News

K-12 schools may get A-F grades

State Senate leader Phil Berger wants broad K-12 reform.

By Bill Moss, Published: April 27, 2012

The leader of the North Carolina Senate brought his campaign for state education reform to Hendersonville on Thursday, saying the K-12 system is broken and needs fixing. How?

By ending teacher tenure, rewarding good teachers and sacking bad ones, ending social promotion of non-readers from third grade to four grade, and replacing the confusing language of school ranks with the universally understood A, B, C, D and F.

By Berger's side was state Sen. Tom Apodaca, the Senate Rules chairman and one of three primary sponsors of the school reform legislation.

"We have a lot of great public schools in North Carolina but as a whole our public school system in North Carolina is broken," said Berger, a six-term legislator and attorney from Eden, north of Greensboro.

Making sure children can read before they enter the fourth grade is a priority of the reform, he said.

"Presently we only graduate about three out of four high school students. So one out of four students that starts the ninth grade will not graduate," he said. "That's a damning thing for us and our future and it's a terrible thing for those kids but there's an even worse situation. Presently our community colleges spend almost $100 million a year on remedial education, and remedial education is education in our community colleges for high school graduates who are not ready to do college work."

"About two-thirds of our fourth graders in North Carolina are not reading at grade level. Statistics tell us there is a strong correlation between those kids who cannot read in the fourth grade and those kids who drop out of school. In many respects the root of the problem starts there."

Historically, the Legislature and education advocates have relied on spending more money, he said.

"If you look back over the past decade, and you look at the state level of appropriations for public schools, appropriations are significantly higher than they were 10 years ago, and yet outcomes are at best flat," he said. "So simply pouring more money into education is not the answer... I think the public is very supportive of the public schools, but the public is concerned about whether it makes sense to put more money into public education if we're not prepared to fix the problem."

Highlights of the reform:

• Reading. "For a thousand years we've known in education you learn to read, then you read to learn, and third grade and fourth grade is really the key to that." The bill "ends social promotion, the idea that just because you've been in the third grade and you've had a birthday that you're going to end up in the fourth grade. What we need to do is make sure that the vast majority of our kids are able to read at grade level by the time they leave the third grade and go into the fourth grade. So what that means is one of the things we'll need to do is retain students." Tests show that 39.4 percent of third graders are reading below level. Berger said the rate of holding back would not be that high because promotion would be based on test scores and other assessments. The bill provides for "intensive reading tutoring and assistance" starting in first grade.

• Ending tenure and installing merit pay. "We want to reward the best teachers with bonuses and merit pay increases," he said. The bill allocates money and authorizes local districts "to set up a merit based program for the teachers so that the goal to have the best teachers in our schools can be realized. We know from the private sector you reward excellence, you make decisions about pay based on outcomes," he said. "We have in North Carolina thousands of great teachers now. We need to reward those great teachers but we also have in some instances teachers that maybe ought not be teaching. So what we want to do is boost accountability in the classroom by employing teachers on annual contracts and providing local systems with the tools they need not only to reward good teachers but to help bad teachers, help teachers improve and in some instances discharge teachers who are not going to be able to aid our students." The approach is endorsed by everyone from President Obama to Republican and Democratic governors to big city mayors, he said.

• A through F replaces fancy language that obfuscates failure. "Currently we grade our schools but the grading scale seems almost designed to confuse people," Berger said. "Currently we have schools of excellence, honor schools of excellence, schools of distinction, schools of progress, schools of priority. You tell me which of those is a good school and which is a bad school. We propose changing those designations, from designations that confuse to designations that will be crystal clear." Using the well-known A through F as grades means the public "will be able to recognize those good schools but also those schools that need improvement. It will act as an impetus to the struggling schools, those schools that are not graded very high, to improve."

• New teachers. The bill establishes an NC Teacher Corps program modeled on the successful Teach for America program that will recruit top college graduates and mid-career switchers to the classroom.

• More school days. The reform would add five instructional days to the calendar without lengthening the school year. "We know that more time in the classroom and more time in front of good teachers results in better achievement scores, so we added five additional instructional days." The act would fund the extra costs such as school bus transportation.

• Earlier start. The bill allows school boards to start the school year as early as the next to the last Monday in August (Aug. 20 this year). Before, state law barred starting before Aug. 25.

The public announcement of the overhaul when the 2012 session has already begun, and just two months before the start of the 2012-13 budget year, signals that Republican leaders are likely to muscle the legislation through despite the shortage of time for hearings and in-depth study. The bill has 28 or 29 co-sponsors in the 50-member body.

A long study is unneeded, Berger said, because school districts that have adopted the reforms have proven their success.

"We know that these reforms work," he said. "They are working in other states."

The changes won't take effect until the 2013-14 school year, he said.

Berger said he traveled to Hendersonville to announce the plan because his high-ranking colleague is from here.

"Sen. Apodaca is one of the primary sponsors, and I think the fact that he's a primary sponsor deserves us coming into his district, talking about the bill and answering questions about it.," he said. The other primary sponsor is Sen. Jerry Tillman, a retired school administrator from Randolph County and the Education Committee chairman.

Apodaca acknowledged that even with their strong majority Senate leaders still must reckon with the reaction of state House leaders and likely Republican gubernatorial nominee Pat McCrory, not to mention teachers across the state who could be whipped up to rally against the reforms.

"What we're trying to do is change the debate because all you hear is money money money," he said. "That won't fix the problem."