Outside eyes on CMS

These are challenging times for public education, and those of us in Charlotte aren't the only ones keeping an eye on how Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is dealing with education and budget challenges. Here's a sampling of some interesting items:.

First, the Orlando Sentinal offers an outsider's take on CMS, noting the clash between racial turmoil at home and acclaim nationwide. "How could this school system be simultaneously viewed as hero and villain?" reporter Richard Fausset asks.

On the acclaim front, The Broad Foundation sends along a data brief on 30 large urban districts where black, Hispanic and/or low-income students outperformed state averages. As noted in Fausset's article, the foundation named CMS one of the nation's five best urban districts this year. CMS, Wake and Guilford county are among 18 districts nationwide where black students outperformed state peers, while CMS is the only Carolinas district recognized for success with Hispanic students.

And on the turmoil side, here's a look at the letter from the U.S. Department of Education's Civil Rights Office asking CMS for student-assignment data as it launches an investigation into complaints about 2011 school closings. I've filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the complaints, which should be arriving soon.

The most intriguing item isn't specifically about CMS, but about the difficulty of turning around low-performing schools. Greg Garrison of Charlotte was kind enough to tweet me a link to a Christian Science Monitor article based on a Thomas Fordham Institute study that examined low-performing schools in 10 states, including North Carolina.

I've only scanned the study, titled "Are Bad Schools Immortal?" In North Carolina, 19 charters and 174 regular schools that were weak in 2002 and 2003 made little progress in the ensuing five years, the study reports. That was pretty typical for what the researchers found nationwide.

"Both of North Carolina’s public-school sectors need to improve their efforts to eliminate bad schools," the study says. "This may prove more fruitful than investing time and resources in turnaround efforts. The findings from all ten states reveal that turnarounds are extremely rare. For those who put the closure option aside in hopes that schools will make dramatic improvements, these results suggest they are likely to be disappointed."