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Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools Failing Students


monsoon

More Charter Schools?  

29 members have voted

  1. 1. More Charter Schools?

    • No - They take needed money away from CMS
      13
    • Yes - CMS needs competition
      16
  2. 2. Will Peter Gorman make a difference?

    • No - School Board is the root of the problem
      11
    • Yes - He has the experience to fix CMS
      18
  3. 3. Will CMS Failures drive people out of the County?

    • No
      10
    • Yes
      19


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CMS reflects the sociopolitical polarization of the community it serves. Affluent surbubanites resent any funding of under capacity poorer urban schools when their children are crammed into trailer park classrooms. Conversely, urban parents see suburban parents as elitist. Like so much else in Mecklenburg there is a political undercurrent, with the Republicans and Democrats representing suburban and urban areas respectively on the BOE and MCC, equaling partisan gridlock while poor and rich kids suffer.
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The root of the problem IMO is not poor economics but poor parenting. If the kids in the inner city districts were not so messed up and undisciplined, the better teachers wouldn't mind working there, and the more affluent parents wouldn't buy their children an "escape" by moving away or choosing private schools.

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I would agree with that characterization. It may not be of the community, but it certainly is of the members of the school board and, to a degree, the BOCC. The politics of student assignment and construction funds is very much an urban versus suburban issue. Thankfully, it isn't really a black versus white one anymore, although there are some slight streaks of that occassionally.

Suburban (generally Republican) representatives almost have it as a standard policy to avoid spending on central city schools (there aren't many inner city schools in this area). There is almost a similar commitment from central city (generally Democratic) representatives to avoid spending on suburban schools, although it is less firm and thus more gets spend on suburban schools.

As to stadtguy's comments, I completely agree with you (although, did your wife not plan to work more than 9 months? It isn't as though certification really makes a difference, does it?). There are some benefits to taking an education program, in that you learn education theory, classroom management techniques, and do student teaching. However, I agree that undergraduate degrees in education (and some grad degress in education) are crap.

The basic 'duh' of education is that the teacher should know stuff in order to teach it. Knowing stuff is more important than knowing how to communicate stuff, but both are important. The teaching conditions, however, are generally so poor that well educated people don't stay very long. That is the brain drain cause, not the entry requirements. (Although, would you believe there are plenty of people allowed to teach for years, despite not passing the Praxis?).

It is, however, the most burning irony of CMS (or the education industry, as you aptly put it) is that the education of their employees isn't not really respected much. A highly educated person who has advanced degrees and honors from top schools and aced the praxis are given just as little professional respect in teaching as people who passed at C level from schools that are lesser reputations, and have no training in the subject matter, and barely show even high school proficiency. (Think, english teachers with no grammar, spelling, or literature skills, who have never heard of the words 'genre' or 'iambic pentameter'). At some point, the ones that are highly skilled start to consider themselves to deserve more.

It is cultural. Reducing junk job positions is a good step. Raising hiring standards would help. Reducing school size would help a lot, as it would help reduce the facelessness of the system.

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I would say that 95% of the current school system's problems are race related as a number of board members are still fighting the court decision to end busing for racial balance in Mecklenburg county in the early 2000s. Let's keep in mind that CMS spent millions of dollars of taxpayer money to fight this tooth and nail all the way to the US Supreme Ct. and still ended up losing. Since then, subsequent policy of the school board has been to punish specific surburban areas which has led to the current mess. And we have had "school choice" which was nothing but a hidden way to maintain racial quota's which continues to fail the students because it takes the focus off the real problems at hand.

Furthermore as we have discussed in earlier threads, it is not as simple as Democrats live in the urban part of Charlotte which is full of enlightened people who want to do right by everyone, and the suburbs are all populated by angry bitter Republicans who are only interested in themselves and nobody else. That is an insult to all parents in this county who do want to see the school system succeed. If you ask me that is a true elitist position and the reason that so many people are leaving the school system, Black and White.

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Are the suburban schools being punished? If you are referring to the lack of construction spending, that would be the doing of the people that voted down the bonds, primarily people in the suburbs.

As for the D vs R thing, I was referring to the boards and not to the community at large, which is actually what I wrote.

Wanting the school system to succeed does not include leaving the school system. Leaving is giving up. It is all demographics and numbers. Poor kids tend to have bad numbers and improve in numbers by exposure to kids with good numbers, so abandonment by the middle class creates bad numbers, which is the very definition of failure.

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