Suburban groups say no to CMS bonds

The $290 million bond package for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools got its first formal opposition today,  as Tom Davis from SPARK Educational Performances and Tim Timmerman from SMART issued a statement urging voters to say no (read their statement here).

SPARK,  or Strategic Partners for Accountability and Reform of Key Educational Performances,  is a north suburban group that has argued for splitting CMS into smaller districts.  SMART, or South Mecklenburg Alliance of Responsible Taxpayers, is based in the southern Ballantyne area and joined with SPARK to explore the notion of splitting the county into northern, southern and central school districts.

Timmerman at a SMART meeting

It's unclear how many people these two groups represent.  "We've got hundreds of people out there who support us,"  Davis,  an Air Force retiree and Republican political activist from Huntersville,  said today. (Update: Davis, who ran for N.C. House in the 2012 Republican primary, says he's now registered unaffiliated.)  He said he and Timmerman weren't the only people who crafted the position statement,  but he declined to give numbers or names,  saying many fear running afoul of the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce,  a major backer of the "Vote Yes for Education Bonds" campaign.

The  "vote no"  position paper raises several issues,  including uncertainty over the role that charter schools and vouchers will play in CMS growth projections,  skepticism about the  "no tax increase"  claim and a call for Mecklenburg County to focus its energy on getting teachers a cost-of-living raise.  County officials say they can cover the cost of repaying the CMS bonds,  along with $210 million in bonds for Central Piedmont Community College on the Nov. 5 ballot,  without raising taxes.  But Davis argues that today's voters and officials can't  "tie the hands"  of future county officials.

Davis

"Current elected officials and special lobbying groups cannot bind the voting privilege of future elected officials. This breaches credibility and trust,"  the statement says. "No one can guarantee what will transpire with future tax rates."

The  "vote yes"  campaign hopes to raise $300,000 in donations and has hired a PR firm to help make the case.  Davis said the SPARK/SMART effort won't be anything like that.  "We're not going to get money into it,"  he said.  "We're going to get the information on the street and let people make decisions."

He said the groups don't plan to take a stand on the CPCC bonds.

Just last week,  Davis was just appointed to the Bond Oversight Committee,  a citizen panel that monitors how CMS spends its bond money,  by school board member Richard McElrath. Davis says he missed the Bond Oversight Committee's meeting last week because he didn't realize it was coming up just two days after his appointment.

McElrath opposed the last CMS bonds,  in 2007,  before being elected to the board in 2009.  He's running for reelection this year and said he doesn't expect to take a stand for or against this year's bonds.  

N.C. school boards seek more clout in Raleigh

Tim Morgan, vice chair of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board, is leading a new group that hopes to give school districts a stronger voice with state lawmakers.  Local boards and  "public education as we know it" face "a battle for survival,"  according to a memo sent to school boards in August.

Morgan

This summer brought a burst of legislation focused on public education,  shaping everything from teacher pay to school ratings to vouchers.  "We ended up having to play a lot of defense this last legislative session,"  Morgan said.

The N.C. School Boards Association, a nonprofit with limited ability to spend money on lobbying,  created the N.C. School Boards Action Center to hire lobbyists and do public awareness campaigns to promote the association's legislative agenda.  Morgan, who serves on the association's board of directors,  was chosen as president of the new action center board.

"What we face today is a battle for survival, both of public education as we know it and of the model of locally elected board governance of public school system operations," says an August memo from Morgan and NCSBA President Evelyn Bulluck. "Our ability to endure in the face of these extraordinary challenges requires that we recognize and accept the changed environment in which we operate and embrace new ideas and concepts in thinking about how we advocate."

The plan calls for a $431,000 budget,  with districts making contributions ranging from $2,000 to $10,000, depending on size.  Morgan said CMS is paying its $10,000 share from the superintendent's budget for lobbying.

The group has already drawn criticism from the conservative John Locke Foundation.  Terry Stoops,  the foundation's education director,  said in a recent Carolina Journal article that local board should refuse to contribute.  "Tax dollars have no business being used to further the political agenda of any organization, let alone one that operates far from the mainstream," Stoops said in the journal, which is published by the Locke Foundation.

Stoops is quoted as saying the NCSBA is trying to replace current legislators:  "They decided to be bridge burners,  rather than bridge builders,  in their approach to the legislature."

Morgan  (a Republican,  like the majority in the House and Senate)  says the action center's bylaws prohibit the group from endorsing candidates.  "Our only function is to support and advocate for the NCSBA legislative agenda,"  he said.

Morgan said the action center will set up a web site soon.  Specific plans,  including how many lobbyists to hire and how heavily to mobilize for the limited 2014 short session,  remain to be drafted.  The nine-member action center board has met only once and will convene for a second time in November,  he said.

Score one for CMS on data accuracy

Last year's CMS seniors didn't log any math gains on the SAT, but the folks who run the district made a big step forward in demonstrating their own ability to report numbers.

When the College Board released its 2013 SAT report today,  I downloaded the school by school report from the N.C. Department of Public Instruction and looked at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools news release.

The numbers for CMS didn't match.

Barnes

That's not the surprise.  As many of you know,  there have been instances in years past when CMS numbers didn't add up.  And too often,  the people who released those numbers weren't prepared to explain.

Today, Chief Accountability Officer Frank Barnes was ready.  Before the scores went public his staff had checked the data they got from the College Board against the state report and caught a problem:  The state report didn't include Garinger High.

That omission made CMS look better.  Without the 142 tests from Garinger,  the CMS average was 1480,  one point above the state average.  With them,  CMS fell to 1473  (still a 10-point gain over 2012).

The CMS news release used the lower and more accurate scores.  It discussed the possibility that lower participation might have contributed to gains.  It mentioned that a school was missing from the state report -- and when I asked Barnes what Garinger's score was he gave it to me, even though the score of 1218 out of a possible 2400 was second-lowest in CMS.  He said he's working with state officials to get the Garinger scores added to state calculations.

"We wanted to report what we knew to be true,  even if it was lower than the state report,"  Barnes said.

All of this adds up to a promising sign that Superintendent Heath Morrison is delivering on his promise to make sure numbers are correct before they're released and to be honest about strengths and shortcomings.

Morrison was hired in 2012, as CMS was grappling with the embarrassment of badly botched school progress reports.  The first time I talked to him,  he said he was going to create systems to avoid such errors and provide honest explanations if mistakes did happen.

The first few weeks brought stumbles.  When state exam results were released in August 2012,  CMS declined to release results for West Charlotte and Harding high schools,  which were not given a state rating because they didn't test enough students.  The result:  A front-page story when I got the numbers from the state and they turned out to be the two lowest-performing schools in the district.

Since then it's been hard to judge.  Changes in state testing have delayed the exam results that usually land in the summer.  CMS still hasn't launched its own school ratings,  trying to make sure they mesh with a state system that's in flux.

The big test will come in November,  when the state releases 2013 exam results. It looks like CMS may be ready.

Education bonds: Tax or no tax?

"No tax increase"  is one of the first things you'll hear from supporters of the bonds for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools and Central Piedmont Community College.

But when you see a ballot, you'll find this wording:

“SHALL the order authorizing $290,000,000 of bonds secured by a pledge of the faith and credit of the County of Mecklenburg to pay capital costs of providing school facilities, including the acquisition and construction of new school facilities, the improvement and expansion of existing school facilities and the acquisition and installation of furnishings and equipment and the acquisition of interests in real property required therefor, and a tax to be levied for the payment thereof, be approved?”

“SHALL the order authorizing $210,000,000 of bonds secured by a pledge of the faith and credit of the County of Mecklenburg to pay capital costs of providing community college facilities, including the acquisition and construction of new community college facilities, the improvement and expansion of existing community college facilities and the acquisition and installation of furnishings and equipment and the acquisition of interests in real property required therefor, and a tax to be levied for the payment thereof, be approved?”

If you plow through that dense prose  (the first item is CMS bonds, the second is for CPCC), the part about approving  "a tax to be levied for the payment thereof"  may sound like you're being asked to OK a tax hike.

That's not the case. Tax revenue will be used to repay the bonds, but that doesn't mean a tax increase.

Bonds are essentially a line of credit authorized by the voters.  As Mecklenburg County officials learned when the recession hit,  if you run up the tab on borrowing you face a painful choice:  Raise taxes and/or renege on promises made during bond campaigns.  The county slowed down on the CMS projects promised in 2007,  resulting in some that haven't been started as the 2013 campaign gears up.  They'll eventually get done  (read an update here),  but not as quickly as voters expected in 2007.

Grand Oak Elementary, a 2007 bond project, opened in August

County officials also rethought their borrowing strategy. They've calculated that they can pay back the $500 million in CMS and CPCC bonds with the revenue they've got, which means they won't have to raise property taxes to handle the debt.  The plan is to spread that borrowing over the next four years.

Here's how County Commissioner Bill James describes it:  "The question of whether a bond package causes a tax increase depends on whether the government issuing the bonds has an adequate bond fund. When I was first elected in 1996 the first item I pushed for was a bond fund. It took 15 years but we finally got one."

"The money to make the bond payments (on the bonds on the ballot) are included in the current tax rate. So, absent some sort of fiscal meltdown, these bonds should be able to be issued without any impact on existing taxes."

So, no tax hike.  The trade off is that the list of projects on the 2013 bonds for CMS is a lot shorter than district leaders would like.  Superintendent Heath Morrison, Associate Superintendent Guy Chamberlain and others are quick to note that $290 million for CMS is tiny compared with the $810 million that's on the ballot for Wake Public Schools in October or the $1.89 billion that Houston voters approved last fall.

Want to interview Heath Morrison?

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is seeking questions for the superintendent via the district's Facebook page. Selected questions will be featured in this weekend's  "Facebook Edition"  of InSight, Superintendent Heath Morrison's monthly broadcast on CMS-TV.

Morrison

Post your question by 5 p.m. Thursday and it might be selected for the show that airs at 7 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.  There's already a question about school security from Stephanie Moore-Rice:  "How easy is it for someone to just walk in a school during the day,  and how fast can someone stop an unrecognized guest?"

Coretta Wilson,  an Alexander Graham Middle School teacher who used to be a WCNC anchor,  interviews Morrison on InSight.  On the last Facebook episode,  he took a question from Kandace Mitchell,  a Chantilly Montessori parent,  about creating more year-round schools and one from Amy Rinehart Rosenhour about changing high school start times.  You can watch it here --  or if you want something shorter than the four-minute clip,  Morrison says he'd like to have more calendar flexibility but that's up to the state.  And he says the district will  "continue to look into" changing school hours,  but notes that there are a range of parent views and a  "delicate balance"  involved in making changes.

Student's view: Don't grade me on teacher tests

Leave it to a teenager to put a fresh spin on a topic.  At a school board meeting earlier this month Celia Collias, a junior at Myers Park High,  joined a group urging Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to resist adding more state exams that are being created to rate teachers.

Her argument:  It's not fair to count those exams toward student grades.  After all,  if they really measure teacher effectiveness,  a low score just means we had a bad teacher,  right?

She's far from the first person to question the tests,  known as Measures of Student Learning. Local parents,  teachers and advocates have aired doubts about the value of the exams and the time they take away from other classroom work.  So have board members and Superintendent Heath Morrison.  State and federal education officials are still mulling whether to delay the plan to add more MSLs this year.

Still,  Celia's analysis made me smile.  She highlighted a kind of Catch 22:  The tests are supposed to measure teacher effectiveness.  But of course student effort  (not to mention intelligence,  preparation and mood that day)  shapes the scores.  Officials say the exams should count toward final grades to motivate students to give it their best shot.  So if students try hard and still get a lousy score their grade drops,  even if it's the teacher's fault.

The folks who support value-added ratings for teachers  --  and there are many who do, all across the country  --  would say that's oversimplified.  They say they can create formulas that tease out the teacher's contribution to student success or failure.  But it's not clear whether regular people  --  not to mention teachers whose careers are at stake  --  believe them.

Two years ago,  CMS officials made a valiant effort to create a value-added formula and explain it to employees and the public.  I think it's fair to say they failed.  Backlash was strong,  including parents threatening to keep their kids home on testing days.  Key players,  including Superintendent Peter Gorman and performance pay director Andy Baxter,  left CMS and the new crew quickly dropped the effort.

Dr. William Sanders and the Cary-based SAS Institute say they have a formula that works.  It's well regarded in national education circles,  and N.C. education officials have hired them to crunch state test scores for teacher evaluations.  But the rest of us can't examine that formula because it's how SAS earns its income.  Morrison has raised doubts about pinning his teachers'  evaluations to a formula that can't be fact-checked.

So stay tuned.  The quest to create better teacher evaluations is an important one.  We'll be hearing plenty more about this.  And Celia and her classmates will be waiting to learn whether new state exams will shape their grades this year.

What's the cost of new CPCC high schools?

Update: CMS has now posted applications that include budgets of $5.2 million for the first five years for each new school. That includes the value of tuition-free college courses the students are expected to take.  See the Harper proposal here and the Levine proposal here.

The school board is scheduled to vote tonight on creating two new "middle college" high schools on Central Piedmont Community College campuses.

But do members know how much money they're signing off to spend?  Under "fiscal implications,"  the agenda lists modular classrooms,  textbooks, principal and faculty.  But there are no dollar amounts.

Maybe I'm being picky here,  but I didn't think  "fiscal implications"  was supposed to be a yes-or-no question.  I thought the point was to disclose and discuss how much public money is at stake.

When Heath Morrison was hired to lead Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools last summer,  he promised transparency.  When the board held a retreat last September,  most members said they had done a poor job of examining all the implications of their decisions and vowed to do better.

So what's up with the new small schools on the Levine and Harper campuses?  Is the board going to approve applications for the state's cooperative innovative high school program without knowing how much it costs to launch these schools?  Or is CMS withholding the information from the public?

On Friday and again on Monday, I emailed Board Chair Mary McCray,  Deputy Superintendent Ann Clark and Communication Chief Kathryn Block to ask about the cost and why it's not on the agenda.  Monday evening I got this explanation from Clark, still without specifics:  "The costs  associated with this program are funded from the local career technical education budget to cover textbooks and bus passes. Staffing is assigned based on the number of students and the state pays for a principal as long as the student count exceeds 100 students."

Morrison has been talking about expanding the middle college model for some time.  There are good reasons for cloning the approach that debuted with Cato Middle College High in 2007. But I have yet to hear the board conduct an in-depth public discussion of the pros,  cons,  costs and benefits of creating two more school that will serve about 200 juniors and seniors each.  Maybe they've held those talks privately,  or maybe it happened in a public forum I missed.  It seems like the kind of thing taxpayers,  employees and families might want to hear.