and a board member of Charlotte Advocates for Education.
“It is just a frustrating thing to watch this happen year after year,” said Johnson. “It’s pretty well known what it would take to close the education gap between the races. There have been studies that have said that if you were serious about getting rid of the gap, all you would have to do is to put experienced teachers in front of students for five years and you can pretty much remove the gap.”
Johnson said he’s been trying to tell other black folks about the real crisis behind the educational disparities for years. At a meeting with other local African-American leaders, he got a hostile reaction when he suggested that school buildings shouldn’t be the black community’s focus.
“They were fussing and fighting for buildings in African-American areas because they [the school system] were spending money in suburban areas and I said, ‘That is not important. Give me the better teacher,'” said Johnson. “I have to remind them that the building has little to do with getting a good education. I could put students anywhere and they will come out learning if we do things right.”
Part of the problem, he said, is the trust that the black community has in the administrators and politicians who have fought so hard for new schools for black kids: “We sort of relegate responsibility for education to the educators and that contributes to the educational gap. We are the most loyal, abiding group when it comes to education and we think that administrators will take care of us, and that is a mistake. When it comes time to fight, it is hard to buck the system you have faith in.”
It’s not that school board members are oblivious to the problem or that they don’t care about it. “It is clearly the most critical problem the district has got,” said Molly Griffin, a school board member. But Griffin also readily admits she doesn’t know how to solve it.
Not just a local problem
CMS is not alone in its struggle with educational disparities. In most urban districts in the United States, experts say, low-income children are taught by less-effective, less-experienced teachers. The fact that CMS offers any incentives at all to teachers to work at schools where children need the most help puts the system in the minority, experts say.
After three years at a Focus school in Mecklenburg County, teachers are eligible for accountability bonuses of a few thousand dollars. This year, the system added yet another such bonus program. The system also has a $1,500-$2,500 bonus program to attract teachers who have (or are earning) a master’s degree. And it will help teachers get their master’s at a reduced cost if they teach at a Focus school.
On top of that, the state offers an $1,800 incentive to entice new teachers licensed in math, science and special education to teach in a handful of what it calls “high needs” schools. In addition, CMS has started an aggressive mentoring program to help support teachers of disadvantaged children.
Had the county provided funding for a $17 million plan hatched by former Superintendent Jim Pughsley, it would have offered talented teachers from both inside and outside the district an extra $10,000 a year for three years to teach in Focus schools. If teachers stayed the full three years and met certain goals, they could collect the full $30,000 from an escrow account. If not enough teachers volunteered to teach in schools that met the “crisis” criteria, the administration would transfer accomplished teachers to the schools whether they wanted to go or not.
The plan was practically revolutionary, some said, because while a handful of school districts were offering large incentives to attract teachers to low-performing schools, no other school system planned to back that up with forced transfers.
Since then, the school board appears to have shied away from that solution. Many feared experienced teachers would simply leave the district for surrounding counties rather than accept an assignment they didn’t want. And they worried that teachers talented at teaching one type of student might not be the right fit for other types of students.
Instead, CMS administrators are studying what other systems do and are planning to launch a committee of businesspeople and educators to come up with ways to retain and recruit talented teachers.
Most experts CL talked to said that while the incentives CMS is offering show its commitment to doing something about the problem, financial incentives and market-based solutions such as merit pay aren’t everything. “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 Eric Hirsch of the Southeast Center for Teaching Quality. “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.”
But among this county’s teachers there is a deeply ingrained perception that struggling schools have the worst discipline problems and the least amount of support from administrators.
“Everybody knows but no one wants to talk about the real issue with those schools,” said Machado. “It’s the discipline in those classrooms.” Machado, who retired last year but still works as a substitute, is clear about where he will and will not teach: Inner-city schools like Garinger, the school he graduated from, aren’t worth the headache.
“I would not go to Garinger because not only are they crazy, they are very, very aggressive, they’re offensive, they’re vulgar, and I don’t think that $80 a day is worth being insulted and being called names, and I don’t believe that the emotional stress that you have to go through with that kind of confrontation is worth the money,” Machado said. “The best teachers don’t want to go through that. Nobody wants to go through that. I don’t care what they pay them.”
Komarisky teaches at West Charlotte High School, another school Machado swears he wouldn’t set foot in. West Charlotte is the lowest-scoring high school in the system, with less than 40 percent of kids at grade level. A veteran teacher with a gift for handling tough kids, Komarisky says he volunteers to take the students other teachers can’t deal with. He says he can handle the 10 percent of kids who act out in the classroom but otherwise are manageable.
“It’s the 25 percent that are thugs who have no intention of getting an education that keep you from teaching kids,” said Komarisky. “I don’t understand why they don’t do something about them.”
The two men appear to share the opinions of the majority of teachers in the system. A recent survey of teachers by the Citizens’ Task Force on CMS found that 72 percent of teachers are dissatisfied with how administrators handle discipline. But the distrust of the administration runs deeper than that. Only 19 percent of the teachers surveyed said they believed the district values its teachers. And just 20 percent of teachers said they trusted administrators to make the best decisions for students.
Judy Kidd, president of the Classroom Teachers Association, said that while teachers need to be paid better, in general, financial incentives won’t entice them to go into inner-city schools until teachers trust the administration to support them.
“Teachers don’t want to go there because they know they are going to be held responsible and the kids aren’t going to be held responsible,” said Kidd. “It is not just the administration, it’s the parents, too.”
On the other hand, said Kidd, putting strong principals whom teachers trust at these schools could help attract and keep them there.
Griffin acknowledges discipline problems linger at Focus schools and that teachers’ jobs are easier at non-Focus schools. But she said change may be on the way.
“I think we have really turned the corner on getting good leadership at our Focus schools, but it will take a little while to see the full impact of that,” said Griffin. The district also has started to study teacher-retention and attraction strategies that have worked elsewhere.
School board member Kaye McGarry, a frequent critic of the administration, agrees with Griffin that better administrative leadership at the schools is key to keeping and attracting experienced teachers. But she said the system needs to take a more aggressive approach.
“We need a superintendent who will clean house,” said McGarry. “I know public education is never going to be perfect, but we can do so much better. Union and Cabarrus counties love our [experienced] teachers. We need to find a way to keep them here.”
This article appears in Jan 18-23, 2006.
