Thousands of Teachers March on Raleigh, NC

by Tamika Walker Kelly

Yesterday was huge.

Thousands of public school educators, bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, social workers, counselors, coaches and other support staff – along with their supporters – flooded the streets of Raleigh. Again.

But we didn't just show up today. We organized. We held our legislators accountable and put them on record about their stance on public education. We met together with our neighbors in county conversations and made concrete plans to continue this work until we win the schools our communities deserve.

And we are already winning.

Tuesday, before so many of us descended on the state capital, Republican leadership in the NCGA announced a plan to give lopsided pay raises to public school employees. But what they don’t know is that we're in this together. We won't accept a proposal intended to divide us.

We are united on the 5 Priorities the North Carolina Association of Educators adopted at our convention in March:

• Provide enough school librarians, psychologists, social workers, counselors, nurses, and other health professionals to meet national professional-to-student standards;
• Provide $15 minimum wage for all school personnel, 5% raise for all ESPs (non-certified staff), teachers, administrators, and a 5% cost of living adjustment for retirees;
• Expand Medicaid to improve the health of our students and families;
• Reinstate state retiree health benefits eliminated by the General Assembly in 2017;
• Restore advanced degree compensation stripped by the General Assembly in 2013.

So, what’s next after yesterday’s #AllOutMay1 action?

First – Please fill out our brief survey to tell us about your #AllOutMay1 day.What did you do? Who did you meet? What was one powerful, meaningful moment that you’ll take back to your school district?

Second – If you are not a member of the North Carolina Association of Educators, we need you to join right now. We know from two years of mass mobilization actions that we have strength in numbers. NCAE is our organization and it’s our voice. We need you with us.

Third – NCAE’s Organize 2020 Racial & Social Justice Caucus is working hard in every school district to bring people into NCAE and orient us toward the fight for public schools. You already signed up for this struggle – we need you to bring your co-workers, your friends and your family. Send your folks to organize2020.org and encourage them to join our communications list so they can get in the loop on our work.

Fourth – This work takes time and resources y’all. Over the past month dozens of Organize 2020 volunteers have worked hard with NCAE leadership to pull this event together. Please consider donating to our work as NCAE’s Racial & Social Justice Caucus.

We are so proud of you all, and ourselves, today. We will not be intimidated into silence by politicians and special interests focused on undermining our public schools.

We are together. We are united. We are organized.

Tamika Walker Kelly, NCAE Region 6 Director
Bryan Proffitt, Durham Association of Educators President

The Spellings Privatization Machine Shifts Gears

With some uncertainty as to how long it will take for North Carolina citizens to ride her out of the state on a rail, Margaret Spellings is wasting no time implanting Koch Brothers' stooges into what has been one of the best public university systems in the nation.  If Spellings is left to do what she was put in charge to do, we will witness the replacement of public servants with crony profiteers, privatizers, and fascist hacks who circulate among the power centers of the Old Confederacy.

As in Cecil Staton, who Spellings recently named as Chancellor of East Carolina University:

As a five-term Republican member of the Georgia Senate, Staton moved millions in taxpayer dollars to Mercer, the private university that employed him. He authored a voter ID bill that a federal judge likened to a "poll tax." He was also notorious for pushing police crackdowns on immigrants.

Most bizarrely, he was involved in an email scandal, in which the then-senator allegedly used a fake account and name to spread attacks about a political rival.

"We know Ms. Spellings was a political appointee who has had nothing really to do with advancing academia," N.C. NAACP president William Barber told Ball. "Now it seems birds of a feather flock together."

And if there are no positions to fill, then she is intent to let her handlers create new positions, as with this newly created position:

So it begins: Yesterday, new UNC president Margaret Spellings announced the appointment of Andrew Kelly to a newly created position called "senior vice president for strategy and policy." The school will pay him $245,000 a year.

A UNC release notes that Kelly was a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute from 2002-2005, and returned to AEI in 2009 as a research fellow in education policy studies. He is also the founder and director of AEI's Center on Higher Education Reform.  

Reactions have been swift.  This op-ed appeared today in the News and Observer by Michael Schwalbe:

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article81662092.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article81662092.html#storylink=cpy

The recent hiring of Andrew P. Kelly as the UNC system’s senior vice president for strategy and policy is a sign of what UNC system president Margaret Spellings and her Republican backers have in mind for the future of public higher education in North Carolina.

Kelly, who received his Ph.D. in political science from UC-Berkeley in 2013, comes to his $245,000 per year UNC system job from the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank in Washington, D.C.

Like Spellings, Kelly has no experience as an educator, other than a stint as a graduate teaching assistant. Also like Spellings, he has ties to the Bush family, recently serving as a policy adviser to Jeb Bush’s failed presidential campaign.

The AEI, for which Kelly wrote about higher education policy, is the tool of its ultraconservative funders, which include the Olin, Scaife, Lynde and Harry Bradley, Adolph Coors and Smith Richardson Foundations. Other super wealthy supporters, including Charles and David Koch, give the AEI millions of dollars through dark money channels, such as DonorsTrust.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article81662092.html#storylink=cpy

What donors get for their money is ideological support for a free-market, anti-regulation, anti-labor agenda. AEI “scholars” produce op-eds, reports and policy discussion papers that oppose raising the minimum wage, support voter ID laws, oppose single-payer health care, oppose tougher regulations on Wall Street banksters and deny climate change.

What comes out of the AEI is not scholarship but pseudo-scholarship tailored to advance the economic interests of its funders. This is the world from which Kelly comes to UNC, to undertake the task of making policies that stand to affect the quality of public higher education in North Carolina for generations to come.

In fairness, one might say that what matters more than where Kelly comes from are the ideas he brings with him. These ideas are easy to find. Kelly has published articles and edited books on how to reform higher education.

One big idea that Kelly pushes is that tuition has soared in recent decades because government loans to college students have provided an open spigot of money, leading to profligate spending by university administrators and giving them an irresistible incentive to keep raising tuition to further fuel that spending.

As a result of this vicious cycle, Kelly argues, affordability has suffered, universities have avoided accountability and low-quality institutions, as well as programs of dubious career value, have been kept artificially alive. The solution is to let the market operate as it should.

“Consumers,” which is Kelly’s term for parents and students, should be told of the likely monetary payoff of degrees in different fields from different institutions, so they can better decide how to spend their tuition dollars. There should also be cheaper alternatives to traditional classes and degree programs; for example, short-term, skills-focused online instruction.

What impedes these reforms? A major obstacle, Kelly says, is the current system of accreditation, which leaves power in the hands of faculty, who want only to keep competitors out of the market and preserve the status quo. As an alternative, Kelly suggests giving the accreditation role to state governments.

Curiously missing from Kelly’s analysis of rising tuition costs and college affordability is attention to the role played by a decline in direct state funding. In the 1970s, states on average provided about 75 percent of funding for public higher education. Today, the figure is about 25 percent. Tuition rates have risen to make up the difference.

In other words, affordability is now a problem because the burden of paying for college has been shifted onto the backs of middle-class families. Kelly ignores this, likely because of why the shift has occurred: the anti-tax and shrink-the-government policies championed by outfits like the American Enterprise Institute.

When self-proclaimed reformers are in league with those whose aims and policies have caused economic hardship for working-class and middle-class families, it’s hard to take seriously those reformers’ claims to be driven by concerns for affordability, though this rhetoric makes for good public relations.

The real goals of the AEI’s “billionaire class” sponsors in regard to public universities have long been clear: turn them into engines of profit making; use them to train scientists, managers, pro-business analysts, and professionals; and, to the extent possible, do not allow them to promote critical thought about the concentrations of wealth and power in America.

To his credit, Kelly seems to have recognized, at least at one time, that administrative bloat – the proliferation of highly paid presidents, vice presidents, vice chancellors and the like, along with armies of staff assistants – is part of what ails higher education and drives up costs. With his new job, he becomes part of that problem, too.

Michael Schwalbe is professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/opinion/op-ed/article81662092.html#storylink=cpy

NC Gov Cancels Charter Report Because of Facts

The leader of the North Carolina Taliban, Governor Dan Forest, has put a halt to a state charter school report because he finds the facts offensive.  The governor has ordered that some sweet-sounding speculation be added to go with the harsh facts associated with the charter resegregation process underway in North Carolina schools:

Forest said a primary concern about the report was that it cited a study last year by Duke University researchers who wrote that "the charter schools in North Carolina are increasingly serving the interests of relatively able white students in racially imbalanced schools."

The report, prepared by the charter school office of the state Department of Public Instruction, said while black and white children attend charter schools and traditional public schools in similar proportions overall, individual charter schools are more racially segmented.

Read more at http://www.wral.com/forest-wants-revamp-to-too-negative-charter-school-report/15220093/#soRSiVFy54d3cq8b.99

Spellings Leader in NC Taliban War on Public Ed

In August Valerie Strauss posted a report by James Hogan on the effects of the Tea Party Taliban that seized control of North Carolina politics and its public education system in 2012.

Besides draconian cuts to everything from teacher positions to drivers' ed, the Bircher wing of corporate education reform has legalized vouchers and has uncapped the growth of both non-profit and for-profit charters.  Here a a clip from Hogan's report:

N.C. teachers are prohibited by law from unionizing, but they did have a common advocacy group in the North Carolina Association of Educators. In 2011, the legislature passed a law targeting how the group collects dues from member teachers.

Then-Governor Beverly Purdue vetoed it. In 2012, the law made its way back to Purdue, who vetoed it again–but the House overrode it during a sneaky, late-night vote. (The law was later found to be discriminatory, retaliatory, and a violation of free speech and thrown out by state courts.)

But with teacher’s main advocacy group effectively muzzled, the legislature was free to run rampant, and teachers quickly came under fire.

Teacher salaries fell to near the bottom among all states in the nation and worst in the South after five years with zero pay increases. And when Republicans finally acted to increase teacher pay, they claimed to make the biggest pay hike in state history–but in reality only bumped up paychecks by an average of $270 per year. When you factored inflation into the mix, teachers were losing money.

Meanwhile, Texas and Virginia started actively recruiting North Carolina teachers to go work in their states. It didn’t take much to convince Tarheel teachers to flee–especially after some teachers discovered they earned substantially less money than when they started thanks to inflation.

In case pitiful paychecks weren’t enough to deter teachers from returning to work, the legislature next took aim at teacher tenure. The Republican-led proposal initially was to eliminate tenure altogether, but eventually they came up with a plan that would grant teachers pay raises for giving up their career status. It was, as I wrote then, a clever way of getting rid of veteran teachers.

To add the greatest insult to injury, the anti-knowledge ideologues of the NC Taliban have put Margaret Spellings in charge of UNC and the 27 other state campuses in the NC public university system.
 
If nothing else, Spellings is consistent, and it didn't take long for Maggie to let her true colors show as the new prez of UNC.  Read it and weep.

Charters Drive School Resegregation, Duke Study Finds

We have known for almost a decade that charter schools are more segregated (follow the links in this commentary) than the public schools they are replacing, and we have known much longer that diverse, inclusive classrooms are the most cost effective and just way to improve academic performance for all students.

We now have evidence that charter schools have become more segregated over the past 15 years, as all minority or all white charter schools have proliferated.  In North Carolina, for instance, white charters now resemble the white academies that sprang up in the wake of the 1964 Civl Rights Act, just as all black charters have become as common as they were during Jim Crow.

There is a big difference, however, between the black charters of today and black public schools of the 1950s and 1960s.  Even during Jim Crow, many black schools had black, caring, and professionally-trained teachers who understood the contexts of poverty and racism from which their students came.

With a primary concern for the whole child, those all-black schools were not laser focused on turning children into miniature Amazon workers, who are subjected to behavioral sterilization while producing test scores that build and protect charter school brands.

Another difference: today's black segregated charters are often staffed with white beginners with little, if any, professional preparation and with even less understanding of the challenges that disadvantaged children bring to school. These beginners represent the Amazon worker paradigm brought to tax-funded discriminatory schools. 

Below is part of a WaPo article that reports on a new Duke study that brings the resegregated charter school phenomenon up to date:

. . . .Setting aside the drama between charters and teachers unions, or complaints that charter schools lead to the privatization of public education, there has been the persistent critique that charters increase inequality by plucking advantaged students out of traditional public schools.

The most recent cautionary tale comes from North Carolina, where professors at Duke have traced a troubling trend of resegregation since the first charters opened in 1997. They contend that North Carolina’s charter schools have become a way for white parents to secede from the public school system, as they once did to escape racial integration orders.

"They appear pretty clearly to be a way for white students to get out of more racially integrated schools,” said economics professor Helen Ladd, one of the authors of the draft report released Monday.

Charter schools in North Carolina tend to be either overwhelmingly black or overwhelmingly white—in contrast to traditional public schools, which are more evenly mixed. Compare these charts from the report:

The bottom chart shows students that attend North Carolina’s regular public schools. There is a healthy variety of schools with different racial makeups. Only about 30 percent of students attend schools that are highly segregated, meaning schools that are more than 80 percent or less than 20 percent white.

The top chart shows students at North Carolina’s charter schools. More than two thirds attend schools that are highly segregated. You can see on the chart because the histogram has two humps, one at each racial extreme.

The charts also show how racial makeups have shifted over time. By 2014, a fifth of charter schools were overwhelmingly — more than 90 percent — white. In 1998, less than 10 percent of charters were that way.

Parental preferences are part of the problem. The charter school admissions process is itself race-blind: Schools that are too popular conduct lotteries between their applicants. But if a school isn’t white enough, white parents simply won’t apply.

In previous research, Ladd discovered that white North Carolina parents prefer schools that are less than 20 percent black. This makes it hard to have racially balanced charter schools in a state where more than a quarter of schoolchildren are black.

“Even though black parents might prefer racially balanced schools, the fact that white parents prefer schools with far lower proportions of black students sets up a tipping point,” the authors write. “Once a school becomes ‘too black,’ it becomes almost all black as white parents avoid it.”

Looking at students in grades 4-8, the researchers found that the regular public school population in North Carolina has become less white over the past 15 years (from 64.1 percent white to 53 percent white), while the charter school population has grown more white (from 58.5 percent white to 62.2 percent white).

Not only that, but the kids choosing charter schools these days also seem to be more able. The researchers examined how students had been scoring on standardized tests before they entered charter school. It used to be that kids with below average test scores applied to charter schools. But in recent years, the kids going into charter schools tend to have above-average test scores.

The researchers argue that this changing mix of students explains much of the test score gains among North Carolina’s charter schools. By their calculations, the schools haven’t gotten that much better at teaching students — but they have gotten better at attracting more able students.

In 2010, North Carolina received a $400 million Race to the Top grant from the Obama administration. As part of its application, it promised to eliminated the cap on charter schools, which had been stuck at 100. Now there has been a flood of charter schools seeking to open in North Carolina, and the researchers warn that the segregation problem might only get worse.

One problem is that disadvantaged students have less of a chance to attend a charter school. First, they or their parents have to be plugged in enough to know which are the good charter schools and motivated enough to apply. Then, they need to have the resources to actually attend the charter, because unlike regular public schools, charter schools in North Carolina do not have to offer transportation or lunch to students. For poor students who rely on school buses and free meal programs, the costs associated with attending a charter school may discourage them from the opportunity.

By contrast, affluent families might not think twice about driving their children to attend the high-achieving charter across town instead of a low-achieving neighborhood school. In this manner, even charter schools without explicit fees or admissions requirements may tilt toward inequality.

Ladd said that she would like to see charter schools be required to provide services on a par with what public schools offer. This would be a step toward making them more accessible. The board that oversees charter schools might also be more careful about approving new ones. Schools that plan to open in white or affluent neighborhoods are unlikely to attract anyone but white and affluent students. . . .