Today’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Donna Martinez, co-host of Carolina Journal Radio.
If you’re angry about the injustice perpetrated on Halifax County kids by the local education pros charged with providing a quality education, get in line behind me. But I’m not just angry; I have a solution that doesn’t revolve around more intervention from state officials. If the Halifax debacle doesn’t force the state to acknowledge that competition and innovation are needed in education, nothing will.
Gov. Beverly Perdue’s announcement that the state will intervene into Halifax County Schools isn’t the government’s first attempt at turning things around in one of North Carolina’s poorest counties. In fact, state officials have been working with Halifax officials for two years. That’s right, two years. The lack of meaningful results from that effort is obvious.
Wake County Judge Howard Manning, who has taken legal charge of education quality in North Carolina through the Leandro case, has called the Halifax situation “academic genocide.” I can relate to his frustration and disgust. Statewide, 70 percent of students in grades 3 through 8 were proficient in math last year. In Halifax, the number was 40 percent. Reading proficiency was 56 percent statewide but just 26 percent in Halifax.
Tragic. Yet, rather than acknowledging the reality of its failing effort and looking for new ideas, the state incredibly prescribes a super-sized dose of the same old medicine. This time around, master teachers and “transformation coaches” will train Halifax teachers and administrators intensively. Said state education CEO William Harrison: “There’s a strong coaching component to what we’re going to do now. We’re going to be involved in monitoring more than we have in the past.”
Sound familiar? I’ll let you decide whether those words comfort a parent whose child’s educational future hangs in the balance.
Underprepared teachers and administrators could be a significant problem in Halifax. However, the facts are clear that the district is not suffering from either large class sizes or a lack of money. John Locke Foundation Education Policy Analyst Terry Stoops notes the student-to-teacher ratio is an ideal 15 to 1. In grades 5, 6, and 7, the average class size is below the state average. Per-pupil spending in the Halifax County Schools is $9,910 per student, 26th highest in the state and $1,400 higher than the North Carolina average.
Woefully absent from the state’s list of solutions is educational competition, which propels standards and achievement forward, rewards innovation and innovators, and weeds out unproductive personnel and failed approaches. Most importantly, competition offer parents an educational lifeline. But real reform isn’t going to happen.
Parents of the 4,400 Halifax students are left to hope the state’s good intentions will be enough. Otherwise, they’re on their own to find a way out. Their options are few. Parents must either home school, find funds for tutors or private school, or assemble a team to apply for, open, and operate a public charter school.
Charter schools represent true opportunity, but politics is poised to kill that hope. Too many North Carolina lawmakers are afraid to infuse the monopoly system with competition. They fear competition will highlight weaknesses and create demand for more options. In response, they stubbornly refuse to raise or lift the arbitrary 100-school cap on charters.
North Carolina isn’t alone in circling the political wagons to fend off competition and choice. That’s why I was so surprised to pick up the Wall Street Journal and read tell-it-like-it-is words from an unexpected charter school ally: the National Action Network’s Rev. Al Sharpton. In a January 12 open letter to Barack Obama, Sharpton and Joel Klein urged the new president, who’s on record in support of charters, to use meaningful reform to close the academic achievement gap. In a key point, Sharpton and Klein define what reform isn’t.
“We, too, believe that true education reform can only be brought about by a bipartisan coalition that challenges the entrenched education establishment,” they wrote. “And we second your belief that school reformers must demonstrate an unflagging commitment to ‘what works’ to dramatically boost academic achievement — rather than clinging to reforms that we ‘wish would work.’”
Exactly. North Carolina, are you listening?