Thanks to a program introduced by Superintendent Peter Gorman, some principals in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system are being freed from the burden of centralized management.
Armed with innovation and frontline knowledge of each school’s challenges, these principals are using their judgment — and not that of district middle management — to make the best decisions for their schools.
Gorman’s plan, called Freedom and Flexibility with Accountability, or FFA, puts some power back into the hands of individual school administrators. Forty-eight principals were picked in the inaugural year, 2007, with another 11 joining the rolls this year.
To qualify, principals must be at their school for at least two years and the school’s End of Course and End of Grade tests must demonstrate growth over the most recent two years. As the district explains in its initial eligibility criteria from the 2007-08, those principals presiding over schools with average two-year growth of 0.04 for elementary and middle schools and 0.03 for high schools are eligible for FFA. As a comparison, a value of zero, 0.00, means that students met expected growth for that year on their EOC and EOG tests.
Once enrolled in the FFA plan, teachers are freed from some districtwide restrictions, such as the amount of time spent in the classroom or how students are assigned to which teacher. Their enrollment lasts three years, reviewed annually.
“What (this plan) basically told me … is that I had the freedom and flexibility to do what needed to be done, to get the job done,” explained Sherry Sigmon, one of the original 48 principals chosen last year. Sigmon heads the Performance Learning Center, which bills itself as a “small, non-traditional high school geared toward students who have not been successful in the traditional setting.”
The high school was an excellent candidate to take advantage of the kind of flexibility and innovation that Gorman had in mind when he began the process of decentralization in 2006.
“This school was a prime example,” Sigmon said, pointing to the PLC’s alternative approach to schooling. With a combination of computer-based curriculum and service-based experiences, students who have wilted in a rigidly structured classroom setting the deadweight of districtwide demands are blossoming under PLC’s relative freedom, she said.
“What I’ve been able to do is be able to do a lot of things with scheduling for the school,” she said. “(I’ve) been able to take money and use it where I deemed appropriate; I did not have to use it for this particular thing for instruction.”
Although still subject to statewide regulations, such as the End of Course tests or the range of curriculum, the district suggests that principals in the FFA plan can organize classes by gender, or change course sequences to fit students’ learning capabilities better.
“There were so many non-negotiables that you [had] to follow,” Sigmon said of her pre-FFA work. With the flexibility of the new plan, principals can create their own professional development workshops for their school’s teachers instead of mandating their participation in a districtwide one. They can modify when school starts and ends, or what the student-to-teacher ratio must be.
At the Performance Learning School, students participate in non-classroom activities each Thursday. Called S.O.U.L.L., or Service Opportunity Ultimate Life Learning, the program allows students to pick service opportunities such as mentoring a middle school student in computer literacy or participating in animal advocacy. With as much as 50 percent of its curriculum delivered through a computer, students at PLC already have tremendous flexibility in creating a schedule and course load that works for them.
“When I came here three years ago and Dr. Gorman came in and came up with this initiative, I was just really honored that he added my name to this list,” said Sigmon. “It was the perfect environment: We had to build the guidelines.”
The district sees this as part of its plan to close the achievement gap between low-income students and their higher-income counterparts. Fifteen of the principals chosen in the first round were located at high-poverty schools or those in the FOCUS program, which allocates extra resources and supplies to schools identified as in-need. Eight of the principals led Title I schools. The plan’s stated long-term goal is to have all principals qualify for the perks of freedom and flexibility.
Colleen Calvani is a contributor to Carolina Journal.