Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Superintendent Peter Gorman is single-handedly attempting to turn the school system around.
Gorman has begun unveiling details of his long-awaited 100-day plan, which he admits will be controversial. The coming months will test the strength of the goodwill he’s built in the community. But Gorman says he’s ready.
CL: If Jesus Christ took your job and implemented the very changes you are implementing at CMS right now, it would take him a minimum of three to five years to raise this system’s test scores. Do you think this community is going to give you that kind of time?
Gorman: This whole job’s messy. When I bought the ticket, I knew what I was getting. I knew this was going to be an intense, brutal four years. And we’ll see if I make it four.
There is going to be a group of individuals that I’m going to lose in the next year. It sounds defeatist but it’s the reality. When I don’t do exactly what they want as they wanted it in the next year, the honeymoon will end. There’s going to be another group of individuals that are going to ride along. They are going to monitor and evaluate and see if we are making progress. And then there’s going to be another group that is going to come along and ride with us even if we don’t make the gains at the pace we want. They still believe so thoroughly and completely in public education that they will stay with us and then that fourth group is a group that just never drank the Kool-Aid at all. They just aren’t along at all, never have been.
More people care about education in this community than anywhere I’ve ever been in my life and more people have opinions and those opinions are diverse and divergent. That’s good and bad. The good part is, hey, at least they’re still talking about and thinking about education. We’re not St. Louis. We’re not one of those areas, like Detroit, where people have given up.
What about those students who have been convicted of felonies outside the school system and the kids who have done violent things in the school system? That’s been a major concern for parents.
I want it more formalized so that every single case automatically gets to review if they are charged with a felony and the child doesn’t return at all until it has been at least reviewed. We may bring the kid back, we might not.
The problem we have right now is that we send all these kids to Derita Alternative School. Here’s the groups of kids we send to Derita — kids who have been caught with a handgun off campus and been in six fights and a kid who has been in a first fight who has never had a discipline incident. I don’t want those kids together. I’m not talking about a super-max type of environment like a prison system, but I am talking about a structured, serious program for the serious offenders. I think we need another program for kids who made a mistake.
We’re setting up three different levels. We are even meeting with an outside provider to look at if we’ll provide that more serious level. Maybe we should be contracting that out. And the other thing I’m concerned about is where we provide those services. I don’t want to provide those services on a traditional campus. When I was in Florida we actually set up a storefront. It really worked quite well. Kids didn’t have movement around the facility without supervision.
For years, there’s been tough talk from CMS about making sure eighth graders are prepared for high school. Yet CMS continues to promote those who fail their tests to the ninth grade anyway. In your new “8.5” program, do you actually intend to keep them from going to high school indefinitely if they can’t get out of the eighth grade? (Gorman wants to experiment with two versions of the 8.5 program, one in which eighth graders are segregated on separate campuses until they pass and another in which they take “catch-up” courses on high school campuses but are barred from participating in daily high school life.)
They’re not going to go to high school until they test out. Some people are going to be pretty ticked about it, but we’ve got to get these kids up to grade level and also in a non-embarrassing environment. How do you deal with [a student] who may have been passed along, and they read at a fifth grade level, and now they are in high school? You have to go back and teach them at a fifth grade level. We can’t do that in your ninth grade English class.
The school board has been remarkably well-behaved since you’ve been around. How have you achieved that? There haven’t been many big foot-in-mouth incidents and the kind of sniping we used to experience.
Well, not at the board meetings, but you know the board meeting is the performance. Practice is sometimes ugly. I will readily admit I’m on my honeymoon. I think they are giving me some leeway.
Now the question is; will my 100-day plan live up to what they expect? I bought time with that and I’m going to alienate different members with different parts of it. We’re bringing forward a prioritization system for facilities, which is going to result in more schools built in high-growth and new areas. That’s going to tick off some folks, but that’s the right thing to do.
When you said that in a recent Charlotte Observer article, I couldn’t believe there weren’t fireworks; a year ago there would have been. Behind the scenes, what the heck is going on?
Well, there were fireworks from board members and county commissioners. People knew that was going to happen. Here’s my belief with that one. We’ve got 20,000 kids in portables. We grow by 5,000 kids a year. If we build 5,000 seats a year, we just don’t drown. I’m trying to keep from drowning, but then also trying to learn to swim. What’s going to be our 15-year plan, our 12-year plan to get rid of 1,200 portables? What I’m trying to share with the board is I never said we don’t need any remodels and renovations. I just said we’ve got to move that percentage and we do need an ongoing plan.
Any other secrets on how you’ve gotten the school board to behave or do you think they are on their best behavior on their own, or what?
I’m not taking ownership. I’m working with them and they are working hard every day. I had someone say, “Gee, so have you made a concerted effort to put your face on the front page of the paper and get their face off the front page of the paper?” That sounds terrible and I wouldn’t exactly put it that way, but the goal has been, what initiatives do we put out, what pace do we put them out? How do we market ourselves?
A lot of people think that the school board will never get public support the way they are perceived now.
Well, I’m the public face of the school district right now and that was part of the goal. I told the board I was going to do that when I came in. I said it in our first interviews and that’s been our focus all along.
A decade ago, the demographics of students in our school system more closely mirrored the county population. Now it appears that some suburban parents are rapidly abandoning it. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Mecklenburg County’s population is 62 percent white, 29 percent African-American and nine percent Hispanic. In contrast, 36 percent of CMS students are white, 42 percent are black and 14 percent are Hispanic.
Right now we are getting to a point where we don’t mirror the community. That’s a challenge we are dealing with. We are going to roll some things out with the 100-day plan; for example, the facilities strategy. Part of that is to stop suburban flight. If you don’t have seats [in the suburbs], it just starts this spiral downward. So that’s a part of it. We’re also looking at some of our high-achieving programs. Do we have those lures so that we can compete against Charlotte Latin, Country Day and Charlotte Catholic?
This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 5, 2006.
