Friday Report – August 18, 2017

The Friday Report

August 18, 2017

On Monday of this week, Governor Cooper vetoed HB 770 “Various Clarifying Changes” which includes a “clarifying change” to the A-F School Performance Grades law, among other things. The Governor’s rationale for the veto was on other non-public education grounds, as the bill contains a cornucopia of unrelated items. The NC Department of Public Instruction had requested at least part of the change in the bill to ensure that the A-F state law, as enacted and revised by the legislature, would be able to comply with the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). In other words, DPI had requested some flexibility in the state’s accountability plan, much of which has been prescribed by the General Assembly in the 2017 Budget bill, so that North Carolina could comply with ESSA requirements. See Section 7.26, Appropriations Act of 2017.

The State’s ESSA plan is due to the federal government in September, so the timeline here for any “clarifying changes” is uncomfortably tight.  The General Assembly returns for Session today, August 18, so time will literally tell whether the legislature intends to quickly overturn this veto.  If not, it appears that some school accountability experts foresee a problem with the General Assembly’s enacted school accountability plan and federal requirements under ESSA.

As the General Assembly returns to Raleigh, the Public School Forum has compiled a small sampling of new 2017-18 Education Studies, Commissions, Task Forces & More enacted by the NC General Assembly. See below for list:

State News

What Issues Will Schools Face in 2017-18?

From looming class size cuts to teacher pay and the rise of alternative and charter schools, here are some education issues that could make headlines this school year.

Class Size

Last year, parents and school officials spoke out against a state law that requires schools to cut class sizes in kindergarten through 3rd grade. Their concerns got the cuts pushed back to 2018, but districts have to spend the next year figuring out where to put hundreds of new classrooms.

The rule, originally a part of the 2016 state budget, required schools to have a maximum 18 students in kindergarten, 16 students in first grade and 17 students in second and third grades. Before that, K-3 classes could have up to 24 students. After school leaders said they would be forced to cut arts and PE teachers to make room for more, smaller classes, North Carolina legislators passed a compromise that bumped the cuts back a year.

Legislators also said they would consider giving more money to arts and PE, but this year’s state budget does not do that. The budget became law June 28 after Gov. Roy Cooper’s veto was overridden; advocacy group Save Our Schools has since created an “N.C. Education Pledge,” asking legislators to commit to arts and PE funding.

Brunswick County Schools has already made the required K-3 cuts, adding a mobile classroom to Belville Elementary and converting computer labs at other schools to classrooms.

“We are fortunate that reductions to our fine arts and physical education programs were never part of the conversation in Brunswick County,” Superintendent Les Tubb wrote in an email. “Class sizes in grades 4-12 will be impacted this school year with even more significant impact in the 2018-19 school year.”

New Hanover County School leaders say they could have to do a planned redistricting a year early — in 2018 — if the K-3 cuts move forward. Pender County Schools Superintendent Terri Cobb said Pender schools have started looking for more classroom space.

“With several schools over capacity, meeting the requirements of recent K-3 class size legislation that goes into effect in 2017-18 and will be fully implemented in 2018-19 has caused us to convert spaces such as media centers and computer labs in these schools,” Cobb wrote in an email.

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from:

Bellamy, C. “What issues will schools face in 2017-18?” Star News. 8/13/17.

Gov. Cooper Establishes Teacher Advisory Committee

On Thursday of this week, Gov. Cooper issued Executive Order No. 16, establishing the Governor’s Teacher Advisory Committee. Composed of up to 25 teachers and support personnel appointed by Gov. Cooper, the Committee will advise the governor on a variety of educational issues.

Members of the Committee will advise the governor on policies and the state budget and will also serve as education ambassadors, representing the Governor at designated events, maintaining communication with local boards of education and stakeholders, and sharing opportunities for the Governor to support teachers.

“Teachers and school support staff will bring critical knowledge, skills, and experience to our ongoing conversations about improving North Carolina’s education system,” Gov. Cooper said. “The Teacher Advisory Committee will give insight into how we can show educators the respect they deserve and be instrumental in helping North Carolina become a Top Ten Most Educated State by 2025.”

The complete list of appointed individuals can be found at https://governor.nc.gov/news/gov-cooper-establishes-teacher-advisory-committee.

Excerpt from:

Office of the Governor. “Gov. Cooper Establishes Teacher Advisory Committee.” 8/17/17.

Enrollment at NC Teaching Programs Inches Back Up

Enrollment in teaching programs at the University of North Carolina system saw a 16 percent uptick last year. Among the schools with increasing numbers is North Carolina State University. Photo Credit: NC State University.

A five year decline in North Carolina students enrolling in teaching programs appears to be turning around. The University of North Carolina system saw a 16 percent uptick in education degree-seekers last year. One college of education is seeing gains in enrollment as students return this fall.

Mary Ann Danowitz is Dean of the College of Education at North Carolina State University. Her school’s enrollment grew for both undergraduate and master’s programs this year.

“After a trend in which we’ve been part of around the country of declining enrollments in teacher education, our enrollments are really up this year,” Danowitz said, “which across the board, whether you’re looking at undergraduates or teachers who are furthering their education, it looks very good for the profession.”

North Carolina State is seeing its highest enrollment of undergraduate education majors in five years, after a steady decline in students. That follows a larger trend among UNC system schools, where undergraduate enrollment in education programs declined 30 percent between 2010 and 2015.

Danowitz and other educators credit the past enrollment drop in part to the state legislature ending its Teaching Fellows loan forgiveness program in 2011. She also says policy from Raleigh may be encouraging the small rise in enrollment this year.

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from:

Schlemmer, L. “Enrollment At NC Teaching Programs Inches Back Up.” WUNC. 8/17/17.

If Your NC High Schooler Doesn’t Have Internet at Home, Sprint Might Have a Free Solution

It’s hard to do homework when you don’t have a computer at home. It’s even harder if you don’t have internet access.

Most high schoolers in North Carolina will go back to school in the next few weeks – and 11,000 of them will get smartphones, tablets or hotspot devices to use this school year from Sprint. Sprint’s 1Million Project is also giving 3GB of high-speed LTE data per month for up to four years for these devices, the company said in a news release.

Students will be able to take home the smartphones and tablets to work on school assignments for all four years of high school. The smartphones can be used as a hotspot to provide wireless internet to a laptop or other device the students may have at home.

This academic year, the 1Million Project is giving devices to 180,000 students in more than 30 states. Up to a million high schoolers will have access to wireless internet at home during the five-year program, which kicked off this week.

Business Wire has reported that eight North Carolina schools districts are participating:

• Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools, 4,000 devices
• Guilford County Public Schools, 2,500 devices
• Winston-Salem Forsyth County Public Schools, 1,400 devices
• Cumberland County Public Schools, 1,180 devices
• Buncombe County Schools, 700 devices
• Nash-Rocky Mount Public Schools, 638 devices
• Rockingham County Public Schools, 323 devices
• Pitt County Schools, 306 devices

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from:

Molina, C. “If your NC high schooler doesn’t have internet at home, Sprint might have a free solution.” The News & Observer. 8/15/17.

North Carolina’s Digital Success Story

State Superintendent Mark Johnson Announces Coding and Mobile Development Grant Application Period

North Carolina Superintendent Mark Johnson announced Wednesday that the Department of Public Instruction is now accepting grant applications for the new $400,000 Coding and Mobile App Development competitive grant program. The program will fund up to $40,000 per school to develop industry partnerships to design and implement computer science, coding, and mobile app development programs for middle school and high school students.

“This is a great opportunity for schools to partner with technology companies and design innovative programs that will excite students and point them toward careers in tech, a sector that includes careers that require everything from a high school diploma to a master’s degree,” Johnson said. “I thank the General Assembly for making this program a priority and I am looking forward to reviewing the applications this fall and seeing the programs in action in the spring.”

The deadline for schools to submit applications is October 15. School districts and charter schools can use grant funds to purchase equipment, digital materials, and for other purposes, including teacher professional development. Applications and instructions are available here.

By law, grant recipients will represent a diverse pool of North Carolina’s public schools. The budget the General Assembly passed in June gives the superintendent of public instruction the responsibility to choose which entities will receive the grants and instructs the superintendent to ensure diversity in “geographic location, the positive impact on the community of industry partnerships, and the size of the student population served by the recipient….”

For this grant cycle, recipients will be identified this fall and schools will implement their programs during spring semester 2018. In succeeding years, recipients will be chosen in the summer and programs will be implemented in the fall.

Why 50 Young Teens at UNCC Embody the Future of Public Education in Charlotte

Neal Kapur, one of the first ninth-graders at Charlotte Teacher Early College high school on the UNC Charlotte campus, explains his contribution to a machine demonstrating evaporation and precipitation.

Photo Credit: Ann Doss Helms, The Charlotte Observer. 

Triangle Schools Talk Race, Equality as Tensions Rise After Charlottesville

With school starting across the Triangle, educators are trying to figure out how to talk with their students about what happened in Charlottesville and the larger questions of race, equality and respect.

Some districts are planning special workshops or other types of support for teachers to help them speak to children who have seen the violence, torches and racial slurs but don’t fully understand what they mean.

“Whether they can actually understand the impact of racism, hatred and violence is still yet to be determined for our younger students but, for all of our students, those images are clear to them,” said Wake County Board of Education chairwoman Monika Johnson Hostler.

At a Tuesday meeting, Johnson-Hostler said schools have to help students feel welcome and safe in order to have those tough conversations. “Whether they say it out loud or not, these things are sitting with them in their seats and it’s just a reminder about why we talk about the need for more adults, specialized adults like counselors in our buildings because our kids are coming to school with those images in their heads and those triggers. We don’t know what those triggers are, but they play out in our classroom,” she said.

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from:

Leslie, L. “Triangle schools talk race, equality as tensions rise after Charlottesville.” WRAL. 8/17/17.

National News

School Segregation Didn’t Go Away. It Just Evolved.

Their idea was simple: to create their own school district. Their stated reason was simple: Schools do better when they’re part of smaller, city-based districts where they can make hyperlocal decisions.

So five years ago, organizers in Gardendale, Alabama, decided it was time to secede from the Jefferson County School District — because of the changing “dynamics.”

But this simple idea has historically caused a contentious debate about race, class, and education in America. And when the courts ruled on this issue, it resulted in the biggest setback to school integration since Brown v. Board of Education: a legal decision that allows parents to use borders to segregate their kids away from their less desirable peers.

The organizers never made overt racial arguments, but they were reacting to a system set up by a 1971 desegregation order to create more racial balance. They said their schools were already overcrowded and underfunded, so why should they bus in other kids who weren’t part of their community?

On a Facebook page to discuss the school district secession, one of the organizers wrote that it would give them “better control over the geographic composition of the student body.” They were hinting at their dismay that students from a mostly black neighborhood were being bused to their mostly white schools. “Those students do not contribute financially,” one organizer wrote. “They consume the resources of our schools, our teachers and our resident students, then go home.”

The organizer also wrote: “A look around at our community sporting events, our churches are great snapshots of our community. A look into our schools, and you’ll see something totally different.”

Here’s what they hinted at — what everyone knew but was never articulated: They were carving out a more affluent, more white area and starting their own school district with it.

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from:

Chang, A. “School segregation didn’t go away. It just evolved.” Vox. 7/27/17.

The Nation’s Teaching Force is Still Mostly White and Female

Teachers tend to be white, female, and have nearly a decade and a half of experience in the classroom, according to new data released Monday by the federal government.

But there are signs that the nation’s teaching force is gradually growing more diverse. It is also more heterogeneous: The nation’s charter school teachers look significantly different from teachers in traditional public schools.

The U.S. Department of Education has been collecting data on schools, teachers, and administrators through its Schools and Staffing Survey every four years since 1987. This year’s release marks the first since the survey, which was administered to a nationally representative sample of 40,000 teachers, was redesigned. Now called the National Teacher and Principal Survey, the new survey, which includes the same questions as well as some new sections on teachers’ preparation and their influence over school policies, will operate on a two-year cycle.

Among the insights from the newly added sections: Nearly all teachers say they have at least some control over what content and skills they teach, the textbooks they use, the amount of homework they give, and how they evaluate, grade, and discipline students. That’s despite a decade of often tumultuous shifts in both what teachers are expected to teach, and how their classroom acumen is assessed.

The findings paint a national picture of the teaching force—as well as offer insights into how much control teachers feel they have in their classrooms and schools.

Public Support for Charter Schools Plummets, Poll Finds

President Donald Trump’s vocal support for charter schools and private-school vouchers has had some school choice supporters wringing their hands over whether it will have a negative impact on the policies they champion. This is particularly true for charter school backers who, over time, have built up bipartisan support.

Now a new public opinion poll from Education Next, a journal published by Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, is providing insights into whether the president—as well as the broader political dynamics in play—have swayed the public’s views on school choice.

Support for charter schools has fallen 12 percent from last year, the largest change in opinion that EdNext saw on any single policy from last year. The steepest drop-off came from white participants. At the same time, the survey found that opposition toward school vouchers and other similar policies that direct public aid toward private schools has softened.

But the researchers who conducted the poll don’t think the big dip in support for charters is linked to Trump’s enthusiasm for them.

“If the decline in support were related to Trump’s support of the concept, I would have expected it to occur primarily among Democrats, and that’s not what we see,” said Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and one of the authors of the report that accompanies the poll. “I would also expect there to be similar changes in opinion about other policies that the president has embraced especially other school choice policies, which is not what we see.”

To continue reading the complete article, click here.

Excerpt from:

Prothero, A. “Public Support for Charter Schools Plummets, Poll Finds.” Education Week. 8/16/17.

Forum Opportunities

Beginning Teacher Leadership Network Accepting Applications

The Public School Forum’s Beginning Teacher Leadership Network (BTLN) is currently recruiting teachers in Cabarrus, Carteret, Mecklenburg, Onslow, Union, and Wake counties for the 2017-18 cohort. Applications are open through September 8, 2017.

North Carolina traditional and charter public school teachers in their first three years of experience are eligible to participate. Participants may remain in the network for three years, regardless of when they enter the program. The core program will consist of monthly sessions, one during each traditional teaching month, during after-school hours. Forums will consist of education policy briefings, teacher collaboration sessions, and interactive professional development.

By bringing together educational practice and policy, BTLN hopes to produce and retain teachers that are “empowered to lead and informed to change” in a new era of teaching. BTLN provides unparalleled access to information and key decision makers in education, while simultaneously giving beginning teachers high-level professional development.

To apply for the 2017-18 Beginning Teacher Leadership Network, click here.

Opportunities

RACE: Are We So Different?

The North Carolina Museum of Natural Science’s RACE: Are We So Different? exhibit continues at the museum through October 22, 2017.

This exhibition looks at race through the lens of science, history, and personal experiences to promote a better understanding of human variation. Interactive exhibit components, historical artifacts, iconic objects, compelling photographs, multimedia presentations, and attractive graphic displays offer visitors to RACE an eye-opening look at its important subject matter. RACE tells the stories of race from the biological, cultural, and historical points of view offering an unprecedented look at race and racism in the United States.

Admission is free but tickets are required. For tickets, as well as additional details on the exhibit, visit https://naturalsciences.org/exhibits/featured-exhibitions/race.

In addition to the exhibit, a series of Speaker Events which includes Diversity in STEM topics were jointly planned in collaboration with the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science and sponsored by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. All of the exhibit events were free of charge and the Speaker and Conversation series were streamed live and recorded for continued access and playback. You may access the series of recordings at the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7dONoqMaCHZ1hXtBTm1wLxEGwNA2W4ju.

Women in Educational Leadership Symposium

Registration is open for the second annual Women in Educational Leadership Symposium (WIELS). The purpose of WIELS is to bring women together to share, learn, and grow in leadership. Women who are interested in learning from others and those who are willing to share skills and expertise are urged to attend. This conference aims to provide personalized learning and mentoring opportunities for those who aspire to become, or currently serve as educational leaders.

The symposium will be held September 22 through September 24, 2017 at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. This year’s conference theme is Advancing the Leader Within: Building Capacity.

Registration for the conference is online at https://wiels.appstate.edu/about-us/registration. Additional information can be found at https://wiels.appstate.edu/.

The Friday Report is published weekly by the Public School Forum of NC and is distributed to Forum members, policymakers, donors, media, and Forum subscribers. Archived editions can be found at www.ncforum.org.

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