Six for District 6 ... so far

Half a dozen people have applied for the District 6 school board seat left vacant when Tim Morgan was elected to an at-large seat in November,  with the application deadline looming at 3 p.m. Monday.  The eight current members of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board plan to hear applicants' pitches at 1 p.m. Tuesday; if time allows, they'll discuss and possibly select an appointee that afternoon. If not, they'll meet again at 4 p.m. Thursday . Both special meetings are open to the public.

Here are the names so far:

Scott Babbidge of Matthews,  a Republican who filed to run for the at-large seat but withdrew when there were four Republicans seeking the three seats.

E. Thomas Bowers of Charlotte,  a Democrat and progressive political activist.

Larry Bumgarner of Mint Hill,  an unaffiliated voter who has frequently run for school board,  including this year.  His comments will be familiar to readers of this blog.

Angelica P. Castaneda-Noorbakhsh of Charlotte,  whom I've been told is a leader in the Latino networking and advocacy group Enlace Charlotte.  I can't find her under any variation of that name in voter records.

Michael Orlando Jones of Matthews,  a name that's new to me.  Voter records show a Michael Orlando Jones who's a Republican living in District 1 and a Michael O. Jones who's a Democrat living in District 2.  To be considered for the District 6 appointment,  applicants must be registered to vote there.

Bolyn McClung of Pineville,  a Republican who's also familiar to readers of blog comments.  He served on the panel led by former Gov. James Martin that advised CMS on construction strategies after a failed 2005 bond vote and is a regular at school board meetings.


I'll get the applications next week and learn more about these folks.  It'll be interesting to see if there's a last-minute surge of filing;  in recent years,  open seats have drawn big crowds of applicants.  Rumors have been floating that this vacancy,  which has two years left to serve,  might entice former board Chair Wilhelmenia Rembert , who served five years in an at-large post and lives in District 6.  Morgan says he knows of two more people who definitely plan to apply Monday and one who's considering it.

There's also been speculation about how the board will make a choice.  Will they pick someone similar to Morgan, a moderate Republican?  Will the Democrats who hold a majority push someone from their party,  even though the south suburban district is heavily GOP?  A look at other appointments indicates anything could happen.

The two most recent vacancies occurred at the end of 2008,  when Vilma Leake and George Dunlap became county commissioners and left openings in Districts 2 and 3,  respectively.  Nineteen people applied for District 2 and 22 for District 3,  though only 17 ended up making speeches for each opening  (some withdrew,  were deemed ineligible or just didn't follow through).  Democrats and African Americans make up a majority of both districts.  The board chose Kimberly Mitchell-Walker, a black Democrat,  for District 2.  James Ross, a black Republican, got the District 3 seat,  ruffling some Democratic feathers.  Both ran for office the following year and lost.

In 2006, unaffiliated at-large member Kit Cramer resigned and 40 people signed up to take her place. The board chose Trent Merchant, also an unaffiliated voter. I still grin when remembering the article I wrote to introduce him: An Observer researcher found a 2002 article describing him as a young Atlanta actor who got frustrated with noisy audience members.

"Get the f--- out!" Merchant yelled,  according to that clip.  "Either shut up or leave!"

Although he did earn a reputation for colorful commentary,  Merchant never used those particular phrases with his colleagues.  He was elected to the at-large seat the following year.


Finally,  the last time the board appointed a District 6 representative was in August 2005,  during an election season.  Republican Lee Kindberg resigned with four months left on her term and endorsed Democrat Liz Downing,  who was running for the seat,  as her fill-in.  Some board members balked at appointing someone who was campaigning,  but Downing got the nod over eight other applicants.  (She was defeated by Republican Ken Gjertsen in November.)  In one of the odder twists, Republican County Commissioner Bill James had offered to represent the district on both bodies to fill the gap before the election.

Hmm ... no word from James about the school board this time around. Then again, some commenters have suggested he's got his eye on becoming Mayor of Ballantyne now.

Prepping for the Broad Prize

Guilford County Schools has paid a Denver consulting firm almost $40,000 to do a simulation of the Broad Prize for Urban Education judging,  according to a district news release.

The release says the researchers who did the Broad-based  "diagnostic report"  described Guilford as  "a rising district nationally,"  but noted that it  "still has more work to do before it can join the elite ranks of Broad Prize winners."

This year's winner is Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools,  where Guilford County Superintendent Maurice  "Mo"  Green got his start as an administrator.  He was Peter Gorman's second-in-command before taking the job in Greensboro in 2008.

Like real Broad Prize judges,  staff from RMC Research Corp.  analyzed data and did a three-day visit that included classroom visits and focus-group interviews.  The group rated Guilford on the Broad Prize Framework for School District Excellence and suggested improvements,  such as more rigorous curriculum and more support for teachers.

The $38,600 cost,  which includes follow-up services,  was split between a Broad Foundation grant and money raised by the local Businesses for Excellence in Education.

Guilford,  North Carolina's third-largest district after Wake and CMS,  was one of four in North Carolina that was eligible for this year's Broad Prize,  based on size and having at least 40 percent of students from minority groups and eligible for federal lunch aid to low-income families.  Wake,  with a 33 percent poverty level as measured by lunch subsidies,  was not eligible.

Gorman: Close schools, pack your bags

Former Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Superintendent Peter Gorman isn't talking to the Charlotte media anymore,  but he certainly has some interesting things to say as he makes the national rounds.

Lew Powell,  a former Observer colleague,  forwarded this recent item from City Beat,  a Memphis,  Tenn.,  blog.  It reports on a confab between Memphis officials and Gorman (who now works for the education division of News Corp.),  then-board Chair Eric Davis,  former board Chair Arthur Griffin and an unnamed former CMS principal.

"The system won a national award this year for excellence in urban education,  but this was not a butt-patting session,"  reports John Branston,  a senior editor for The Memphis Flyer.  Branston's report continues:

“Progress has been painfully slow,  and at the rate we are moving in Charlotte it will still be 15 years before the achievement gap is closed,”  said former superintendent Pete Gorman.

He urged the committee to  “build a bench”  of future principals and assistant principals from among promising young teachers;  move good principals and five teachers as a group to the toughest schools but not against their will;  give new leadership three years to turn around a school;  give good schools more autonomy;  measure improvement , not raw scores,  so that even college-prep schools must show improvement year over year;  pick a superintendent for the consolidated district sooner rather than later;  give the schools with the poorest students the most money,  and give the wealthiest schools the least money;  and expect to move on if you are the superintendent that has to close schools.

“You can’t close schools well,”  he said,  adding that "to do the job well,  I sometimes question if it's physically possible."

Gorman,  as most Charlotte readers know,  launched a push in fall 2010 to close about a dozen schools in 2011-12.  He announced his resignation in June,  just after the board approved a 2011-12 budget.  Many of the newly-merged schools are now dealing with discipline problems,  although the staff that remains to deal with aftermath still voices hope that there will be academic benefits.

Follow-up on Cochrane turnaround

I got an email today from David Markus,  the writer of the Edutopia package on Cochrane's "turnaround" that I wrote about yesterday.

I had re-messaged Markus,  the publication's editorial director,  to let him know former Cochrane Principal Terry Brown was challenging his account of then-Superintendent Peter Gorman visiting the east Charlotte middle school in 2006 and proclaiming,  "This may be the worst school I have ever seen."  Brown,  who ended a three-year stint as Cochrane's principal at the end of the 2006-07 school year,  says Gorman never visited the school while he was there.  Brown said he and Gorman had several conversations during the year that the two of them shared in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools,  and Gorman never gave him any indication that he held such dim views of Cochrane's academic performance.

Markus stands by his reporting: "In an email to me on November 2nd, Pete Gorman corroborated the 'worst' school quote and added that his visit to Cochrane was the most disheartening school visit of his career."  No word from Gorman;  I haven't been able to reach him since he announced his resignation in June.

I still don't know who pitched the Cochrane turnaround story,  which has gotten national and local attention,  or whether Markus realized that part of the proficiency gains he cited came from a change in N.C. testing rules that bumped up most low-scoring schools.  But on the general topic, Markus said:

"We believe it is a  'turnaround'  for the statistics we cite.  As a student of school turnarounds I am sure you know that when a school has fallen as low as Cochrane had,  it will take several years to dig out.  Cochrane is well on its way after only a few,  but as we make plain in our package,  their rise to excellence is not nearly complete.  Nor is it guaranteed.  That said I am very impressed with (Principal) Josh Bishop's team and the results they are achieving."

We're certainly in agreement that turnarounds are complex and slow.  This got me curious enough to do my own walk down memory lane ... actually, the N.C. school report cards. Here's what the numbers show, with some context.

At the end of 2006-07,  the year Gorman may or may not have proclaimed Cochrane the worst,  67 percent of its students passed the reading exam and 37 percent passed math.  The school fell short of the state target for growth,  generally described as an average of one year's academic gain per student.

In 2007-08,  after Brown's retirement,  Valarie Williams was hired to lead Cochrane.  State officials also introduced an eighth-grade science exam,  and bumped up the number of correct answers needed to pass the reading test.  Most educators agreed the old cut-off was too low,  but the change brought a plunge in pass rates across the state,  especially for minority and low-income students and the schools (such as  Cochrane) that served them.  In 2008, Cochrane's pass rates were 32 percent in reading, 34 percent in math and 14 percent in science.  Cochrane again failed to make the growth target.

In 2008-09,  North Carolina started requiring students who failed state exams to try again,  boosting pass rates across the state.  That year Cochrane hit 47 percent in reading,  54 percent in math and 35 percent in science,  and it met the "expected growth" target.

In February 2010,  Gorman reassigned Williams to Vance High School as part of his "strategic staffing" plan to improve that school.  Josh Bishop became interim principal (he got the permanent job at the start of 2010-11).  That year ended with Cochrane at 52 percent passing reading, 67 percent passing math and  61 percent passing science. The school made "high growth."

Last year Cochrane held steady at 52 percent passing reading, declined to 59 percent passing math and rose to 63 percent passing science,  with an "expected growth" rating.  It was a year when many CMS schools saw some slump in scores.

The gains in math and science are impressive, even with the retesting boost.  Still,  it's worth noting that Cochrane continues to hover around 50 percent proficiency on reading.  In 2011,  only 43 percent of students passed both reading and math exams,  a mark that signals readiness to move on to the tougher high school courses.  And the black,  Hispanic and low-income students who make up the majority of Cochrane's students had pass rates about 10 percentage points lower than the average for those same groups in CMS and statewide.

CMS is state's No. 8 employer

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is North Carolina's eighth-largest employer,  down from seventh in 2002,  the Triangle Business Journal reports.  The 2011 list puts CMS just ahead of Wake County Schools,  even though Wake has more students.

Spokeswoman Tahira Stalberte says CMS has 18,120 employees this school year, including 8,890 full-time teachers. (Interim Superintendent Hugh Hattabaugh and former school board Chair Eric Davis have both told public groups this month that CMS has 9,300 teachers; I couldn't get an immediate explanation for the 400-teacher gain.)

Public bodies hold four of the top nine spots on the N.C. employer list, with state and federal governments in the No. 1 and 2 spots, respectively.  Charlotte's Carolinas Medical Center is fifth -- up from No. 9 on the old list.

Cochrane turnaround tale ... really?

The contrast between Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools'  glowing national image and the controversy that surrounds it at home is a source of much discussion.

I suspect those of us in the thick of things do tend to fixate on problems.  Up close,  bumps in the road can look like mountains.

But if problems get exaggerated locally,  I've also seen success exaggerated nationally.  Most recent case in point:  The Edutopia package on Cochrane's  "turnaround"  that's been widely circulated.  I first saw it on the ASCD Smartbrief,  a national roundup of education reporting,  early this month.  CMS officials played the video portion at the conclusion of a Dec.  13 report on schools in transition.

My first reaction was confusion.  Cochrane,  an east Charlotte middle school that's starting to add high school grades this year,  hasn't been on my  "success story"  radar.  Had I missed something?

A look at my data sheets said no.  Cochrane ended 2011 with a composite pass rate of 58 percent on state exams.  Of 35 CMS middle schools,  only four scored lower  --  and two of those,  Spaugh and Williams, closed this year.  More telling,  only two middle schools earned a lower growth rating,  a measure designed to make sure schools are judged on how much their students gain,  not just how well prepared they are when they arrive.

So why is one of the district's weakest middle schools being highlighted as a school that  "beats the odds every day"?  David Markus,  Edutopia's editorial director and the writer of the main article,  hasn't responded to my message asking who suggested the story.  In another part of the package,  an endnote thanks The Broad Foundation for sharing research about top urban districts.

The package focuses mostly on Cochrane's significant gains in pass rates from 2008 to 2011.  What's not  mentioned is that the same can be said for most struggling schools in North Carolina,  thanks to a change in testing that took effect in 2009.  In 2008,  students took the test once.  Starting in 2009,  those who fell below the "passing" line were required to try again,  and be counted as passing if they met the mark on the second test.  Generally,  the more failing students a school had,  the bigger the  "retest"  bump it showed.  As CMS superintendent,  Peter Gorman frequently blasted the retesting system as giving schools an artificial inflation in pass rates.

Gorman, who left CMS in June to work with education technology for Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.,  is featured in a dramatic opening to Markus'  story.  It describes Gorman visiting Cochrane in 2006,  the year he started as superintendent: "Known for his no-nonsense determination to turn around the district's failing schools, Gorman minces no words in describing Cochrane: 'This may be the worst school I have ever seen.' "  Gorman is later quoted as saying, five years later, "There was no instructional focus. It was the most disheartening school visit of my career."

Terry Brown,  Cochrane's principal in 2006-07,  called me after reading the first version of this post.  While I had noted that Gorman certainly wasn't saying such things publicly at that time,  and that administrators tend to give their most vivid  "bad schools"  accounts in hindsight,  Brown, who retired in 2007, says this goes beyond dramatic reconstruction.

"Gorman never visited Cochrane the first year he was there.  Not one time,"  Brown said.  "He was scheduled and canceled.  I'm appalled.  None of this is true."


Bottom line:  Edutopia, a publication of the George Lucas Educational Foundation,  is dedicated to highlighting academic solutions that include technology, teacher development and "comprehensive assessment."  CMS is well known for those approaches,  and Cochrane,  as noted prominently in the story,  is working with Texas Instruments to use technology in math instruction.  One sign that it's helping,  from my spreadsheets:  CMS reported that last year only 49 percent of Cochrane sixth-graders were proficient on math exams,  while 65 percent of eighth-graders were.  One troubling signal:  That's down from 75 percent of Cochrane eighth-graders proficient in math the previous year.

I don't want to detract from the hard work and high aspirations of the faculty and students at Cochrane.  I'd love to write their turnaround story sometime down the road,  when I see solid evidence that it's justified.  All this is just to say that improving education is complicated business,  and it's wise to scrutinize naysayers and cheerleaders alike.

Charter costs and West Meck suspensions

A caller raised a good question about this morning's story on per-pupil costs at charter schools serving Mecklenburg students.  He correctly noted that charters don't get public money for buildings,  while Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools gets construction and renovation money through county-issued bonds.  The caller suspected that would skew the per-pupil spending reported on the N.C. school report cards.

I'm not sure there's ever a perfect apples-to-apples comparison,  but the state does not include capital expenses   --  that is, building and renovation  --  in the per-pupil tally for charters or traditional public schools,  so it should be a reasonably close comparison of spending on education  (or at least school operating expenses).

While we're scrutinizing numbers,  Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools has issued a correction to some eye-popping suspension numbers from West Mecklenburg High that were reported at last week's school board meeting.

As part of a staff report on discipline and other issues at schools that saw major changes in enrollment,  CMS initially said West Meck had 2,452 suspensions during the first half of 2010-11  --  with an enrollment just under 2,200  --  and 1,482 with a slightly smaller student body this year.  A corrected report issued last week  (while I was taking a few days off, thus the delay in reporting)  amends that to 1,226 last year and 741 this year, exactly half of what was presented to the board.

The email from CMS Communications Director Tahira Stalberte noting the revisions does not address the source of the error.