Flawed priorities

Six years ago, for the first time, this community was forced to confront the toll that years of neglect had taken on inner-city schools as school system leaders testified in the Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education desegregation court battle.

Now, three-quarters of a billion dollars in voter-approved bonds later, things look starkly different at most inner-city schools. Gone are the leaky pipes, faulty thermostats and stench of old, rotting carpet. The hundreds of millions in bond and other monies we’ve spent so far have bought us over 20 new or restored inner-city schools, and much more.

But a study by Creative Loafing found that the one factor experts agree is the real key to providing equity for poorer schools — good, experienced teachers — has been neglected. In addition, our study found that all the window dressing still hides a systematic educational disparity so stark it surprised and disturbed most of the school board members we talked to.

The study found that in terms of teachers, Mecklenburg’s is a caste-like, three-tiered school system that breaks down with surprising predictability along class and racial lines. White majority suburban schools are stacked with the system’s most experienced teachers, and have the greatest number of teachers with the much sought-after National Board Certification. Today, the schools with the highest concentrations of minority and poor children, called EquityPlus II schools by the school system, are teacher turnover mills with much higher numbers of inexperienced teachers who leave in a seemingly endless stream, only to be replaced by more just like them. The rest of the system, which includes schools with more balanced populations in terms of race and socio-economics, 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.

In interviews, every school board member we spoke to — from conservative suburban schools champion Larry Gauvreau to liberal, school equity advocate Louise Woods — admitted they were aware that schools dominated by poor and minority children were still getting the shaft in the teacher department.

But when confronted with the results of CL’s study, many were surprised by the extent of the problem.

Glaring Disparities
For the last decade, buildings, facilities, bricks and mortar have dominated the debate over education in Mecklenburg County. In comparison, teacher effectiveness, the one thing that national studies have shown over and over to be the single most important factor in student performance, has gotten short shrift here, amounting to little more than a side note in the debate.

When you compare all the schools in the system side by side on paper, you could understandably get the impression that some sort of bizarre, yet orderly, truce was hatched six years ago — as if, in exchange for getting to keep the best teachers in largely suburban white schools, the community agreed to deck out many high-poverty largely minority schools with all the window dressing they always lacked, but none of the educational thunder. It’s as if the community said fine, we’ll buy you books and computers and media centers and we’ll even stick our kids in trailers in the suburbs, for now, as long as those trailers are staffed by the best teachers.

Take the three high schools with the highest test scores in the system, for instance. Last year, those schools — Providence, Myers Park and Butler — had three key things in common that no one seemed to notice. Those three had the highest number of highly coveted national board certified teachers of all the high schools. And all three schools, which were among the highest in white student populations, had the lowest percentage of inexperienced teachers and the greatest number of teachers with more than four years experience. At all three schools, over 50 percent of teachers had more than 10 years experience.

Meanwhile, only one of the six equity schools, Garinger High School, had a majority of teachers with more than 10 years experience. Of the six schools with the highest number of new teachers (those with zero to three years experience), four were equity schools. It’s a phenomenon that’s duplicated across the school system.

Equity schools are, in most cases, no longer dark, dank places from another era. Schools serving large numbers of poor and black children that once lacked instructional computers are now hardwired like NASA launch stations, with nearly twice the number of computers per student found in suburban, majority white schools. At about 12.5 students per teacher, the teacher-pupil ratio in these schools is significantly better than in non-equity schools. Class sizes, on average, are about five students smaller in inner-city middle and elementary schools than in their more affluent suburban counterparts, a feat the school system accomplished by placing trailers at inner-city schools that aren’t overcrowded to create more classrooms so more teachers could teach fewer students.

Today, the libraries these kids use have more books per student than suburban or non-equity schools, and overall, the effective age of the library collection is about 10 years newer than what you’ll find in the rest of the system, a far cry from the days when the library books in largely black schools were cast-offs from largely white ones. On paper, it all looks good. In the halls of these schools, it looks even better. It’s a tremendous accomplishment, given where we were in 1998. But it’s not equity.

The teacher problem is at its starkest at the middle school level, where little has changed in the last two years. During the 2002-2003 school year, the first year parents were able to choose their child’s school, 44 percent of the teachers at the county’s 14 equity schools had between zero and three years teaching experience. At non-equity schools, an average of 30 percent did.

But the equity designation, which takes into account both poverty and race, can hide a lot, particularly the role race plays in where teachers teach. At the 10 middle schools with African-American student populations of 57 percent and above, 47 percent of teachers had three or fewer years experience. At the nine schools with white populations of 57 percent or above, only 28 percent of teachers did. The situation didn’t appear to improve much this year. The school system did not provide us with requested data on where teachers with three or fewer years of experience are now teaching, but did agree to send us data on where teachers with four or fewer years of experience were teaching — and then never sent it despite repeated requests. We eventually obtained the data from a school board member who had requested it months after we had.

Again, the disparity was glaring. While 48 percent of teachers at equity schools fall into the zero to four years experience range, only 30 percent of those teaching at non-equity schools do. At the majority-white schools described above, 28 percent of teachers had zero to four years experience, compared to 52 percent at the majority black schools.

These averages don’t even begin to capture the difference between Cadillac schools like Davidson International Baccalaureate, where only 11 percent of teachers have four or less years experience and 82 percent of students are white, and equity schools like Marie G. Davis, where 95 percent of students are black and nearly 60 percent of the teachers have four or fewer years of teaching experience.

Disparities like those surprised even school board member Louise Woods, who chairs a school system committee that studies personnel issues. Woods asked us to recalculate the average percentages of inexperienced teachers at majority African-American and equity middle schools listed above, because she initially had difficulty believing they could be that high. So we went through it with her, school by school.

“That’s awful,” Woods said. “It’s a crime. It’s a condemnation, really. We tend to blame the children. We say, “These are poor children, what do you expect?’ If we can’t solve this problem, then nothing else matters.”

Board member Vilma Leake, who is African American, says the numbers aren’t a surprise to her because she’s been griping about the situation for years.

“We know that there’s a disparity,” said Leake. “It’s a major problem and I’ve been cognizant of those problems all through the years and it’s gotten worse in the last five or six years.”

Experience Counts
Renowned education researcher William L. Sanders, now a Senior Research Fellow with the University of North Carolina system, says the findings of decades of educational research can be boiled down to one simple truth.

“We’ve looked at differential class size, location of buildings, urban versus rural or suburban settings,” Sanders said. “We looked at percent minority kids in schools and the percentage of free and reduced price lunch kids in those schools. All of that paled in comparison to differences in teachers at the schools. The differences in teacher effectiveness just dominates all of those other factors when you’re looking at rate of progress kids make.”

And the most important factor in teacher effectiveness, says Sanders, is teacher experience.

“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 than schools that have a smaller percentage of beginning teachers.”

For the kids, the stakes are huge, Sanders says.

“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. 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. So consequently, 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.”

Of course, say experts like Sanders and Dan Goldhaber, a labor economist with the Center for Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington, that doesn’t mean that all new teachers are bad teachers. It just means that research shows that new teachers tend to dramatically improve their ability to help students progress during their first few years of teaching.

“Years of experience is a very strong indicator on average relative to effectiveness that you can see in the distribution of teaching talent,” said Sanders. “That is one of those things that is consistently very big.”

Eric Hirsch, Vice President for Policy and Partnerships at the North Carolina-based Southeast Center for Teaching Quality in Chapel Hill, agrees.

“In terms of years of experience, studies show that that does tend to make a difference and usually you find teachers kind of ramping up in their first few years,” he said. “Experience matters.”

So, says Goldhaber, does where a system’s National Board Certified (NBC) teachers wind up. National Board certification, which teachers qualify to pursue after three years in the classroom, is an extensive series of performance-based assessments that includes teaching portfolios, student work samples, videotapes and thorough analyses of the candidates’ classroom teaching ability. It’s a time-consuming process so arduous that many teachers don’t make it, and so valuable that those in NC who do are paid 12 percent more just for having NBC certification.

In a recently released study, Goldhaber and an independent research team surveyed 600,000 North Carolina elementary student test scores over a three-year period. They found that low-income or minority students showed gains as high as 15 percent on their year-end reading and math tests when taught by NBC teachers when compared to similar students whose teachers attempted but did not earn certification.

Even though Mecklenburg County is second in the nation in the number of NBC teachers, the county’s equity and high minority population schools lag far behind suburban schools in numbers of NBC teachers who teach there.

Only three middle schools broke into the double digits as far as percentages of NBC teachers working there this school year. The three schools, J.M. Robinson (28 percent), Davidson IB (22 percent) and Carmel (11 percent) are all majority-white schools. Meanwhile, four of fourteen equity schools had no NBC teachers at all, and at another five, two percent or less of those teaching held NBC certification.

A Start, But Not Much of One
Today’s school board is a more conservative one than the body that held office half a decade ago. The passion you can hear in the voices of most suburban board members for fixing overcrowding at suburban schools, which is a legitimate problem, is missing when they talk about leveling teaching disparities in the system’s neediest schools. But missing, too, are the angry black leaders who once held up corroded pipes before the television cameras and railed about crumbling schools during the Swann court battle. Also conspicuously absent are the white liberal voices that demanded change.

Sure, the school board and administrators have talked about the teacher disparity problem. They’ve studied and implemented incentives for teachers to teach in the schools where children struggle most. Last week, they even launched a non-profit charity called the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools Foundation, which will raise money to expand the system’s fledgling teacher mentor program and entice teachers to remain with the school system and to teach in the system’s most fragile schools.

This is a start, but not much of one. Had education leaders responded to the facilities disparity crisis six years ago by launching a charity to raise an undetermined amount of money for nicer inner-city school buildings, the response would have been outrage. Instead, they spent hundreds of millions on facilities, and called it equity.

So far though, the outrage that fueled the quest for equity in facilities is missing when it comes to what is actually being learned in the classroom.

African-American school board member George Dunlap repeatedly assured CL that schools Superintendent James Pughsley was doing a good job on teacher disparity, even after we pointed out to him that according to the system’s own data, little appears to have changed in the last two school years in terms of where inexperienced teachers are teaching. Dunlap also reiterated that the system was using incentives to attract teachers to equity schools, but was fuzzy on the details of the programs.

The tone of the quest to find out what is causing this problem and what can be done about it is even more tepid.

“We know there are discrepancies at schools, and some of them are equity schools,” said Lee Kindberg, a school board member. “We don’t know if that’s because of bad luck, bad leadership or what.”

Part of the problem may be that school board members know that solving the problem would require tackling uncomfortable subjects like why the system’s teacher turnover is among the highest in the state and why the best teachers don’t want to teach in certain schools.

In 2002-2003, CMS lost 17 percent of its teachers to teacher turnover. That’s better than the system has done in previous years, but school board members say they’re also aware that teacher flight affects high-minority and equity schools more than it does suburban schools, which is true.

Some 28 percent of teachers left the county’s equity elementary schools last year, while only 18 percent left the system’s suburban white majority schools. The county’s elementary and high schools show roughly the same gap.

“When you think of even (three) out of ten staff leaving and what that does to the stability of the adults that those kids see, but also just the collegiality and the culture of the school, when you have the constant churn and so many inexperienced teachers constantly walking through this revolving door, that’s big,” said Hirsch.

Compounding the problem is where teachers live and the inherent way the system is set up.

“The culture of schools and assignment in the past has been really focused on people choosing where they wanted to go and in many cases, frankly, we’re trying to overcome that culture that was, and is still to some degree, that once you’ve had two or three years in a more challenging school, you can get a transfer somewhere else,” said Woods.

Many times, says Sanders, the problem is as simple as not wanting to fight traffic.

“Teachers tend to live in the suburbs,” Sanders said. “Even beginning teachers may take an apartment. They tend to start in inner-city schools and if they stay in teaching they often tend to transfer when the opportunity presents itself closer to where they live. This tends to create more vacancies at the schools they left which then creates the openings for beginning teachers.”

To Leake, it’s also a racial issue others aren’t so eager to talk about.

“(There are) a greater number of white females in the teaching profession and they want to dictate where they go and where they’re going to work and we can’t do that,” said Leake. “It should not be that way. The central office should designate where teachers are going to work. I don’t know why we can’t focus on doing that. I’ve been saying it all along that we cannot continue to be successful if we’re not going to put people where they’re needed the most. It just depends upon who’s saying it as to who is listening.”

But others, including school board members Kay McGarry and Woods, aren’t sure if that would work.

“I think that would be pretty difficult to do because we have neighboring counties that are already taking teachers away from us,” said McGarry. “Maybe it’s because we’re not as efficient in actually placing them in a school or maybe because of the environment they’re in, they choose to go to a neighboring county.”

Like Leake, Dunlap acknowledged that assigning teachers to the schools that need them most would quickly solve the problem, but said he had reservations about it.

“I would not want a teacher teaching my child if the teacher felt like she was in a hostile environment because I wouldn’t feel the teacher was giving my child her best,” said Dunlap.

Ineffective Incentives Leave Uncomfortable Questions
CMS is not alone when it comes to these problems. In most urban districts in the country, experts say, minority and low-income children are taught by less-effective, less-experienced teachers. The fact that our local system offers any incentives at all to teachers to work at schools where children need the most help puts CMS in the minority, said Goldhaber.

“School systems typically don’t differentiate based on the kinds of students that you’re teaching,” he said.

After three years at an equity school in Mecklenburg County, teachers are eligible for accountability bonuses of a few thousand dollars. The school system has a $1,500-$2,500 bonus program to attract teachers who have or are earning master’s degrees to equity schools, and will help them get their master’s at a reduced cost if they teach at an equity 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.

But teachers also receive bonuses if their students hit certain growth targets no matter where they teach. Sanders says teachers know that reaching those is often easier if you teach in a suburban school. Still, teachers at equity schools that reach these targets get additional money on top of that. In addition, CMS has started an aggressive mentoring program in some schools to help support teachers of disadvantaged children and closed others with high percentages of experienced teachers to transfers.

Most experts CL talked to said that while the incentives CMS is offering show its commitment to doing something about the problem, they’re not the solution.

Attracting teachers with master’s degrees to low-income schools, for instance, may accomplish little, Sanders said.

“We have not been able, nor has anybody else in research been able to show a measurable difference between teachers with a master’s degree and a B.S. degree relative to progress kids make if you hold years of service constant,” said Sanders.

And, says Hirsch, since the state’s policies on national board certification — a 12 percent annual bonus for those who receive it — doesn’t stipulate where these teachers teach, it doesn’t lead to a more equitable distribution of those teachers across school systems. Each year, CMS holds a special breakfast for NBC teachers to encourage them to transfer to equity schools, but offers no financial incentives for them to do so. Some school board members expressed support for an additional incentive such as this in passing, but it can’t be said that anyone is poised to step forward and carry the torch. Even if they did, it’s unclear that spending more money to attract board certified and experienced teachers to struggling schools would make a difference.

Financial incentives and market-based solutions like merit pay help, say experts, but not much.

“Even with the greatest incentives in the world, unless they are of an enormous magnitude, the working conditions in those schools are essential for keeping teachers there and until you address some of those things, nothing will change,” said Hirsch.

By that, he’s talking about the politically touchy stuff, like asking teachers what they don’t like about the atmosphere at these schools and working diligently to change it, even if that means removing a principal who lacks leadership qualities or dealing with discipline problems.

“You ask questions like, “Is the school clean? Is it safe? Are you uninterrupted? Can you work and have a physical space which would allow you to be successful with kids? Do you have a principal that is supportive and is an instructional leader that understands those sorts of issues and encourages and leads there?'” Hirsh says. “All five are heavily related to whether teachers stay.”

Hirsch says school systems in North Carolina should carefully study the results of a teachers’ working conditions survey currently being conducted by the state that will have teachers’ assessments of working conditions broken down on a school-by-school basis.

“That would be a good place to start,” he said.

Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com

This article appears in Apr 28 – May 4, 2004.