Category: issues

Things are Dippy over at DPI

The new website didn’t help matters. Ever since he took office in January 2017, relations between NC Superintendent of Schools Mark Johnson and advocates for the state’s teachers and public schools have grown ever more acrimonious. If Johnson had wanted to establish warmth and collegiality with teachers and the various groups that claim to speak for them, several missteps have placed obstacles in the path: He commented, during a Q&A session at a statewide meeting of school boards, that a starting salary of $35,000 for new teachers was “a lot of money” for starting teachers, presumably in their 20s. At the time (January 2018), the Raleigh News & Observer reported that Johnson himself was earning  $127,561. He tweeted that teacher pay was “on the right […]

Read more

How Did You Learn to Read?

When you were in kindergarten or first grade, how did you learn to read? Did you spend part of each day listening to your teacher reading to the class and to your parent reading a bedtime story? At some point, you were handed a book, and one day, you were reading independently. Just like learning to talk, reading came to you naturally…it just sort of happened! Right? Not likely. You were probably too young to be able to recall it clearly, but you and your classmates didn’t start to read independently after merely learning to sing the Alphabet Song and paying attention during Story Time. It’s far more likely that you learned to read by receiving multiple hours of instruction in letter sounds. After you learned the […]

Read more

Testing Should Help

A TED talk from April 2013 by “creativity expert” Ken Robinson—who has been criticized of late for being idealistic and clueless—makes a really simple point: tests should be diagnostic. He states, “Standardized tests have a place. But they should not be the dominant culture of education. They should be diagnostic. They should help.” At this writing, most students in Wake county have recently undergone the annual ritual of high-stakes testing, during which time virtually no other learning could take place at each school. There’s plenty to despise about the state-mandated standardized testing that occurs every May. Here are just a few of the common criticisms that angry parents have piled on in recent years: Testing wastes an inordinate amount of instructional time, as teachers are […]

Read more

Newer Discipline Practices and School Safety in Wake County

In September 2017, two students were stabbed, and one was murdered at a public school in New York City. Some have blamed the school’s ineffective alternative discipline practices—practices that were adopted in response to guidance from the Mayor’s office to avoid major discipline referrals and suspensions. NC public schools are also developing and implementing alternatives to suspensions and expulsions. Could it happen here in Wake County? Over the past decade, public schools in the state of North Carolina have been actively encouraged to replace more traditional methods of applying discipline—typically, punishments for misbehavior—with Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS), which is often referred to as “School-Wide Positive Behavior Supports,” or SWPBS. We discussed PBIS in our previous piece on this topic. The NC Dept. of […]

Read more

Do Newer Discipline Practices Erode School Safety?

Max Eden of the Manhattan Institute think-tank has written something of an exposé for The74Million, a website devoted to news about American public schools. Eden writes that he had been doing research into “the unintended consequences and dangers of discipline reform” in public schools when he read about a knife attack at a public high school in New York. The details of the attack are gruesome: it was allegedly committed by a student who said he was being bullied; it occurred during class; it critically injured a 16-year-old student; and it killed his 15-year old friend. After interviewing current and former students and teachers at the school, Urban Assembly School for Wildlife Conservation, Eden concludes that it was “a once safe and supportive school that fell […]

Read more

The False Promise of School Choice

“School choice” is both a politically charged concept and an ill-defined goal. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has been a strong advocate for increased parental choice for close to 30 years. She described her 2017 tour of “innovative” schools and school districts as an opportunity to “really highlight and expose to more people the beauty of options and choices and to continue to make the case that all parents, not only ones that have the economic means, should be able to have a decision-making power to make some of those choices” in an October edition of EducationWeek. But there’s abundant evidence out there that parents are pretty bad at selecting their child’s school.  Much hand-wringing accompanied the findings, in multiple research studies, that only 1-2% […]

Read more

Really Bad Legislation

The 2016 unfunded class-size reduction mandate is just one example of legislators’ strangely punitive relationship to district superintendents and public-school administrators throughout North Carolina. No matter what, the requirements that stem from this legislation would be mind-bogglingly expensive to enact. Yet somehow, state legislators are blaming local districts for not planning carefully enough, or for misallocating funds that could miraculously have built the required schools, installed the required trailers, and hired the required teachers in record time. Multiple lawmakers have admitted that the legislation entailed some unintended consequences and was rushed through as part of a budget package, which limited  opportunities for debate. Senate Pro Tempore Phil Berger was quoted in the Asheville Citizen-Times defending the law. Berger states that the 2016 “state budget included […]

Read more

Class-Size Reduction Sounds Like a Futile Waste of Resources

Bryan Hassel, co-founder of Public Impact and an education consultant in Chapel Hill, NC, makes a very straightforward and convincing case that the NC General Assembly made a big mistake when it passed legislation as part of the 2016 state budget to reduce class sizes statewide in Grades K through 3. You can read his full blog post at Education Next, but here’s a summary of his main arguments: Smaller class sizes mean that schools must hire significantly greater numbers of teachers each year. The finest teachers will reach fewer students each school year if their classes are reduced by 5 – 10 students. Such teachers will effectively be rendered less, well, effective. As a follow-on to his first argument, Hassel notes that larger and […]

Read more