MECKLENBURG EDUCATION
DIGEST
K12Meck.org
WELCOME!
1939 Oscar winning Best Actor: Robert Donat
Goodbye, Mr. Chips
CHARLOTTE-MECKLENBURG
SCHOOLS
NEVER
OUT OF THE CROSSHAIRS
No U.S. school district has been more in the crosshairs than
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, yet few have garnered as many accolades for
excellence-or at least, effort.
Despite the myth that in the first years after Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg
Board of Education busing was successful, the district has never been not
segregated! Busing to fulfill Brown was only partially or temporarily
successful in Mecklenburg. The proof is in West Charlotte High School's journey
as an all-Black high school, then integrated, and today mostly abandoned by
white families. That experiment ultimately led to the district replacing race-based
student assignment with student assignment based on socio-economic
status. The distinction was hardly noticeable, but it satisfied a Board
of Education that had struggled since 2002 with a minority community that
believed that policy was behind poor student outcomes.
CMS's twenty-first century approach, crafted by eleven superintendents over 25
years, delivers education through a two-tiered grading platform, where economically
disadvantaged neighborhood demographics often compromise quality instruction.
The bottom tier is EVAAS or Growth. The top is Proficiency. The dividing
line is reading comprehension.
On this website, you'll find a record of what works, what doesn't, and perhaps
some visions.
CMS' NEWEST EDUCATION EXPERIMENT
"Student Outcomes Focused Outcomes"
After decades of the Board of Education relying on teacher
professional development carried out by eleven different superintendents, it
shifted the burden of improving student outcomes onto their shoulders. The
board hired The Council of Great Cities Schools’ A. J. Crabill to change their
behavior and provide guidance in setting goals and guardrails based on
standardized testing. The program’s name is Student Outcomes
Focused Governance. The
difference from the past is that the board is to spend 50% of each of the two
monthly meetings receiving staff reports covering the goals.
Below is the night and day difference between a 2019 and 2025 board meeting.
1971
A discussion of Mecklenburg County would be incomplete
without mentioning the 1971 Swann v. Board of Education decision, which led to
the nation’s first forced busing. A small group of local citizens set out to
make busing good for the community. Through exemplary effort, the school
district transformed its last remaining all-Black high school, West Charlotte
High School, into a national model for successful integration. Over the
next 40 years, de facto segregation returned. According to former MeckEd CEO Ross Danis,
"By 2002, West Charlotte High School was largely black and low-income,
with less than two-thirds of the teaching staff fully certified. When, in 2006,
a bonus of $10,000 was offered to high-performing CMS teachers willing to teach
in a low-performing school, not one chose to work at West Charlotte High
School. The once high-performing West Charlotte High gradually declined in
performance until, by the end of the 2000s, it was consistently ranked among
the lowest of the low-performing high schools in the state."
2012
On January 10, 2012 the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education met at a remote location seated around eight church tables arranged in a rectangle to unanimously giveaway seven sick elementaries, one desperate middle and one embarrassing high school to a public-private partnership supported by $55 million from The Foundation For The Carolinas and $1.2 million from Belk Foundation. The purpose was to create graduating classes at West Charlotte High School that were uniquely trained to succeed and throw-off decades of community distain. As the facilitator asked each Board member to explain their vote, District 4 member Tom Tate sadly said, “I don’t know what else we can do.” Nine years later and on its fourth superintendent, Project L.I.F.T. died.
The plan never had a chance. Several weeks after the contract was signed there was the realization that the goal of feeding West Charlotte High School with better prepared students was flawed. 75% of the students in the L.I.F.T. elementary feeder areas were assigned to other high schools. By 2023-2024 West Charlotte had the state's second worst graduation rate.
Project L.I.F.T. Contract
2006
In 2006 Leandro Judge Howard Manning threatened to close West Charlotte High School and four others saying CMS was “…in the ditch”. Five years later with former school board member Ericka Ellis-Stewart pushing hard to improve opportunities for disadvantaged students, the district won the Broad Prize for closing the achievement gap and improving the academic performance of low-income and minority students. The Broad Prize was discontinued in 2015 because its once pool of candidate urban district had fallen from 75 to 2. The Broad Foundation decided the prize money would be better given to charter schools. CMS was not one of those two!
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