I previously posted about the death of a beloved community public school in Haywood, North Carolina, due to state budget cuts and the opening of a charter school.
Members of the community rallied to support the school, and they put the blame where it belongs: on the politicians in Raleigh, who are responsible for the schools’ funding and for authorizing charter schools to compete with neighborhood public schools. They also recognized that that the charter is funded by out-of-state right wingers whose goal is not to improve public education but to destroy it.
The voters will remember in November. That’s the good news in Haywood. A school board member plans to run against the Republican incumbent.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
That’s exactly what has to happen, everywhere. You sabotage public education, you lose your job–simple cause and effect relationship.
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How sad this closing is; so polar opposite of the Finnish paradigm, mindset, and value system. Where have North Carolinians been in the last 8 years with regard to their public services and who they vote in and what those types of officials were really all about?
Where is the citizens’ vetting of their politicians?
It’s as though North Carolinians are but a microcosm for all of American. We Americans are ultimately our own worst enemy because we stand divided, undecided, and inactive.
We remain passive, and dismissive, and submissive.
We don’t get informed. We look the other way.
We say, “Oh! THAT problem over there . . . With THOSE people. H-m-m-m.”
We feel the imagery and branding of people and institutions without ever examining in depth the substance.
We trust the big flashy, bells and whistles and sound effects on Fox News along with the caps and porcelain laminates of the movie star-like news reporters and their $40,000 smiles.
We do a cursory reading if we read at all. Or we defer to someone else. Or we get our news in little hors d’oeuvre sized sound bites from AOL or some other tabloid internet source.
We are more occupied by our Kitchen Aid attachments and accessories than the last Social Security COLA bill passed by a bevy of Senators . . . .
It’s changing now that many of us are waking up and smelling the b.o. of establishment politics, but we are going to have to work ever more hard for all the years we have been asleep at the wheel . . . .
We have been drunk with individualism and influenced by bad eating habits and watered down thinking. We have been breathing all these years without really feeling like what it’s like to be alive.
I think the Sanders campaign is fulfilling the potential in getting us to be at our most lively . . . . . I hope North Carolinians will be open minded and learn from all of this.
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Much of what has happened the last eight years was the implementation of RttT.
The vetting of our leadership might come in the form of, “who will push to get the DOE out of our state business?” And last I checked that would NOT be the Democrats.
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The school district in question has seen a sustained loss of child-age population that started long before any charter schools opened nearby. The county also has a very high proportion of families who homeschool.
As a result, all nine of the district’s elementary schools are substantially underutilized: cumulatively they are only 67% filled, with room for 1,500 more students than they have now. However, the county is projected to lose even more of its school-age population than it has already.
Are taxpayers expected to provide the funding to operate schools at wastefully low levels of utilization for no reason other than to benefit the relatively tiny number of people who work in or send their kids to a school that might be lost to consolidation?
(It is likely that in this case, all teachers and staff from the closed schools will be reassigned to other schools in the district.)
http://www.smokymountainnews.com/news/item/17057-overbuilt-school-consolidation-targets-central-elementary-as-collateral-damage
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No, Tim. Taxpayers should not bear the burden.
But what they should do is receive a substantial decrease in their property taxes to reflect the declined enrollments, and funding at that point should become more federalized to keep the schools purely public and not charterized.
Maybe some staff has to be laid off, but with even a remaining overage, there could have been created smaller class size and provide intervention services early on for the children needing it the most.
Consolidation of school buildings could have been another option, with busing provided as needed.
Charters will no nothing to save costs or solve the problem; they only add to it.
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That has to be the biggest Corporate Takeover elephant (LIE) in the room: How people in state after state, city after city, district after district keep buying into the Charter Schools Save Money mantra.
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Why not read to the bottom of the article where reasons for the decline in school population are discussed? Many factors are discussed including the opening of a charter school. This is obviously a district that had no need of a charter school if its school were already underutilized.
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Tim,
I agree with your points.
Furthermore, I don’t think our General Assembly lifted the caps on charters. That happened under Perdue to qualify for RttT.
The blame game in public education policy will get us nowhere in NC.
The reaction to cacauphonous blame games reminds me of the song from Cinderella, “in my one little corner, I can be whatever I want to be. On the wings of my fancy I can fly anywhere and the world will open it’s arms to me.” And that’s exactly what frustrated NC parents are doing: flocking to charters. Blame game won’t solve that issue.
I am glad to have learned more about factors involved in the school closing that have not been harnessed for political gain because they are not political.
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Can I just say how much I dislike autocorrect?
Own little corner
No apostrophe in its. Possession.
Grrr
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Tim, when a district is losing population, no charters are needed
Do you work for Mercury LLC?
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Robert and Diane,
While I do consider saving NC’s public schools to be something of a triage situation and the most threatened pillars need the fastest attention, I would not presume that Democrats will automatically remedy our situation UNLESS they are willing to address how actions on their watch (read: state education lottery and RtTT) have contributed to the weakening of public school pillars.
Dr. Ravitch you are generally pretty fair about the dismal qualities of RttT. But when it comes to NC you throw rocks as if only Democrats here can fix it. Well, they helped break it. So is that a fair assumption? Is carte Blanche to ridicule our General Assembly and Blane them for EVERYTHING really productive?
Most people get what is going on. No question. But I don’t think we can assume Democrats will save public schools for NC. They helped start the demise. The public school situation in NC needs honest and bold conversations. I see more and more people giving up on the notion of public school here (or immediate participation either as teachers or involved families) and it is not generally because of Raleigh. (And there are stock photos of these rallys, btw, and even a group that comes running for rally photo opps, followed by emails asking for money to buy more signs). Our schools cannot be reduced to a formula of good party bad party. Maybe the triage requires Democrats get back in control, but even if they do they still have to confront the CCSS issue, the lift on charter caps, VAM, testing and all the things RTTT brought us.
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RTTT was a disaster, with no redeeming features
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Read Diane’s post from Feb. 22. She hardly gives the Democrats a pass. There is no guarantee that Democrats today will do any better than the Republicans who control your legislature, but the Republicans have uber control right now. You need people in office who support public schools whatever their party affiliation.
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cx: blame
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Also remember that charters create jobs. So people like that. Up fitting buildings, new teacher hires, web design, marketing plans, corporate and real estate legal services, etc.
So in the immediate sense, people are not going to say no.
And who opened those flood gates? Wasn’t this General Assembly. NC had our charter situation in check until Race to the Top.
Until I hear a Democrat talk about that, I don’t buy into Raleigh-bashing as the reason our schools are in trouble.
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Well I really do feel like NC is still churning from RttT. Austerity hasn’t helped, but it is not the heavier culprit.
I invoke Proverbs 25:6-20.
The most important pillar for NC public schools is the one of honest debate. Who is king here? The children of NC; dat’s who.
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Without bothering to vet your claims and assuming they’re true, if the district was already losing its school age population, why on earth would they allow charters to open and pull even more kids away from public schools? That may be a factor, but it’s certainly not an excuse.
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Dienne,
That is a valid question. But not one for our General Assembly. We have a state board of Ed. We have a state supe. And she is a Democrat.
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Involved Mom,
I disagree with you. The Tea Party Republicans took over the legislature in 2010 for the first time in a century, and it has made war on the public sector ever since. It has passed laws for charters, vouchers, and cyber charters. It eliminated the exemplary NC Teaching Fellows program and replaced this career program with TFA. It laid off thousands of teaching assistants. It passed laws to remove due process. Teacher salaries, once at the national average, are now at the bottom. Teachers are moving out. The war against public education has been accompanied by regressive legislation in other areas, like the environment. That’s why the Network for Public Education is meeting in Raleigh in April, to show solidarity with NC educators
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There are so MANY of us out here who have lost our jobs, our financial safety net, our social optimism, and even our ability to be heard to the TFA juggernaut.
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Of course Involved Mom is right when she says that charters and the reform movement in general have been nearly just as much supported by democrats as they have by the GOP.
Donkey or elephants do not matter; policies and mindsets do.
Involved Mom, please enjoy your entry into a privatized society. You’ll never have to move to Central or South America, you’ll never have to acquire another language, and you’ll never have to worry about a burgeoning middle class. Just hope that you have enough wealth to pass onto your children to keep them rich so that the vast majority of impoverished people will never be able to enter the middle class.
Since charters are a number one symptom of all of this, do not worry for now, because it will take about one to two generations to transform ourselves into the kind of society you no longer have to immigrate to . . . . .
Me?
I will stick to Sanders.
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Robert
your comments are presumptuous. How do you know I don’t support Sanders? Or that I don’t work daily to try and get our state on the right track?
What I’m saying is that in our state, an honest dialogue MUST happen for the future of our schools. I’m not denying what the General Assembly has done and how it has hurt; but I’m also not hiding from the damage caused BEFORE the Republicans in NC became a super majority.
I don’t think Republicans wanted to mess up public schools. But since the Democrats started us down that road, they are riding the wave that aligns with their ideology.
I watched and participated in the last elections. I saw a few seats flip back over to Democrats, and all the work that went into making that happen. I am not convinced, however, that solidarity with teachers will solve all our problems with public school futures in an expedient way. Too many other issues are being overlooked in that song; it’s a nice song, but even the best Symphony has several movements to be complete. And all I tend to hear is the functional equivalent of the first movement of Beethoven’s fifth. What about the other proverbial movements? That’s my point.
Go ahead and try with NPE and the conference in April. But I think you all chose NC to make a statement for NPE, not to help NC. Because the help we need is honest dialogue. Furthermore, I have not heard any Democrats offer up what they will do to help our schools once elected. The assumption would be give it more money. But to whom? Charters that keep popping up because we lifted the cap to qualify for RttT? Vouchers for parents who, at this point, often want to get away from the CCSS, which also came from RttT.
Do you see my point? I don’t want to fight with you or Dr. Ravitch. . .but I don’t think incomplete conversations will help NC’s public schools.
I’m waiting for thorough talk about things that impact the public education scenario in NC: including the lottery, including RttT mandates and policies, including any necessary consolidation or elimination of positions that are cumbersome (and I don’t mean TAs, for goodness sake I know we need TAs; I have children in the schools)—but curriculum coaches and so forth. Constant training on the newest pre-fab and boxed curriculum we BUY for our schools. That stuff. I don’t trust that NCAE advises in the right direction on that. . . how could they? They have accepted Gates money to promote CCSS.
I do hope for the best outcome for the NPE conference in Raleigh. But if you chose it to make a statement that our state sucks, well it will only be ignored. Our state doesn’t suck. We just have some bold conversations to have when it comes to our schools and those have to include conservatives. I want to see Donkeys and Elephants doing that; even at the NPE conference. Will that happen? Have Republicans been invited? Will NPE help be a salve and mediator, or will they just align with NCAE when it’s convenient to rally support, but then not be part of the thorough conversations that are needed in NC? I hope the former.
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Test
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Bernie Sanders.
Test.
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Feel the pantsuit.
https://www.betfair.com/exchange/politics/market?id=924.8325569&exp=e
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Go to OTB, Tim, and play with the horses .. . .
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BREAKING: New York State to close all OTB outlets: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/09/nyregion/09otb.html
Come on Bobby, you gotta get out more!
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Come on, Timid, you gotta use your head more . . .
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We will remember the murder of public education in our state and then we will walk into voting booths across NC and remember that our votes don’t matter in this uber-gerrymandered state where nothing can stop the audacity of the NC Genral Assembly and their hand-picked newbies or the incumbents who have no competition.
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Well said. Until we stop the gerrymandering machine, it feels as if we are simply making noise.
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NCLB – (R). RttT – (D). Consider your vote carefully this November. As a country, we have allowed the oligarchy to take over. We either take it back this year or prepare for the last gasps. The fastest way to dismantle a country is to take down the intelligentsia. Keep the masses uneducated and they will HAVE to follow you. THINK before you vote.
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So everyone now has to transfer to the national charter chain?
What a racket. Huge boon for the charter chain, though. Now they can expand in another state.
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Stupid, stupid, stupid Americans . . . .
“Moo!” said the cows as they stood in line to the slaughter house . . . .
When all they have to do is walk off the line and gore the bad farmers or kick them in the gut . . . . .
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The charter school will ultimately enroll about 400 kids from K-12. Despite an organic decline in school-age population, the district still enrolls about 7,500 children. Children enrolled at the closing elementary school will be split evenly between two other underutilized district schools within a two-mile radius.
In other words, no, not “everyone,” or a number that is even remotely close to “everyone,” will voluntarily enroll their child in the county’s single small charter school. District “capture” is safe.
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Tim, the charter should never have been opened in a district with declining enrollment
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Kudos to the people in that school district for calling out their state rep.
These anti-public school lawmakers show up in our school districts when it’s time to get elected and use our kids and schools as props. You won’t hear any public school bashing from any of these people when they’re parachuting into your school. They save that for when they get back to the statehouse.
When my state rep show up he lavishes praise on the public school. That’s because he knows he won’t get re-elected if he doesn’t support the public schools that actually exist.
They can oppose public schools. That’s an option. But they do have to run on it.
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The Ohio Inspector General is investigating a “troubled” online learning contract that was given to a for-profit charter operator who is a big political donor.
This cheap ed tech garbage they over-paid for wasn’t intended just for charter schools- the plan was to push this junk into every low and middle income public school.
The saddest part is Ohio State joined in and are now caught up in an ed reform scam.
There goes any credibility the flagship state university had.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2016/02/25/ohios-troubled-online-education-project-investigated.html
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Not surprising since Tea Party Republicans have kept screwing the things so bad for public schools, causing the exodus of teachers and leaving other working poor in the gutter.
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Very, very sad but North Carolina’s once proud days as a country wide leader in k16 public education are over. The Tar Heel State once proudly showed others how to build strong public school systems. Now, the best lessons NC will offer are “what not to do”.
Warning to young career professionals: AVOID NC, take your talents to places where politicians respect PUBLIC education. (Even the folks in South Carolina now look down on NC !!)
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