Archives for category: North Carolina
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North Carolina: A Veteran Teacher Writes a Letter to the New State Superintendent

By dianeravitch
December 17, 2016 //
2

Stuart Egan is a National Board Certified Teacher in North Carolina. The state legislature (the General Assembly) just passed legislation removing educational authority from the state board of education and handing it to the just-elected state superintendent of education, who is a Republican with only two years of teaching as a member of Teach for America.

 

Egan wrote to Mark Johnson, the 33-year-old neophyte who is suddenly in charge of the state’s schools.

 

The young man who will control the state school system ran against “the status quo,” which was imposed by the legislature that just put him in charge. Will he tangle with the legislature? Will he fight for teachers? Will he roll back over-testing, as he promised?

 

If you have …, “taken issue with what (you) sees as a lack of support for teachers and schools coming from the department and a failure to respond quickly to such issues as the state’s academic standards and over-testing” will you really seek to empower or enable those very teachers and schools the way that people in the GOP controlled NCGA special session just empowered you before you even step foot inside of your new office?

 

When the chair and vice-chair of the GOP controlled State Board of Education say that the General Assembly overstepped its boundaries in granting you as the incoming state superintendent this much power, then that sends more than one red flag into the air.

 

When two former governors, one of whom is Republican Jim Martin, says the special session has gone too far with bills such as the one which enables you, then sirens are screaming.

 

When the John Locke Foundation says that the power grab that involves the role of your office has gone too far, then many are saying that part of hell is freezing over.

 

So, what will you do now that you will have much to say about charter schools and the Achievement School District, the management of monies for public schools, and who is hired in DPI as well as some who may sit on the State Board of Education?

 

Because if someone who was as experienced as your predecessor was as handcuffed as she and was still able to wage battle against the very forces that have actually controlled the very “status-quo” you seem to have run against, will you be willing to battle those very people for the sake of the students and schools now that they have politically enabled you?

 

Or will you bend to the wishes of those who have placed this power within your office through a politically motivated special session that was undertaken solely as a coup against the fact that a democrat won the governor’s election?

 

I eagerly await your answer through your actions in the coming years.

 

 

Categories Administrators, superintendents, North Carolina

North Carolina: Legislature Strips Powers of Governor

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2016 //
21

As threatened, the Republican-dominated Geral Assembly of North Carolina passed legislation to diminish the powers of the incoming Democratic Governor.

 

The outgoing Governor, Pat McCrory, who lost the election to Attorney General Roy Cooper, promptly signed the controversial bills, undermining his successor.

 

The Tea Party Republicans who control the legislature are punishing Cooper for winning. They are a disgrace to a great state. They have betrayed democracy and abandoned any sense of fairness.

 

This is the work of North Carolina zillionaire Art Pope, who spent years defeating moderate Republicans and replacing them with extremists. Jane Mayer wrote about Pope in the New Yorker in 2011. Her article was entitled “State for Sale.”

Categories North Carolina

Update on the Tea Party Coup in North Carolina

By dianeravitch
December 16, 2016 //
7

As the North Carolina General Assembly passes legislation to limit the powers of the newly-elected Governor of the state, who is a Democrat, protestors gather at the State Capitol, speak out and are arrested.

 

The General Assembly has been controlled by Tea Party extremists since 2010, when they had the chance to redistrict and guarantee themselves a super-majority. The federal court has ruled that the redistricting was unconstitutional and ordered the legislature to redistrict again. Note to fox: Please stay away from the hens.

 

One of the new laws transfers power over the schools from the State Board of Education to the newly elected Republican superintendent of schools. Mark Johnson is a 32-year-old former Teach for America teacher, who taught for two years, then was elected to a local school board. A year after he was elected to the local school board, he announced his candidacy for state superintendent. Based on his scant experience, the Tea Party wants him to take charge of public education in the state. Michael Bloomberg and TFA’s political advocacy group LEE (Leaders for Educational Excellence) funded his campaign. Count this as another victory for TFA’s ambition to take over public education.

Categories Education Industry, North Carolina, Teach for America TFA

North Carolina: Coup Plotters Shift Power Over Schools from State Board to Republican Superintendent

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2016 //
66

A coup is underway in North Carolina.

 

The Republican General Assembly is stripping power and staff from the newly elected Democratic governor and turning it over to Republicans.

 

Education is a central issue. The legislature is transferring control from the state board of education to a newly elected Republican state superintendent.

 

Democracy is betrayed in North Carolina by power hungry Tea Party Republicans.

Categories Democracy, North Carolina

North Carolina: EMERGENCY! STOP THE COUP!

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2016 //
8

From Public SchoolsFirst in NC:

 

“We are desperately trying to get 500 folks here at 430pm – we want to show strength before they close building at 5 pm – come for one hour – they will pass these laws but we can show our anger and we can bear witness- Please folks, I’m begging you, be a witness to this crime on Jones Street, be a witness to the right wing extremist taking over our North Carolina Constitution. Come witness a political coup underway to take away your voice and vote – if you can’t come then be relentless in your phone calling, your emailing, and your tweeting. Don’t stop, don’t get weary, and don’t give up, but a thorn in the side of bigotry. Please share –
WHY YOU ARE NEEDED to show up at 4:30 pm TODAY (and keep showing up and keep emailing and calling when you hear about their final votes!)

Folks we are in the midst of a political coup by the right wing conservative extremists. These are not patriots but powering grabbing white Republicans – they held a Jim Crow caucus consisting of white men (and a few token white women) to draft these bills against the will of the people in secrecy and with intent to take power from the people.
The GOP controlled General Assembly led by Senator Berger and Representative Moore, are using every dirty trick in the book to preserve their privileges since NC voters elected a democrat as their new governor.
In other words, the political elites – mostly Phil Berger, Art Pope, Thom Tillis, Richard Burris and Tim Moore are preserving their grip on power in any way they can, legally (even if undemocratic) and illegally (even if it costs our tax payers) – they are trying to sell this as normal, political business as usual but it is really an ‘overthrow’ of our democracy and our constitution and actually is only intended to preserve authority in the hands of the few.NC General Assembly has gone too far. They came to Raleigh under the pretense of protecting NC hurricane and forest fire victims but have now filed over 20 bills, including unprecedented laws that strip Governor-elect Roy Cooper of executive powers, hurt public education, create gridlock in the state and county boards of elections and circumvent the will of the people, and do further harm to the people of our state. Extremists in the legislature are upset about the outcome of our election and are trying to maintain their control.
HB 17 goes to extraordinary lengths to take away all powers of our Governor-elect, slashing the number exempt positions he can oversee from 1,500 to 300, and eliminating his ability to make appointments to university campus boards of trustees.
Additionally, the bill radically reorganizes governance of North Carolina’s public schools. In almost every possible way, the bill strips power from the State Board of Education to provide more authority to the newly-elected Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction. If the bill becomes law, it will certainly be challenged in court due to constitutional issues. The bill – which was unveiled under a cloud of secrecy last night – is quickly moving through the General Assembly without adequate public input or transparency.
The North Carolina State Constitution clearly gives the State Board of Education the responsibility for running our public school system. The State Board, which consists of 11 members appointed to eight-year terms by the Governor, would be stripped of its powers under HB 17. The new law would unconstitutionally place these powers with the newly-elected Superintendent of Public Schools, Mark Johnson, a lawyer with no experience running a state agency.
HERE IS A PARTIAL LIST:
House Bill 17 makes 1,200 of Pat McCrory’s political appointments permanent state employees, grants the NC Senate unprecedented approval over Governor-elect Cooper’s cabinet picks, and also removes Governor-elect Cooper’s power to appoint trustees to the UNC board and the state board of education.
House Bill 6 needlessly changes the Department of Information Technology from part of the Governor’s cabinet to an “independent” agency whose leadership would be chosen by the Republican Lieutenant Governor.
Senate Bill 4 allows McCrory to appoint the chair of the industrial commission before he leaves office and would drastically change the board of elections by giving the General Assembly the authority to choose half of its members and giving Republicans almost-guaranteed chairpersonship of the board for the foreseeable future.
Senate Bills 5 and 6 grant McCrory the power to appoint two last-second Special Superior Court judges. One of the appointees would be McCrory’s budget director, Andrew Heath, who has limited legal experience.

 

The people of North Carolina will not take these actions against our constitution, our democracy and our vote!. We demand that they respect our vote, end this Session and stop attacking our democracy.
Please join our People’s Assembly at 4:30 pm today at the NC General Assembly in the rotunda.”

Categories Accountability, Democracy, Fraud, North Carolina

North Carolina: What Can a Democratic Governor Do with a Tea Party Legislature?

By dianeravitch
December 8, 2016 //
6

This post is a very interesting analysis of how the newly elected Democratic Governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, can use his bully pulpit to pound the legislature, which has passed dreadful laws in the past five years.

Why did McCrory lose? The author credits Reverend William Barber’s Moral Monday for standing strong, pushing hard, and never giving up.

He quotes Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling with a lesson for all of us:

“(T)he seeds of McCrory’s defeat really were planted by the Moral Monday movement in the summer of 2013, just months after McCrory took office….

“He allowed himself to be associated with a bunch of unpopular legislation, and progressives hit back HARD, in a way that really caught voters’ attention and resonated with them….

“(T)he Moral Monday movement pushed back hard. Its constant visibility forced all of these issues to stay in the headlines. Its efforts ensured that voters in the state were educated about what was going on in Raleigh, and as voters became aware of what was going on, they got mad. All those people who had seen McCrory as a moderate, as a different kind of Republican, had those views quickly changed. By July McCrory had a negative approval rating- 40% of voters approving of him to 49% who disapproved. By September it was all the way down to 35/53, and he never did fully recover from the damage the rest of his term….

“And it’s a lesson for progressives in dealing with Trump. Push back hard from day one. Be visible. Capture the public’s attention, no matter what you have to do to do it. Don’t count on the media to do it itself because the media will let you down. The protesters in North Carolina, by making news in their own right week after week after week, forced sustained coverage of what was going on in Raleigh. And even though it was certainly a long game, with plenty more frustration in between, those efforts led to change at the polls 42 months after they really started.

“Keep Pounding.”

The most important lesson on how to survive the next four years: KEEP POUNDING. NEVER GIVE UP, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER.

Categories North Carolina, Resistance

North Carolina: How Charter Schools Are Slowly Gutting Public Education

By dianeravitch
December 6, 2016 //
13

Jeff Bryant has written a stunning documentation of the damage done by the charter industry to public schools in North Carolina. It is worth your time to read it all. It is a preview of what lies ahead for public education in the Trump era, unless parents and educators and public-spirited citizens join to save their public schools. It is not a pretty picture.

 

The Tea Party Republicans in the legislature and Governor Pat McCrory in the state house set a course to undermine, underfund, and starve public schools while opening the state to charter schools, whether nonprofit or for-profit. Jeff Bryant shows how funding for the public schools is below 2008 levels, even though enrollment has grown by nearly 80,000. Public schools have had to make budget cuts, at the same time that charter schools and online charter schools take away students and funding. In North Carolina, as in many states, if a student leaves a charter school after October to return to the public school, the charter school gets to keep the full year of tuition and is not obliged to replace the student who left.

 

The board that oversees charter schools and decides which new charters to approve is filled with charter school advocates. As Donald Trump used to say, “It’s a rigged system, folks, it’s a rigged system.”

 

Bryant explains in detail how the for-profit charter management companies make money. He uses the example of National Heritage Academies, which is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the hometown of Donald Trump’s designated Secretary of Education. Half their teachers may be uncertified, which means they have lower salary costs. But the real money is in the real estate.

 

Bryant writes:

 

How do these schools make a profit? The best answer the reporter for the Charlotte Observer could find was in management fees for the EMOs [educational management organizations], which In North Carolina equal to 7 – 19 percent of total school operational costs.

 

But based on my inquiries, that figure represents a very small part of the profit these schools make.

 

Out Of Michigan And Florida

 

“North Carolina is one those states that is new to the charter game,” Ellen Lipton tells me in a phone call to her office in Michigan – home of National Heritage Academies. NHA is based in Grand Rapids, where Betsy DeVos also lives.

 

“The low per-student funding that tends to characterize Southern states generally kept charter school operators from moving into those states,” she contends. “But now states like Michigan are getting saturated” so the charter chains have decided to move south.

Lipton is a Michigan State Representative who has spoken out against the spread of charter schools through the state’s Education Achievement Authority, an appointed agency, similar to the Achievement School District North Carolina created last year, that takes over low-performing schools and turns them over to charter operators.

 

According to Lipton, NHA has “fine-tuned” the business of chartering to ensure they make a profit. She points me to a recent investigative report by the Detroit Free Press that finds, “It is difficult to know how charter management companies are spending money … Unlike traditional school districts, the management companies usually don’t disclose their vendors, contracts, and competitive bid documents.”

 

“NHA is a business model based on, not necessarily educating kids, but on being a facilities management company,” Casandra Ulbrich, another Michigan source, tells me.

 

Ulbrich is currently serving her second eight-year term on the Michigan State Board of Education and also works in education administration at a state community college.

 

She tells me how the NHA business model works: First, NHA forms a charter school board to “invite” NHA to manage a new school. The governing board is not independent of the management company, and members of the board can serve on multiple NHA charter boards across the state, thus creating a network of charter school boosters the work on promoting these schools.

 

After securing a contract to manage the new school, NHA purchases a building – it could be a storefront in a strip mall or an abandoned warehouse – and requests approval from an authorizer to open a school there. After the authorization, the charter board signs a lease agreement with Charter Development Company, LLC to take over ownership of the building. Charter Development Company, which has branches in all the states where NHA has schools, has its home office in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the same address as the home office of NHA.

 

Now NHA and its related enterprises own the building and its contents, even if desks, computers, and equipment have been purchased with taxpayer money. It receives rent payments from the district. It owns the curriculum the school teaches. And if NHA is ever fired, the charter board – and by extension the district – is in the awkward position of having to buy back its own school.

 

 

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

North Carolina: The Education Agenda of Roy Cooper, Just Confirmed as the Next Governor

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2016 //
18

After a hard-fought election that produced a narrow margin of victory, State Attorney General Roy Cooper was elected the next Governor of North Carolina. Pat McCrory, current governor and Tea Party hero, conceded defeat.

 

Education was the leading issue for Roy Cooper. He railed against the actions of McCrory and the legislature, and he was elected even as the state voted for Trump. Maybe that’s a lesson for Democratic candidates in other states. Supporting public schools is wise and politically powerful.

 

This is what Governor-elect Cooper says on his website:

 

We need to make education a priority. Governor McCrory has prioritized huge tax giveaways to big corporations and those at the top while he cut teaching assistants and failed to provide the resources our children need and to pay our teachers what they deserve.

 

We have to give more pay and respect to teachers, and to treat them as the professionals they are. Among the top priorities are increasing teacher pay, reversing cuts to textbooks and school buses, and stopping teacher assistant lay-offs.

 

Teachers will ultimately know we respect them when our policy reflects our rhetoric. Reinstating a teaching fellows program to attract the best and brightest, providing opportunities for teachers to improve their skills as professionals, and making sure their kids are healthy and ready to learn in the classroom are vital.

 

North Carolina already ranks 46th in the country and last in the Southeast in per-pupil expenditures for public schools. Many good teachers are leaving for other states for better jobs, and class size has increased. That’s causing parents to lose faith in public schools and undermining North Carolina’s best jobs recruiting tool, our education system.

 

Similarly, I oppose vouchers that drain money from public schools. I support strong standards and openness for all schools, particularly charter schools. While some charters are strong, we see troubling trends, such as a re-segregation of the student population, or misuse of state funds without a way to make the wrongdoers reimburse taxpayers. We need to manage the number of charter schools to ensure we don’t damage public education and we need to better measure charter schools so we can utilize good ideas in all schools.

 

We must support early childhood education as well as our great universities and community colleges. Our approach to quality education must be comprehensive.

 

Here is his education agenda.

Categories Accountability, Education Reform, North Carolina, Privatization, Supporting public schools

North Carolina: Governor McCrory Concedes

By dianeravitch
December 5, 2016 //
9

 

 

In one of the closest elections in the country, Governor Pat McCrory conceded at last to State Attorney General Roy Cooper in the race for governor.

 

McCrory came to office as the formerly moderate mayor of Charlotte. Once in office, he joined the far-right wing Tea Party majority in the General Assembly to pass legislation for charters and vouchers, to eliminate the respected North Carolina Teaching Fellows program (which required a five-year education commitment and produced career teachers) and replaced it with a $6 million grant to Teach for America, and enacted law after law to reduce the status of the teaching profession.

 

To understand the damage that McCrory and his cronies did to the state read this summary of five years of political wrecking imposed on the state.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, North Carolina, Privatization, Teacher Pay, Teacher Tenure, Vouchers

NC: Teacher Suspended for Stepping on the Flag While Teaching about First Amendment

By dianeravitch
December 2, 2016 //
35

I don’t approve of stepping on the flag or burning it, but my understanding is that the Supreme Court ruled that burning the flag is a form of speech and is protected under the First Amendment. There are many things and many kinds of speech I don’t like, but the First Amendment protects the speech I don’t like, even the speech I hate.

 

A history teacher in North Carolina tried to illustrate his lesson on the First Amendment by stepping on the flag, and he was suspended without pay.

 

Ironic to be teaching the lesson, then suspended because you thought that the Supreme Court ruling was in force.

Categories Academic Freedom, North Carolina
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