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North Carolina: Teachers Must Become Politically Active to Improve Education

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2019 //
12

LeAnna Erls Delph is a veteran teacher of sixth grade students in social studies and language arts in Asheville, North Carolina. She is a member of the Governor’s Teachers Advisory Committee, is the North Carolina Association of Educators regional director for the far west, and is a member of the Red4EdNC advisory board.

She explains here why teachers owe it to their students, their communities, and their profession to become politically active.

On a recent Sunday morning, I woke up to see tremendous chatter on social media concerning the budget impasse in the North Carolina General Assembly. The discussion included the lack of educator raises, the failure to expand Medicaid, unacceptable working conditions, and a shortage of support staff. This discussion quickly evolved into the formation of a new social media group discussing the possibility of a large scale collective action or strike of North Carolina educators.

This kind of discussion is not new to me. I’ve been a sixth grade social studies and language arts teacher for 18 years, working my whole career in a diverse community confronted with significant economic struggle. I love my community, and they have always inspired me to advocate for my students and their families. Recently, I decided to take an Inquiry to Action class through the Western Region Education Service Alliance (WRESA) to earn continuing licensure credits and build my activist skills. Here, a small group of educators studied educator activism in both theory and practice.  Each week we discussed a different education-related activist tool, theory, and issue. The culminating project was to take our “inquiry” and put it into “action” in some way.

The group decided to focus on “making the invisible visible.” In other words, we seek to deepen critical consciousness — the notion that we go through life oblivious to the world around us on the largest scale. A famous example of this precept is the analogy of the fish in water. If you asked a fish what water is, the fish wouldn’t understand the question because it has a fish brain.

Joking aside, it is because the fish is completely immersed in the water and always has been. The fish just doesn’t notice because it is so “normal” and so ubiquitous. In human life, this would be like the systematic racism that we all live within. Or, it may be ideas that are simply taken as “common sense.” For educators, we may struggle to apprehend fundamental truths about our own environments. I believe that public educators swim in a sea of politics which is all too often invisible — so that is the concept I choose to render more visible. 

Most North Carolina local school boards have policies which hold that employees may not engage in political activities during the school day. However, because public schools are supported by public monies which are controlled by politicians, the very act of teaching, while not partisan, is an inherently political activity. In fact, North Carolina’s evaluation instrument for educators insists upon educators taking part in political activities. Standard 1 (Teachers Demonstrate Leadership) states, “Teachers advocate for schools and students. Teachers advocate for positive change in policies and practices affecting student learning.” What is advocating for policies if not political?  

Please open the post to see her wonderful infographics and finish learning her thoughts on teacher activism.

LeAnna is a member of the Resistance!

 

 

Categories Education Reform, North Carolina, Resistance, Teacher Pay, Teachers

North Carolina: A Mother Sends Her Children to a Charter School But Is Shocked When She Finds Out About the Real Estate Deal

By dianeravitch
November 15, 2019 //
14

Larry Lee, an education advocate and blogger in Alabama, posted the story of a North Carolina mother who enrolled her sons in charter school, taking a blind leap of faith. She is a diligent mother, so she attended board meetings and followed her sons’ progress closely. But then she inquired about who and what was behind this charter school and she was gobsmacked. Lee was interested in the story because the same sharp operators are behind the controversial Woodland Prep charter school in Alabama.

Lee writes:

Alyson Ford is a mother in the Charlotte, NC area.  It wasn’t long after she enrolled one of her sons in a charter school that she began to feel something was amiss.  Soon she was attending board meetings of the school and digging into financial records.  What she found was disturbing and even led to conversations with the FBI.

What does this have to do with Alabama?  Many of the players Alyson has uncovered are involved with American Charter Development of Springville, Utah.  This company is heavily involved with both LEAD Academy in Montgomery and Woodland Prep in Washington County and has close ties to Soner Tarim.

Here is Alyson’s story:

“I have two boys.  One has only attended charter schools. The other has attended traditional public schools, as well as charter schools.

My son enrolled at Lakeside Charter Academy in November 2017, during their rebranding and name change from Thunderbird Preparatory Academy. He stayed through the 2018-2019 school year (4th grade). My stepson began at Lakeside in January 2018, for 4th grade. We withdrew him at the start of the 2018-2019 school year.

We chose the charter school route for several reasons. The biggest being that one son has a severe peanut allergy. The thought of him  eating lunch in a cafeteria, surrounded by peanut butter sandwiches was terrifying.  Our district schools are much larger than charters as well. We liked the idea of smaller schools for our boys. We like the sense of community offered at many charter schools.

We were aware of the negative press since Thunderbird opened in 2014. I studied the North Carolina Charter School Advisory Board meeting minutesl. The school was frequently in trouble and on the verge of having their charter revoked.

We toured the school and found the interim principal amazing. She was the reason we took the leap of faith. We were cautiously optimistic when enrolling at Lakeside Charter Academy (formerly Thunderbird Prep).

Given the school’s past I vowed to be very involved and attend board meetings. I was especially curious about the EB5 investors involved with the school. Even though I repeatedly asked questions regarding this I never received much clarity. Sadly, the more I attended board meetings the more unanswered questions I had.

So she started looking for the answers to her questions. You may be surprised to see what she learned.

 

Categories Accountability, Alabama, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, For-Profit, North Carolina, Privatization

Justin Parmenter: Why N.C. Governor Cooper Vetoed a Pay Raise for Teachers: It Was a Sham!

By dianeravitch
November 14, 2019 //
14

 

Justin Parmenter, an NBCT teacher in North Carolina, explains in this article why Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed a pay raise for educators passed by the ultra-conservative state legislature. 

He begins:

Asheville City Schools full-time instructional assistant Angel Redmond is in her 4th year with the school system and her 21st year in education. Angel has a degree in psychology, and her duties include teaching math and reading to small groups, handling discipline issues, proctoring standardized tests, and substitute teaching when needed. Her current salary is just $22,000 per year, which means that she has to put in 15 hours a week at her second job in order to make ends meet.

Under a General Assembly plan for educator pay which was vetoed last week by Gov. Roy Cooper, Angel would have seen an increase of only $18.26 per month. That’s enough for roughly half a tank of gas.

Cooper’s veto of the poorly-named “Strengthening Educators’ Pay Act” came at the request of public school educators and advocates. On the surface it might seem like a peculiar move for a governor who has vowed to bring much-needed improvements to public education in our state, and Senate leader Phil Berger wasted no time framing Cooper as an enemy of teachers.

However, the legislation would have provided little more than table scraps from a General Assembly majority that has consistently underfunded public education and deprived our schools of billions in potential revenue via massive tax rate cuts since taking control of the House and Senate nearly a decade ago.

Under the bill, teachers with 0-15 years experience would not have received any raise this year. Teachers with 16-20 years would see only $50 more a month before taxes. Teachers from 21-24 years of experience would get $150 more a month, while our most dedicated veterans with 25 years or higher would have salaries raised $60 a month.  For school year 2020-21, teachers with 0-15 years would again get nothing, and teachers with 16 years or more would all get another $50 a month.

These measly raises were promised, not funded.

Governor Cooper was right to veto what amounted to an insult, not a pay raise.

Teachers deserve a living wage. Teachers deserve to be paid as valued professionals.

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Hoax, North Carolina, Teacher Pay

North Carolina: Leaders of Charter Chain Disappear into Thin Air

By dianeravitch
October 22, 2019 //
5

 

A few years ago, Oregon businessman John Bryan gave hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions to make sure that the state had a welcome mat for charter schools. He coincidentally opened 17 charter schools across the state, under the aegis of a management corporation called TeamCFA. He also pushed the legislature to create an “Opportunity School District,” modeled on Tennessee’s failed Achievement SchoolDistrict, which would gather the state’s lowest scoring districts and give them to a charter operator. By happenstance or design, Bryan’s TeamCFA received the contract to run the district. Districts fought hard to prevent the state from taking over their schools, and eventually only one school was sucked in. The first evaluation of the OSD showed that its one school did not improve, and the district had a revolving door of superintendents and principals.

TeamCFA runs 17 charters with 11,000 students in North Carolina and another four in Arizona.

When a reporter at the Raleigh News & Observer tried to find out who was in charge, no one answered the phones or returned his messages.

The reporter did reach a board member.

“I want to clear up one misconception,” C. Bradley Miller, a member of TeamCFA’s board of directors, said in an email Friday to The News & Observer. “TeamCFA Foundation is not closing. We remain committed to supporting schools and their students and helping them achieve academic excellence.”

Miller said staff members still work at TeamCFA, but he didn’t provide any details. No one answered the phone at TeamCFA’s headquarters on a recent weekday and a voice mail from The News & Observer wasn’t returned.

The staff directory, email and telephone contact information on TeamCFA’s website was gone Monday afternoon.

Staff members who left and were contacted by The N&O would not say why they left.

Amid the uncertainty, two new schools that opened in August — Bonnie Cone Classical Academy in Huntersville and Community Public Charter School in Stanley — no longer plan to have TeamCFA run their day-to-day operations.

They just picked up and left without so much as a “by your leave.” It’s an innovative way to supply high-quality seats and academic excellence.

Read more here: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article235919992.html#storylink=cpy

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, North Carolina, Privatization

Betsy DeVos Floods North Carolina with Charter Cash

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2019 //
14

Betsy DeVos just dropped $36 million on North Carolina to lure children out of their public schools and into charter schools. The state is not sure it can spend the money.

North Carolina will now have more than $36 million in federal funding to help increase enrollment in charter schools, particularly for children from low-income groups.

The N.C. Department of Public Instruction announced Tuesday that the U.S. Department of Education is awarding the state an additional $10 million to support a statewide initiative to use charter schoolsto help meet the needs of educationally disadvantaged students. This comes on top of the $26.6 million federal grant awarded last year to increase the number of charter schools across the state.

It’s a financial windfall that has caused charter school leaders across the state to apply for a share of the federal funding.

“The reality is — let the elephant out here — that we’re going to have difficulty spending this money perhaps,” Joseph Maimone, a member of the N.C. Charter Schools Advisory Board, said at Tuesday’s meeting. “We’ve got to really think about how difficult it’s going to be to use up the entire grant.”

State officials say they’re confident that they can spend the $36.6 million.

Charter schools are taxpayer-funded schools that are exempt from some of the rules that traditional public schools must follow, such as providing school meals and bus service. Charter schools have a lower percentage of students receiving free and reduced-price lunches than traditional public schools.

There are 198 charter schools open in North Carolina serving more than 100,000 students. Enrollment has surged since state lawmakers voted in 2011 to eliminate the state limit of 100 charter schools.

Supporters say charter schools provide families with more education options. But critics say charters siphon money away from traditional public schools and increase school segregation.

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Funding, North Carolina, Privatization

North Carolina: A Sad Bedtime Story about a Failed State Takeover

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2019 //
11

This is a story so nutty that it would be hilarious if there were no children involved. Instead, it is an outrage.

When the fringe rightwingers of the Tea Party won control of the North Carolina legislature in 2010, they promptly passed laws authorizing charters and vouchers and transferring the funding from the state’s successful N.C. Teaching Fellows Program (which prepared career teachers) to the temps in Teach for America.

Then they looked wistfully to Tennessee and realized that what they were missing was a mechanism for state takeover of low-scoring public schools. Tennessee had its very own “Achievement School District,” funded by $100 million of federal Race to the Top money, and North Carolina wanted to do the same thing. The Tennessee ASD  took control of the state’s lowest-performing schools and pledged to catapult them into the top 20% of schools in the state.

By 2016, it was clear that the ASD was a total failure but that did not deter North Carolina lawmakers. Give them credit for a combination of gullibility and ignorance.

To help the state takeover pass, a very wealthy conservative entrepreneur from Oregon named John Bryan funded a campaign for the state takeover legislation. Bryan handed out about $600,000 to Legislative candidates from 2011 to 2016.

The bill passed, and now North Carolina had its very own Innovative School District. The law said the state would take over up to five low-performing schools in its first year, which would be turned into charter schools.

But now the story gets even better! Oregon entrepreneur John Bryan had his very own charter chain, called TeamCFA, which already operated 13 charters in North Carolina.

Why not give the contract for the ISD to TeamCFA?

The only problem was that no public school wanted to be part of the ISD. Each time a school was designated by the state, the parents fought back, contacted their legislator, and avoided the state takeover.

Ultimately, only one school joined the ISD: Southside Ashpole Elementary School in Robeson County. The school was turned into a charter school operated by a new company called Achievement for All Children.

Achievement For All Children is heavily connected to Oregon resident John Bryan, a generous contributor to political campaigns and school-choice causes in North Carolina. He has taken credit for passage of the law creating the Innovative School District.

The board of directors for Achievement for All Children includes former Rep. Rob Bryan, a Republican from Mecklenburg County who introduced the bill creating the new district. John Bryan contributed about $17,000 to Rob Bryan’s campaigns for the state legislature from 2013 to 2016.

Tony Helton is chief executive officer of both Achievement For All Children and TeamCFA, a charter school network founded by John Bryan.

But most of the questions this week focused on the qualifications of AAC, which was formed in February 2017.

An independent third-party evaluation by education consulting firm SchoolWorks said it’s unclear whether AAC “is legally eligible to operate and manage” Southside Ashpole because state law says the company chosen must have a record of results in improving performance for low-performing students or schools.

The company plans to partner with TeamCFA, which has 13 charter schools in North Carolina. But SchoolWorks says TeamCFA’s schools have “a mixed record of student achievement.”

https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article208006534.html#storylink=cpy

The new Innovative School District had a new principal and its own Superintendent, quite a lot of leadership for one little school.

The State Board of education just got an evaluation of its takeover school.

Test scores, already low, dropped a bit. The new charter got a grade of F.

The school saw high administrative turnover:

Behind the scenes, the report says rifts developed between the principal and some faculty, which were due in part to the significant leadership changes in the district. In the past two years, the program has seen three superintendents, two principals and two different peoplerunning Achievement For All Children.

And despite the experiment’s negative evaluation, the state is supposed to throw more public schools into the “Innovative School District.”

Under state law, four more schools have to be added to the district for the 2020-21 school year. A list of 12 schools being considered for takeover (none in the Triangle) was released in September.

State board members and State Superintendent Mark Johnson met Wednesday with state lawmakers to ask them to approve a delay in selecting any new schools this year.

Expect public schools chosen to enter the failed ISD to fight back.

This is not funny. This is education malpractice.

 

 

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Education Reform, Failure, North Carolina, Privatization

Rob Schofield: The War on Public Education in North Carolina

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2019 //
9

There was a time when Norh Carolina was widely seen as the most progressive stTe in the South. That time ended abruptly when the Tea Party took control of the state in 2010 and began to decimate public services, especially public education. The Tea Party introduced charters and vouchers, killed the state’s successful NC Teaching Fellows Program for career teachers (giving its funding to Teach for America for temps).

Rob Schofield of NC Policy Watch assesses the war on public education and its ties to the Koch ideology of strangling government.

He writes:


There was a time in the United States not that many years ago in which K-12 public education was taken as a given – something as fundamental to the health and wellbeing of society as drinking water and law enforcement and public roads.

It may not have always lived up to this ideal (particularly in places where the great evil of racial discrimination and segregation held sway), but it’s fair to say that the American public school classroom was widely understood to be the glue that brought our broadly middle class society together and moved it into the future, the unifying institution that inculcated the fundamental civic values of democracy, and the place where society combated ignorance and superstition and prepared members of the next generation to build a better world.

Tragically, this began to change in the latter part of the 20th Century. In her powerful 2017 book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, Duke University historian Nancy MacLean makes a compelling argument that the advent of racial integration – and, in particular, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education) – helped spur a conservative resistance movement that served to undermine the general consensus about public education.

And when this sad development was combined with two other toxic trends – perhaps most notably the aggressive, corporate-sponsored revival of dog-eat-dog, market fundamentalist economics and the explosive growth in what’s-in-it-for-me? American consumerism – it wasn’t long before prominent leaders of the American Right were referring derisively to “government schools” and treating K-12 education as a commodity in which “winners” and “losers” aggressively bargained and shopped for the best deal.

Now, add to all of this a healthy measure of obliviousness from mostly white male elites that could not and cannot see the amazing advantages they enjoy merely by virtue of their race and gender, and you’ve got a recipe for the situation that confronts North Carolina today – a time in which an entire cohort of children will soon graduate from 12th grade, having experienced nothing but declining public education budgets and a sustained ideologically-driven effort to depopulate public schools.

And while some on the political right continue to insist on paying lip service to the notion that they still support public education, a long litany of ills tells a very different story. Consider the following facts about the education system that students and educators return to this week as they begin the 2019-‘20 school year:

Actual state funding for K-12 education is down 6.7 percent (when one adjusts for enrollment growth and inflation) since the 2008-’09 school year – a time when North Carolina ranked 43rd in the nation in terms of per pupil spending and in spending as a share of Gross State Product.

Most per student funding allotments are actually down more than 6.7%. For instance, the state has 9% fewer “instructional support personnel” (counselors, nurses, librarians, etc.), 8% fewer principals and assistant principals, 36% less funding for teacher assistants, 57% less for textbooks, 56% less for classroom supplies, and 17% less for non-instructional support like custodians and bus drivers.

The state’s mushrooming charter school and voucher programs are contributing to declining public school enrollment, increased racial segregation and a pernicious situation in which children with higher incomes and fewer disabilities are “creamed” away and children with greater challenges disproportionately remain.

Despite recent modest improvements for some, North Carolina teachers still earn far less (5% less) than their college-educated, private sector peers. Only five states fare worse by this measurement.

The state faces a school infrastructure need of at least $8.1 billion.

While most states made use of the post-Great Recession recovery to rebuild their public education investments, North Carolina instead enacted a series of aggressive, multi-billion dollar tax cuts that mostly benefited the top 1% and that lowered the state’s overall funding effort (as a share of Gross State Product) to 48th in the nation. Indeed, it would take billions in additional spending just to match spending levels in South Carolina.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Disruption, Education Reform, North Carolina

North Carolina: School Grades Measure Income, Not School Quality

By dianeravitch
September 25, 2019 //
9

Public Schools First in North Carolina posted an analysis of the grades given to schools by the state, based mostly on test scores. Not surprisingly, the school grades measured income, not school quality, since standardized tests measure income.

School Performance Grades

School Performance Grades

Source: N&O analysis of Public Instruction data

School performance grades started in 2013-14 modeled after a program in Florida started by Gov. Jeb Bush. All North Carolina public schools, including charters, have received A-F performance grades since 2013. 

Critics of a single school measurement believe that grades:

  • Do not reflect the learning in our schools
  • Undervalue student growth and other important measures of school quality
  • Could result in more attention to borderline students while underserving the lowest and highest performing students
  • Are often used by privatization advocates to support school choice measures and state takeovers of schools, removing these schools from local control and community input.
  • Will have negative economic impacts on a community (lower home values/sales)
  • Do not come with resources/financial support to improve grades

How did North Carolina’s Schools do This Year? Results show that these grades continue to be closely correlated with a student’s family income level.

  • Schools with greater poverty earned fewer A/A+NG’s and B’s and earned more C’s, D’s, and F’s than schools with less poverty.
  • Of the 21.7 percent of schools receiving a D or F grade, 95 percent were serving high poverty populations
  • In schools with more than 80 percent low income students, 60 percent received a D or F grade. Less than one percent of schools with less than 20% low income student populations received a D or F grade
  • Of schools with high concentrations (41 percent or more) of students who are economically disadvantaged, 71 percent met or exceeded growth, compared with 79 percent of schools serving fewer students in poverty.
  • For the 2018–19 school year, 73.3 percent of all schools met or exceeded growth expectations, a slight increase from the previous year.

Read more in our fact sheet about A-F grades here!

Source: N&O analysis of Public Instruction data

School performance grades started in 2013-14 modeled after a program in Florida started by Gov. Jeb Bush. All North Carolina public schools, including charters, have received A-F performance grades since 2013. 

Critics of a single school measurement believe that grades:

  • Do not reflect the learning in our schools
  • Undervalue student growth and other important measures of school quality
  • Could result in more attention to borderline students while underserving the lowest and highest performing students
  • Are often used by privatization advocates to support school choice measures and state takeovers of schools, removing these schools from local control and community input.
  • Will have negative economic impacts on a community (lower home values/sales)
  • Do not come with resources/financial support to improve grades

How did North Carolina’s Schools do This Year? Results show that these grades continue to be closely correlated with a student’s family income level.

  • Schools with greater poverty earned fewer A/A+NG’s and B’s and earned more C’s, D’s, and F’s than schools with less poverty.
  • Of the 21.7 percent of schools receiving a D or F grade, 95 percent were serving high poverty populations
  • In schools with more than 80 percent low income students, 60 percent received a D or F grade. Less than one percent of schools with less than 20% low income student populations received a D or F grade
  • Of schools with high concentrations (41 percent or more) of students who are economically disadvantaged, 71 percent met or exceeded growth, compared with 79 percent of schools serving fewer students in poverty.
  • For the 2018–19 school year, 73.3 percent of all schools met or exceeded growth expectations, a slight increase from the previous year.

Read more in our fact sheet about A-F grades here!

Categories Accountability, Bush, Jeb, Education Reform, North Carolina, Testing

How the GOP in North Carolina Pulled Off Its Sneak Attack on Medicaid Expansion for 634,000 People

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2019 //
18

Think dirty politics, think North Carolina.

Yesterday, while some Democratic legislators and Governor Roy Cooper attended a 9/11 memorial service, the Republican legislators called a snap vote to override the governor’s veto of the state budget. They had repeatedly assured the Democrats that no votes would be recorded that morning, but they lied. If the full body of representatives had been present, the governor’s veto would have stood.

Cooper vetoed the budget because it did not include Medicaid expansion, which he favors but the Republicans oppose. Thanks to the Republicans, 634,000 citizens in the state will not have health coverage.

This article includes an interview with Democratic representative Chaz Beasley, who explains what was at stake.

He said,

North Carolinians sent us up to Raleigh to have a voice and a say in how we spend $24 billion. And what we’ve seen throughout this process is that many of us were not at the table when whole swaths of the budget were negotiated and settled upon. The governor has made it clear what he would like to see in the budget. One thing he’d like to see is Medicaid expansion in there.

But problems with the budget go beyond the fact that it doesn’t expand Medicaid for 500,000 North Carolinians. We still underpay our teachers. We still have schools that lack the resources to be successful. We still haven’t given a large enough pay increase to our state employees, or a cost of living adjustment to our retirees. Instead, the budget includes things like expanding programs for virtual charter schools that do not have good ratings for how they’re teaching our kids.

Virtual charter schools, we know, are a cash cow for big out-of-state corporations, and they are noted for terrible academic performance, high attrition, and low graduation rates.

The only mildly amusing comment in the article comes from a Republican who said that it was important to take a vote on 9/11 “so that the terrorists didn’t win.” He didn’t explain why it was necessary to take the vote when members of the Democratic party had been assured there would be no vote that morning. When you lie, cheat, and steal to get your way, you undermine democracy. When you betray democracy in your pursuit of power, the terrorists win.

 

Categories Corruption, Democrats, Lies, North Carolina, Republicans, Virtual Charter Schools

Curriculum Company Sues Parent for Criticizing Its Program

By dianeravitch
September 12, 2019 //
33

Sarah Sparks writes in Edweek about a curriculum company that is suing a parent in Wake County, North Carolina, for criticizing its math program. The company says the parent is defaming its product. The parent’s lawyer says the company is attacking the parent’s First Amendment rights.

As the story notes, this is a SLAPP suit, a suit meant to silence public criticism. The last time I encountered this sort of thing was when a charter company filed a suit against a school board member in California for negative criticism. The ACLU came to her defense. It should defend this parent too, who is using his Constitutional right to disagree with a program adopted by his district.

A group of families in Wake County, N.C., have pushed for months to get the district to stop using a controversial new curriculum. Now the company behind the curriculum is suing one of the most vocal parents for defamation.

It’s a surprising move that some say could have broad implications for parent advocacy around curriculum and instruction. A win by the company “would certainly cast a shadow on the idea that parents have a right to participate in their own children’s education, to criticize schools for buying particular textbooks, to voice their concerns about instruction and curriculum,” said Tom Loveless, an education researcher formerly at the Brookings Institution, who is not involved in the case.

The Mathematics Vision Project, a nonprofit provider of open source math curricula, filed a complaint this summer against Blain Dillard, a parent in the Wake County public school system. MVP has accused Dillard, an outspoken opponent of the math program, of libel, slander, and “tortious interference with business relations.”

The company alleges that Dillard has launched “a crusade against MVP” through his online criticism of the curriculum and advocacy with school officials and employees.

In a written statement to Education Week, Jeffrey Hunt, Dillard’s lawyer, wrote that the lawsuit “has no legal merit.”

“It is alarming that a parent would be sued for defamation for expressing opinions and making truthful statements about his son’s high school math curriculum,” Hunt said. “The lawsuit appears to be an attempt to silence Mr. Dillard and other critics of MVP, and to chill their First Amendment rights to speak about MVP’s services.”

The district is entering its third year using the MVP curriculum, which received a favorable evaluation from the curriculum reviewer EdReports. The open source curriculum emphasizes problem-solving and collaboration—students learn by working through problems, and teachers are expected to act as facilitators.

For months now, parents have spoken out against lessons that they say are confusing and poorly structured, lodging complaints with the district and making statements at school board meetings. Parents said their children weren’t getting enough direct instruction and were encouraged to rely on their classmates for help. As a result, they said, students who used to get As and Bs were now getting Cs and Ds, which would have long-lasting effects on their grade point averages and college prospects.

Barbara Kuehl, an author and consultant at MVP, said that the organization’s materials encourage a variety of methods. “Our curriculum not only supports well-timed direct instruction, we advocate for it,” she said. Kuehl declined to comment on the lawsuit, citing pending litigation.

Pushback from parents over a new curriculum, and particularly a discovery-based program, is nothing new, said Loveless.

“There have been all kinds of programs that have been oriented around that philosophy, and they have been quite controversial,” Loveless said.

What is new? A curriculum provider suing parents over such complaints.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Civil Rights, Curriculum, Freedom of Speech, North Carolina
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