Lawmakers’ disastrous path to an inferior NC education
Published May 30, 2013
By Mike Ward, former State Superintendent of Public Instruction, published in The News and Observer, May 29, 2013
I am a proud North Carolinian – proud to be a product of public schools, proud to have spent a career in public education, proud to have served as state superintendent of Public Instruction for two terms and proud of the broad-based leadership that made our state’s public schools the envy of many others.
From 2004 until last fall, my wife and I lived in Mississippi as Hope served as the bishop of Mississippi’s United Methodist Church. Our friends and colleagues there often looked to North Carolina as a Southern state doing the right things in public education.
I recall the days when North Carolina was considered an educational backwater. But Republicans and Democrats, professional educators and business leaders decided that our children deserved better than 48th or 49th in public education. Tar Heels grasped the direct connection between excellent schools and economic growth. Our state developed a great legacy of investing in public education.
The investment paid off. Higher achievement scores, lower dropout rates and competitive international comparisons of student performance reflect our progress. Though much remains to be done to ensure that schools work well in all places for all children, we advanced steadily over the past few decades.
Ours became one of the most rapidly improving systems of public education in the United States. People from across the country wanted to know how it happened and how we were narrowing performance gaps across social lines. The NAACP’s 4th National Education Summit honored our state with the Daisy Bates Educational Advocacy Award for progress in access, equity and accountability.
How sad we were to move back to Raleigh last fall and find some legislative leaders committed to a sprint to the bottom. After being far more competitive, North Carolina now ranks 48th in per pupil expenditure and 46th in how well we reward our hard-working teachers. And some in the General Assembly appear poised to make it worse.
Here’s just a sample of the proposed policies that stand to hurt our public schools and our students:
1. Massive cuts to school funding. This means thousands of lost teaching positions. It means crowded classrooms and the loss of teacher assistants in early elementary grades, even though research shows that smaller class sizes help students, especially struggling students.
2. Vouchers. If you want to know where money to pay for teachers is going, one place to look is at the proposed voucher legislation. Proponents refer to them as “opportunity scholarships.” Vouchers are bad public policy, snatching millions of dollars away from public schools that desperately need them. We support the choice of private education, but taxpayers will foot the bill for some parents to send their children to private schools. Legislators backing these vouchers will tell you that the vouchers are for disadvantaged students, but the bulk of these vouchers will go to middle-income residents – and you’ll get to pay their children’s private school tuition. Vouchers are an expensive, divisive program with virtually no record of improving overall student performance.
3. Reduced funding for pre-kindergarten. This is a senseless and self-defeating proposal. Investing in pre-K is not just good for kids – it’s good for all of us. Research shows that quality pre-K returns $5-$13 for every dollar spent by reducing costs for remedial education, social services and criminal justice.
Just as the nation took notice during our impressive period of investment and progress, the nation will witness the backslide. High-end employers and investors will take their money elsewhere; no one wants to send their dollars to places that are weak on educational support and noted for social strife. The racial and economic divisions in our communities will deepen. Opportunity for those living at the margins will shrink. That’s not just wrong, that’s bad wrong.
This is not the North Carolina we have been or want to be. The good news is that it’s not too late for our legislators to do the right thing. Residents must study these crucial education issues and call their representatives in the General Assembly before these disastrous policy and budget proposals become law.
May 31, 2013 at 9:26 am
Tom Hauck says:
Thanks for your column and for giving me the opportunity to reply and to support Darrell Allison, President of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina(www.PEFNC.com).
Here is a link to a recent video they made.
http://pefnc.org/videos/parents-for-educational-freedom-in-nc/
Finally the lawmakers are doing something about breaking the poverty cycle in North Carolina. Taking off the charter school cap was one good effort. Starting some scholarships is another.
During the 2011 - 12 School year -- 54.2% of the poor (Economically Disadvantaged) kids in North Carolina passed their End Of Grade Tests and 84.1% of the not poor (Not Economically Disadvantaged) passed their tests thus there is a 29.9% disparity in the results of the public schools.
I cannot understand why some groups want to keep poor kids locked into failure. If only half (45.8%) of the poor kids are passing their tests something is failing and so far nothing is being done about it. By the way the results are not getting better. During the 2003 - 04 school year, the results were 68.6% poor or ED passing and the not poor or NED result was 90.0% passing for a 21.4% disparity.
The disparity in other years was 2003/04 -- 21.4%;
2004/05 -- 21.6%; 2005/06 -- 30.3%; 2006/07 -- 28.7%; 2007/08 -- 33.6%; 2008/09 -- 30.1%; 2009/10 -- 29.9%; 2010/2011 -- 29.5%; 2011/12 -- 29.9%.
Over those nine years (2003 to 2012) hundreds of thousands of poor children have been relegated to a second class life, dependent on the government and organizations like NAACP to "look after them". Almost all of those nine years the Democrats completely ran North Carolina including the Governor, the General Assembly, the State Board of Education and many of the counties and their County Boards of Education.
Democrats and their supporters keep asking for more money for schools and then, I think, they wasted it by not investing in the education of the children.
For example, between 2000/01 and 2008/09 (the earliest and latest years I could find) the children in the public schools grew by 15.1% to 1,476,566.
Teachers, Teachers assistants and Assistant Principal, Teaching grew by 16.2% to 109,026 or 1005 more teachers than the 15.1% student increase. That might be explained by a lower teacher student ratio.
In those same 2000/01 to 2008/09 years the All Other Category of employees grew by 19.8% to 35,767 employees or 1,410 more than the 15.1% student increase. The greatest increases were 86% in Unskilled Laborers, 84% in Technicians, 79% in Consultant, Supervisor ( I have tried to find out what that is and the best I get is "Like a Master Teacher").
By the way, I have heard Mr. Allison debating his efforts to help poor children, with teachers' representatives and they keep saying that "private schools do not have the same rigorous testing standards and we have no idea if children are learning. We test every child in the public school." I think they should be ashamed as through the tests they know that they are not teaching every child and they do not seem to care.
If anyone forces a poor child to go to a public school, they have an obligation to teach that child. If they cannot or do not want to teach every child they should let that child go to a school that will teach him or her.
By the way, the money is not coming out of the education budget but from the general fund and even if it was coming from the education budget it is less per child than currently being spent by the public school system.
May 31, 2013 at 11:12 am
Jw Wright says:
We are now 19th among nations for our educational system. If that is not inferior, what is. Stupidity is continuing to do the same thing and expect a different result.
