This article originally appeared in WFAE reporter Ann Doss Helms' weekly education newsletter. To get the latest school news in your inbox first, sign up for our email newsletters here.
There’s some irony in the fact that I used North Carolina’s school performance grades to drive the narrative in last week’s three-part series on Renaissance West. (Read it here en español, thanks to the Charlotte Journalism Collaborative.)
I’ve made no secret of my concerns about those grades, which oversimplify school performance to the point of misinformation. The A-F grades, which purport to rate school quality, rely heavily on student test scores. Those scores say as much about the advantages or disadvantages students arrive with as they do about the difference educators make.
The grades can be used to drive oversimplified narratives: That certain schools (almost always those serving a lot of Black, brown and low-income students) are failures — or worse, that certain students, families and communities just can’t or won’t do what it takes to succeed. I hope my series conveyed a more nuanced story: That the challenges are real, that progress requires persistence and stability, and that milestones can be cause for celebration even when the journey is far from finished.
North Carolina will post a huge amount of school performance data on Wednesday, including the letter grades. Renaissance West STEAM Academy hopes to finally score higher than an F … and I have a hunch that’s going to happen. Educators and officials can’t reveal their scores until the state releases the data, but Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools plans to hold its news conference on test scores at Renaissance West. And officials from Superintendent Crystal Hill on down have been beaming when they say they’ll see me there.
Stability is vital … and elusive
Reporting this series I heard over and over that stability is essential to serious progress. High-poverty schools tend to see rapid turnover in teachers and principals — and when principals make real gains, as Dwight Thompson seems to be doing at Renaissance West, they tend to get promoted or moved to another high-needs school. Case in point: A few months ago I reported on impressive growth ratings at Allenbrook Elementary School under the leadership of Principal Kimberly Vaught. I saw Vaught at the CMS back-to-school news conference, and she’s now in central offices as executive director of leadership development.
You can’t blame principals for seeking a promotion or taking on a new challenge. Nor can you blame district officials for trying to find the best use for their standouts. I’ve often heard teachers and principals say they’d rather learn from peers who have been successful in CMS than from outside consultants.
And for the Renaissance West Community Initiative, leadership churn at the top of CMS has also posed a challenge. The plan for coordinating housing, education and other services calls for lots of public and private groups to work together, but turnover in the superintendent’s office — which is generally accompanied by changes in other top jobs — has meant CMS leadership is continually getting up to speed on the arrangement. Now that Hill has a four-year contract and is getting to know the Renaissance West team, maybe CMS, the school and the community can reset for the future.
Dive deeper on Renaissance West
If the series intrigued you, be sure to check out this piece from WFAE Senior Editor Ely Portillo examining the ties between housing, segregation and educational achievement. It’s a perennial chicken-and-egg dilemma: It’s hard to create equitable education when neighborhoods are economically segregated and a lack of affordable housing destabilizes families. But schools where most kids aren’t mastering academic skills tend to devalue a neighborhood and set up another generation of inequality.
And if you missed Thursday’s “Charlotte Talks,” listen here to Principal Thompson, founding Renaissance West Community Initiative CEO Laura Yates Clark and her successor, Mack McDonald, talk more about the project.
Nicknames, libraries and other parents’ rights changes
On the third day of school I got an email from a former colleague saying that he’d gotten a CMS notification that his son wanted to use a “new” name. In fact, he said, the son has always alternated between Alexander and Alex, but apparently the teacher decided to play it safe to be in compliance with North Carolina’s new parents’ rights law. Among other things, the law requires schools to notify parents of “any changes in the name or pronoun used” by their children.
For this family, it was mostly cause for eye-rolling. “Is CMS being too eager to follow the state's new ‘parents bill of rights’ legislation or does the law get that granular? This level of notification seems, frankly, intentionally dumb, but I haven't read the law,” my former colleague wrote. But he was also aware that for some trans or nonbinary youth, such notices could create anxiety or even harm.
The question about the CMS response is an interesting one. The district moved quickly to revise its policies. It put a two-week hold on school library check-outs so details of parental review and challenges could be worked out, and it launched the nickname notices in short order. I see two things shaping that response: There’s a new superintendent trying to be responsive to parents while protecting educators. And there’s an awareness that in a large, Democratic-majority county, plenty of activists and Republican lawmakers will be on the lookout for CMS missteps.
At this point I don’t know how other districts are responding to the law. Let me know what you hear, and I’ll make a round of check-ins soon.
