Charter, Achievement, UNC Lab Schools, and the Statutory Corruption of K12 Education
Many North Carolinians may be familiar with the controversial – and increasingly evident – academic, financial, and governance failings of a number of North Carolina charter schools. This should come as no surprise: more than a few observers predicted that the legislature’s peremptory style, and its dogged determination to ignore facts, evidence, and the rule of reason in the governance of our public schools, virtually assured the corruption of public charter school initiatives in North Carolina.
In most places, being called out for bungled lawmaking, especially in education policy, might encourage a bit of humility and self-restraint from legislators. Not so on Jones Street, where the public good is frequently sacrificed to hubris, and power-mongering all-too-often supplants the wise restraint of good governance. And so when many existing charter school schemes were scrutinized and found wanting, and rumblings were heard that many new proposals might not pass muster even with political appointees on the State Board of Education, the legislature responded not by walking back their missteps, but by doubling-down and introducing wholly new approaches to malfeasance in public education policymaking.
In two bills (H1080, H1030) forced through the last legislative session, lawmakers went well beyond the cronyism of charter school politics. In a stunning display of imperious overreach, the legislature moved to establish the foundations of a shadow-system of public K12 education. In the process, legislators systematically violated time-honored and time-tested state and national traditions of divided power, limited government, public accountability, and the responsible use of prerogative authority in public education management. This is not how democracies educate citizens.
H1080, which mandates the creation of a statewide “Achievement School District” (ASD), will become a nationally recognized example of statutory coercion and the arrogation of public authority in public school management. In order to create and control its new creature, the legislature replaced the oversight authority of the duly elected state Superintendent of Public Instruction with the compromised purview of an unelected ASD czar, and authorized the ASD to conduct forced annexations of local schools. There is no appeal on these decisions: affected districts must submit to ASD authority, or they must shut down targeted schools. Then, after it gathers up the expropriated public properties, the ASD is free to turn the annexed schools over to private education corporations looking to fatten up on the public dime. The final insult is how this is financed. H1080 actually makes local taxpayers, and accountable state and local school officials, pay for having their interests and authority usurped by the Jones Street cabal: ASD funds are forcibly extracted from the education monies allocated to, and paid by, citizens in the now-disenfranchised and defenseless local districts.
There is no question that thoughtfully designed and well governed achievement schools can be a terrific opportunity for communities to give underserved students a leg up. But whether they are useful and how they should be managed is a matter for parents, local school boards, locally appointed school administrators, and teachers on the front-line – not partisan hacks and brow-beaten bureaucrats in Raleigh -- to decide. Indeed, if anything good comes of this, it will be despite not because of what legislators have done. No wonder then that opposition to the ASD and calls for the Governor to veto the bill were heard across the public school professional and support communities: school board associations, citizens’ public school advocacy organizations, professional teachers’ associations, members of local school boards, superintendents, parents, and even mainstream media outlets, have all weighed in against the ASD law. Even reliable supporters of Jones Street diktat, like the Civitas Institute, had to acknowledge (in a howler of understatement) that “HB1080 is not a perfect bill”.
Perhaps recognizing the limits of both passive-aggressive charter school cronyism, and the implied threats from muscling up on vulnerable students and schools with an ill-conceived ASD plan, Jones Street also moved to combine its K-12 social engineering schemes with ongoing efforts to establish autocratic control over the University. This legislation was so hastily and thoughtlessly composed that UNC officials were unaware of its existence until right before it was passed.
Under the “UNC Laboratory Schools” provisions of H1030, University faculty, staff, and administrators will be involuntary conscripts in extending the legislature’s incursions into public school – and public higher education -- management and governance. Anyone who knows anything about university governance, public school governance, university laboratory school design, and the politics of education in North Carolina, will quickly recognize that this plan is ripe for political abuse, and that it will likely produce effects that will be used to justify even more imperious legislative behavior.
The lab schools statute is chock full of coercive command. It requires the University to establish a number of lab schools, each one assigned to a different campus (probably for pernicious reasons, as we shall see), it requires the NC Board of Education to approve their establishment, and it requires local school districts to turn over authority and funding to newly empowered lab school governance bodies. And that’s where things go way off the deep end.
Given the legislature’s contempt for experience and expertise, and their distrust of anyone they cannot command at will, it should perhaps come as no surprise that it is the inexperienced and (presumably) manipulable politicos on University campus Boards of Trustees who have been put in charge of every aspect of lab school management. With absolutely no evidence that they know what they are doing in K12 education matters – let alone whether they understand when their statutory and UNC code duties are being systematically compromised -- the campus Trustees have been given the responsibility of siting the lab schools, appointing advisory boards, hiring and firing administrators, faculty, and all other school employees, defining the curriculum of study, and determining measures and methods of student assessment, academic performance, and student conduct policy.
This was well-calculated scheming by legislators. Campus Boards of Trustees are full of appointees notorious for abdicating their independence in order to engage in backscratching with their political patrons, and they all-too-often act on political motives rather than their obligations to public and institutional interests.
Indeed, in one recent instance, one member described the “sentiment of the board” of the East Carolina University Trustees, who will soon be governing an ECU Lab School, in a way that was fully at odds with ECU Chancellor and Faculty Senate actions supporting freedom of expression at campus-sponsored activities.
This does not bode well for the management of ECU or other lab schools, especially when the perspectives of education professionals and local school officials might come into conflict with legislators’ efforts to engage in surrogate control of the curriculum, hiring, standards of success, and other dimensions of lab school organization. And given the partisan proclivities of Trustees, it is likely that the aims of the legislature, rather than the public interest, will be served when public servants and the politicians disagree.
There are also all sorts of hidden dangers in the support structures of the Lab Schools. The legislature gave a piddling $1 million for UNC to get the lab schools up and running, which means that UNC General Administration will be robbing funds from other administrative activities in order to comply with these new statutory requirements. At the campus level, no funding will be available to hire additional staff or faculty to cover the newly imposed demands of Lab School management, which means that the legislature has used the budget as an instrument to suppress other teaching, research, and service duties of the faculty. At the local school district level, no extra funding is available to enable the Universities to mount up effective lab school operations for students. And that means that the Universities and local school boards, administrators, teachers, parents, and students, will be thrown into a situation where they will share a death-spiral of failure because of inadequate funding, or they will be set in competition for scarce resources, thus killing off the spirit of collaboration required to make these kinds of experiments successful. As UNC Greensboro Chancellor Frank Gilliam warned, we shouldn’t be surprised if “School districts see this as a hostile takeover,” particularly as “They’re asked to give up a lot, and there’s nothing in it for them.”
In short, the Lab Schools program is little more than an underfunded mandate that is organized to fail – and there is also good evidence to suggest that may be the intended goal. It is probably more than coincidence that the lab school arrangement was surreptitiously crafted, then jammed down the University’s gullet. Senate leader Phil Berger has long been on the public record stating that he wants to shut down a number of UNC Schools of Education, and he has on many occasions charged UNC with failing to submit to his will and whims. Requiring the lab schools – and their compromised outcomes -- to be distributed to different campuses will then offer many opportunities for justifying further cuts to the University.
Finally, what may be most astounding about all this is that unlike K12 officials, both Margaret Spellings and members of the UNC Board of Governors (BoG) have embraced, sometimes with questionable enthusiasm, the legislature’s lab school scheme. Despite vigorous counsel by UNC faculty governance representatives that Spellings and the Board were duty-bound to stand against this brazen abrogation of University governance authority, University management prerogatives, and faculty responsibilities for curricular planning and development, it appears that Spellings and the BoG are more concerned with appeasing the Jones Street bullies than defending the autonomy of the University. This may undermine the forbearance faculty leaders encouraged toward Spellings as she settled in to her leadership role, and the lab school snafu could be a critical turning point in what may prove to be a short tenure in office. Most importantly, it may well demonstrate whether Margaret Spellings is prepared to support, or allow the legislature to compromise, the long tradition of collaboration between the University and K12 public education in North Carolina, and the University’s mission of service to the people of this state.
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Over the next year, supporters of excellence, equity and accountability in North Carolina public education will be hard-pressed to contain the expansion, and mitigate the pernicious effects, of the General Assembly’s charter school, achievement school, and lab school stratagems. That work will be critical to protecting the educational opportunities of thousands of deserving students from challenged circumstances, and the unrealized promise of a high quality of life for all North Carolinians.
The majority of legislators in the General Assembly may believe that they entitled to commandeer the education of our children and the work of our Universities, and the Governor, President of the University, and poltroons of patronage on many of our education governing bodies may believe that it is politic to appease haughty and overbearing lawmakers. They are wrong. Nothing good ever comes from untutored pretension of overlords and the submissive deference of subordinates. As public school boards, superintendents, principals, teachers, parents, students, University faculty and staff – and, yes, responsible politicians – struggle to right these wrongs, they deserve our support.
