I posted last night that Governor Pat McCrory plans to appoint a man to the state board of education who has little experience in public education, but is known for his strong support for removing a book taught in a high school English honors class.
North Carolina teacher Stuart Egan points out that the nominee has a conflict of interest. His wife ran/runs a school that receives state-funded vouchers.
In reference to North Carolina, you can never say “it can’t get worse.” It always can, as long as Pat McCrory is Governor and the Tea Party extremists control the legislature.
Governor McCrory named a new member of the state board of education: J. Todd Chasten. His major qualification appears to be his role in efforts to ban a book from the English honors class in his district.
The North Carolina General Assembly will vote on his nomination tomorrow.
NC Policy Watch reports:
Governor Pat McCrory’s recent nomination of J. Todd Chasteen to serve on the State Board of Education has raised the eyebrows of some western North Carolinians.
A Boone resident who appears to have a thin record of experience with public education, Chasteen was deeply involved last year in efforts to ban a book from a public high school English classroom in Watauga County.
“We should reject Governor McCrory’s recent nomination of Wataugan J. Todd Chasteen to the North Carolina Board of Education,” said Appalachian State University English professor Craig Fischer at a public forum at the university earlier this week, objecting to Chasteen’s lack of experience in public education.
“Chasteen sided with would-be censors during last year’s battle over keeping Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits in the sophomore English Honors curriculum at Watauga High,” Fischer added. “He spoke on behalf of banning the book at a February 10, 2014 school board local forum about the controversy, claiming–inaccurately–that Allende’s book is full of ‘deviancy’ and child pornography.”
Chasteen, an attorney and executive with Boone-based international aid organization Samaritan’s Purse, not only spoke publicly for removing The House of the Spirits from the classroom, but also lobbied the eventual tie-breaking board of education member, Ron Henries, in person and via email in an effort to persuade him to vote for banning the book, according to emails obtained by N.C. Policy Watch.
This is the mission statement of his organization:
Samaritan’s Purse is a nondenominational evangelical Christian organization providing spiritual and physical aid to hurting people around the world. Since 1970, Samaritan’s Purse has helped meet needs of people who are victims of war, poverty, natural disasters, disease, and famine with the purpose of sharing God’s love through His Son, Jesus Christ. The organization serves the church worldwide to promote the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
He is obviously a man drawn to charitable, faith-based work. But he has no particular qualification to sit on the state board of education. His activity in the book-banning controversy was sufficient to recommend him to McCrory as right for the state board of education.
Stuart Egan, NBCT high school teacher in North Carolina, describes the latest disaster cooked up by the North Carolina General Assembly, which is dominated by Tea Party extremists: a constitutional amendment to lock in steep tax cuts.
The General Assembly majority calls it TABOR, a Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.
Egan calls it “A Tourniquet Around the Bloodlines of Our Republic.”
GOP leaders in the North Carolina General Assembly are pushing for a proposal to place a constitutional amendment on the November ballot that would cap the income tax rate a 5.5% (currently it is 10%).
That proposal is a political tourniquet, pure and simple. And just as limited blood flow would cause harm to the skeletal system in a body, this measure would cause our state’s infrastructure to slowly disintegrate.
Chris Fitzsimon puts it very bluntly in his latest “The Follies” from June 17, 2016 (http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2016/06/17/the-follies-253/). He states,
“As the N.C Budget & Tax Center points out, that cap would cut off a vital source of revenue that the state needs and make it virtually impossible for future lawmakers to use the income tax to increase state investments, even in times of emergencies.
It also locks in place the massive tax cuts for the wealthy passed in 2013 that will cost more than $2 billion a year when fully in effect, more than the entire budget of the community college system and early childhood programs combined.
The new lower tax cap could threaten the state’s coveted AAA bond rating and force increases in the state sales tax and could lead local governments to raise property taxes and fees. It’s a terrible idea that threatens funding for public schools, health care, and environmental protections and makes decisions for future members of the General Assembly that will be elected by the voters just like the current members were.”
That’s scary to think about. The very fabric, the very sinews of society like schools, healthcare, and environmental protections would be instantly jeopardized and it would take years to recover as part of the GOP’s plan is to change the constitution of the state.
Remember that all three of those areas (schools, healthcare, and environment) have already been hazardously affected in the last three years here in North Carolina.
Per pupil expenditures are lower, charter school growth is uncontrolled, and teacher pay is still low despite what the current administration wants to boast.
Medicaid expansion was denied and we as a state are still paying into a system that benefits other states but not ours because of political ideology and a dislike for the current president.
The fracking industry is being given an open door and permission to do whatever it wants. Duke Energy’s coal ash spills have still gone relatively unpunished.
How long will the people of North Carolina let these barbarians rampage through the state and destroy the public sector?
Wake up, people of North Carolina! The legislators in your state are pummeling your public schools with a sledge hammer. They are turning them over to for-profit corporations! Do you want your local public school to be run by a national corporation? Do you care who “owns” your neighborhood school?
Stuart Egan, a high school teacher in North Carolina, has been writing recently about the step-by-step privatization of public schools in North Carolina.
In this post, he describes the General Assembly’s decision to create an “Achievement School District,” modeled on the one that failed in Tennessee. The basic idea is to gather up the lowest-performing schools in the state (attended by the poorest students) and turn them over to a charter operator.
He cites the comment made by Rep. Cecil Brockman, who favors outsourcing these schools to out-of-state corporations:
Perhaps the most frustrating moment of the final debate came when Rep. Brockman impulsively quipped,
“If (teachers) don’t like it, good. This is about the kids. Who cares about the teachers? We should care about the kids. If they don’t like it, maybe it’s a good thing.”
Do Republican legislators in North Carolina really have that much contempt for teachers? Apparently so. North Carolina raised entry level salaries to $35,000 but capped salaries at $50,000. Legislators work hard to remove any job protection or recognition for teachers. They even abolished the successful North Carolina Teaching Fellows Program–a five-year program at the University of North Carolina intended to prepare career teachers–and transferred the funding to Teach for America.
This is the same legislature that rolled out a budget proposal to spend $1 Billion on vouchers over the next decade. Most of the students who get vouchers will go to religious schools with uncertified teachers and no curriculum. How is this supposed to improve education?
The parent-led Public Schools First NC calls on the public to speak out against legislation to create an “achievement school district,” modeled on Tennessee’s failed ASD. The goal of the law is to invite charter takeovers of low-scoring schools.
“An Achievement School District is a bad idea for North Carolina. Taking over failing schools and giving them to out-of-town charter operators does not help students or communities. Yet the House is ready to take up a bill (HB1080) that would create an ASD with five of our most vulnerable elementary schools. Tell your representatives you DO NOT SUPPORT this unproven and unaccountable strategy when state transformation teams working closely with local schools and districts are beginning to succeed. They deserve more staff and funding, not an expensive state takeover!
Tell your legislators to REJECT HB1080! (click here and sign the petition
HERE IS the calendar in the house tomorrow.
Click to access CurrentHouseCalendar.pdf
HERE is the calendar in the senate tomorrow.
Click to access CurrentsenateCalendar.pdf
HERE is the House Education Budget
http://www.publicschoolsfirstnc.org/resources/education-budget/”
I previously wrote a post about the powerful multimillionaire Art Pope, who controls Tea Party politics in North Carolina. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer profiled him and showed how he cannily used his fortune to defeat moderate Republicans so Pope’s ideological allies could gain control of the party and push it to the far right. Pope funds the John Locke Foundation, which espouses his views. When Pope ran for office, he was defeated, but he was appointed state budget director by Governor Pat McCrory and set the priorities for the state, which reflected his own views.
One of his many allies is John Hood, who is former president (and current chairman) of Art Pope’s John Locke Foundation. Hood has been placing articles in the North Carolina press, boasting of North Carolina’s progress in reforming its school system. As is by now well known, the Pope battalion in the legislature has cut education funding and launched charters, vouchers, and online charters. Not many would view these “reforms” as a boost to the state’s students and teachers. But John Hood does. Indeed, his last article was titled “How to Pay Teachers More.”
Stuart Egan has been writing open letters to John Hood on his blog. Egan does not have the access to the media that is granted to the powerful Mr. Hood. In Egan’s latest open letter, he takes apart Hood’s false claims, one by one, to show how the public has been hoodwinked by the John Locke Foundation and the state government.
Hood claims that the state enjoys a budget surplus because taxes were cut, and the economy boomed (the old supply-side mantra of the Reagan administration).
Egan writes:
Interestingly enough, that budget surplus was created by a tax revenue overhaul crafted by none other than Art Pope, who not only serves your mentor and boss, but also served as Gov. McCrory’s first budget director. You may claim that we have had lower tax rates than we did before McCrory took office, but there’s more to it.
While tax cuts did come for many, standard deductions were greatly affected. Many of the standard deductions and exemptions that were once available to citizens like teachers no longer exist. In fact, most people who make the salaries commensurate of teachers ended up paying out more of their money to the state, even when “taxes” went down. Why? Because we could not declare tax breaks any longer. Who designed that? The budget director.
Furthermore, there is now a rise in sales tax revenue because many services like auto repairs are now taxed. So to say that the surplus just appeared because of spending limitations is a little bit of a spun claim. In fact, most of those spending limitations in public schools came when we saw increased enrollment and costs of resources rise.
Hood goes on to boast that the state had eliminated salary increases for teachers who acquire additional degrees. Of course, North Carolina wants to have teachers who do not invest in continuing their education.
He also boasts that the state is embracing merit pay. As Egan points out, no merit pay program has ever produced better education.
So eliminating pay increases for more education and introducing merit pay is supposed to translate into higher pay for teachers? Scuttling North Carolina’s successful North Carolina Teaching Fellows program, which produced career educators, and replacing it with TFA is supposed to improve the workforce?
Egan points out that Hood is engaging in election year rhetoric:
McCrory’s claim to want to raise teacher pay looks more like pure electioneering. It is synonymous to a deadbeat dad who shows up at Christmas with extravagant gifts so that he can buy the love (or votes) of his children.
Here we go again. Governor Pat McCrory of North Carolina is running for re-election this year. His government has repeatedly passed legislation that harms workers, immigrants, public education, higher education, and the environment, while cutting taxes for the rich and corporations. Anyone interested in learning how the Tea Party Republicans have damaged North Carolina is invited to read Altered State, which describes the radical changes of the past five years.
Since it is best not to talk about those things, McCrory and his Tea Party pals want to keep focused on their valiant effort to keep transgender women out of public restrooms. This “crisis” appears to have emerged only this year, since there are already many gender-neutral public restrooms in hotels and the airport.
The U.S. Justice Department told North Carolina that the law aimed at restricting the right of transgender people to use the restroom of their gender identity was discriminatory. Now McCrory can appear at the great restroom martyr, protecting little girls and women from sexual predators in the bathroom.
North Carolina announced today that it will sure the federal government.
The U.S. Justice Department is suing North Carolina. If the Justice Department prevails, North Carolina could stand to lose billions of dollars in federal assistance. This seems unlikely but not impossible.
Playing the bathroom card didn’t work for Ted Cruz. Let’s see if it works for McCrory and his fellow disrupters.
North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper sued a charter operator who got $666,000 from the state to open a charter that closed after being open for only 10 days.
“Attorney General Roy Cooper is suing the managers of a failed Kinston charter school, claiming they inflated enrollment estimates to get state money for education services they did not provide.
“Kinston Charter Academy – which closed 10 days into the school year in September 2013 – got more than $666,000 in state money in August 2013, according to the lawsuit. The money was based on a projected enrollment of 366 students and was supposed to last until October.
“On Sept. 3, the school had 189 students. It closed three days later. The students transferred to other schools, and the lawsuit says the state had to pay twice to educate those students for three months.
“The suit, filed in Wake County Superior Court on Tuesday, claims that school CEO Ozie L. Hall Jr. and Demyra McDonald-Hall, his wife and board chairwoman, illegally obtained and misused state money. They knew the academy would not survive the 2013-14 school year, yet made imprudent or self-interested business transactions, and misled students by persuading them to enroll, the suit said.”
Mr. Hall said the suit was baseless and he will fight it. He is now running another charter school.
Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/state-politics/article74020632.html#storylink=cpy
The US Justice Department informed North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory that HB2 is illegal. This is the state law that prevents localities from enacting ordinances to prohibit discrimination and that requires people to use the bathroom that matches the gender on their birth certificate.
This was a foolish bill from the start because it is unenforceable. Who will monitor the genitals of those who use public bathrooms? Will citizens be required to carry copies of their birth certificate?
The federal government theoretically could cut off all federal aid to NC, a sum in the billions.
Stuart Egan is a National Board Certified teacher of high school English in North Carolina. I have published his posts before. I met Stuart at the Network for Public Education annual conference in Raleigh a few weeks ago and invited him to write a post that would sum up the damage that the Tea Party government has done to teachers and schools in the past five years. He agreed to do so. His perspective is especially valuable because he is in the classroom.
Stuart Egan writes:
When the GOP won control of both houses in the North Carolina General Assembly in the elections of 2010, it was the first time that the Republicans had that sort of power since 1896. Add to that the election of Pat McCrory as governor in 2012, and the GOP has been able to run through multiple pieces of legislation that have literally changed a once progressive state into one of regression. From the Voter ID law to HB2 to fast tracking fracking to neglecting coal ash pools, the powers that-now-be have furthered an agenda that has simply been exclusionary, discriminatory, and narrow-minded.
And nowhere is that more evident than the treatment of public education.
Make no mistake. The GOP-led General Assembly has been using a deliberate playbook that other states have seen implemented in various ways. Look at Ohio and New Orleans and their for-profit charter school implementation. Look at New York State and the Opt-Out Movement against standardized testing. Look at Florida and its Jeb Bush school grading system. In fact, look anywhere in the country and you will see a variety of “reform” movements that are not really meant to “reform” public schools, but rather re-form public schools in an image of a profit making enterprise that excludes the very students, teachers, and communities that rely on the public schools to help as the Rev. William Barber would say “create the public.”
North Carolina’s situation may be no different than what other states are experiencing, but how our politicians have proceeded in their attempt to dismantle public education is worth exploring.
Specifically, the last five year period in North Carolina has been a calculated attempt at undermining public schools with over twenty different actions that have been deliberately crafted and executed along three different fronts: actions against teachers, actions against public schools, and actions to deceive the public.
Actions Against Teachers
What gets lost in the conversation with the public is that due-process rights are a protective measure for students and schools. Teachers need to know that they can speak up against harsh conditions or bad policies without repercussions. Teachers who are not protected by due-process will not be as willing to speak out because of fear.
I personally teach multiple sections of AP English Language and Composition and am subject to the Assessment of Student Work (ASW). I go through a process in which I submit student samples that must prove whether those students are showing ample growth.
In June of 2015, I uploaded my documents in the state’s system and had to wait until November to get results. The less than specific comments from the unknown assessor(s) were contradictory at best. They included:
Alignment
Al 1 The evidence does not align to the chosen objective.
Al 4 All of the Timelapse Artifacts in this Evidence Collection align to the chosen objectives.
Growth
Gr 1 Student growth is apparent in all Timelapse Artifacts.
Gr 2 Student growth is apparent between two points in time.
Gr 3 Student growth is not apparent between two points in time.
Gr 4 Student growth samples show achievement but not growth.
Gr 9 Evidence is clear/easily accessible
Gr 10 Evidence is not clear/not easily accessible
Narrative Context
NC 1 Narrative Context addresses all of the key questions and supports understanding of the evidence.
NC 4 Narrative Context does not address one or more of the key questions.
And these comments did not correspond to any specific part of my submission. In fact, I am more confused about the process than ever before. It took over five months for someone who may not have one-fifth of my experience in the classroom to communicate this to me. If this is supposed to supply me with the tools to help guide my future teaching, then I would have to say that this would be highly insufficient, maybe even “unbest.”
Those legislators who push for merit pay do not see effective public schools as collaborative communities, but as buildings full of contractors who are determined to outperform others for the sake of money. And when teachers are forced to focus on the results of test scores, teaching ceases from being a dynamic relationship between student and teacher, but becomes a transaction driven by a carrot on an extended stick.
That historic raise was funded in part by eliminating teachers’ longevity pay. Similar to an annual bonus, this is something that all state employees in North Carolina — except, now, for teachers — gain as a reward for continued service. The budget rolled that money into teachers’ salaries and labeled it as a raise. That’s like me stealing money out of your wallet and then presenting it to you as a gift.
Actions Against Schools
Let me use an analogy. Say in 2008, a school district had 1000 students in its school system and spent 10 million dollars in its budget to educate them. That’s a 10,000 per pupil expenditure. Now in 2015, that same district has 1500 students and the school system is spending 11.5 million to educate them. According to Raleigh’s claims, that district is spending more total dollars now than in 2008 on education, but the per-pupil expenditure has gone down significantly to over 2300 dollars per student or 23percent.
Some districts have taken to move away from the 6/7 period day to block scheduling. Take my own district for example, the Winston-Salem / Forsyth County Schools. When I started ten years ago, I taught five classes with a cap of 30 students. With the block system in place, I now teach six classes in a school year with no cap. The math is simple: more students per teacher.
When speaking of “test scores”, we need to agree about which test scores we are referring to and if they have relevance to the actual curriculum. Since the early 2000’s we have endured No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top initiatives that have flooded our public schools with mandatory testing that never really precisely showed how “students achieved.” It almost boggles the mind to see how much instructional time is lost just administering local tests to see how students may perform on state tests that may be declared invalid with new education initiatives. Even as I write, most states are debating on how they may or may not leave behind the Common Core Standards and replace them with their own. Know what that means? Yep. More tests.
“Graduation rate” might be one of the most constantly redefined terms in public schools. Does it mean how many students graduate in four years? Five years? At least finish a GED program or a diploma in a community college? Actually, it depends on whom you ask and when you ask. But with the NC State Board of Education’s decision to go to a ten-point grading scale in all high schools instead of the seven-point scale used in many districts, the odds of students passing courses dramatically increased because the bar to pass was set lower.
Actions To Deceive The Public
Simply put, it is a voucher system that actually leaves low-income families without many choices because most private schools which have good track records have too-high tuition rates and do not bus students. Furthermore, the number of private schools receiving monies from the Opportunity Grants who identify themselves as religiously affiliated is well over 80 percent according to the NC State Educational Assistance Authority. Those religious schools are not tested the way public schools are and do not have the oversight that public schools have. Furthermore, it allows tax dollars to go to entities that already receive monetary benefits because they are tax free churches.
Especially in rural areas, uncontrolled charter school growth has been detrimental to local public schools. When small school districts lose numbers of students to charter schools, they also lose the ability to petition for adequate funds in the system that NC uses to finance schools ; the financial impact can be overwhelming. In Haywood County, Central Elementary School was closed because of enrollment loss to a charter school that is now on a list to be recommended for closing.
Overall, this has been North Carolina’s playbook. And those in power in Raleigh have used it effectively. However, there are some outcomes that do bode well for public school advocates for now and the future.
I only hope that the game changes so that a playbook for returning our public schools back to the public will be implemented.
Stuart Egan, NBCT
West Forsyth High School
Diane Ravitch's blog 