Tonight Elyse Dashew will hand over the gavel after four years as chair of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board. It’s a stretch that included the ouster of two superintendents, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the academic and political upheaval it left in its wake.
She says it’s been exhausting and rewarding. When Dashew first got involved with CMS advocacy, she was a parent with two elementary school children in magnet schools. Now she’s leaving the board as the parent of two CMS graduates.
She recalls that she was the only new member elected in 2015.
“So for the longest time I felt like the newbie, and all of a sudden I blinked my eyes and I was the one saying, ‘Back in the day …’ ” she said last week.
As chair during turbulent times, Dashew has sometimes been the focus of public distrust and anger. She says she has worked to remain empathetic even when people who are scared or angry “kind of see you as a caricature of who you are.”
“You do have to tune out the noise or you’ll never get anything done,” she said. “So how do you listen and also tune out the noise? How do you protect your boundaries and also remain empathetic?”
She sees people losing faith in all sorts of institutions, but says the discontent can be especially intense when it comes to schools because “that is where people feel government the most closely in their lives and they feel how government impacts the things they care about the most, which is their children and their property values.”
‘You were right. We were wrong’
Drawing school boundaries is where property values most clearly come into play, and that’s always a source of controversy. But battles over boundaries paled in comparison with the rage that emerged over how schools reacted to COVID-19.
Dashew had been chair for only a few months when the state ordered public schools to close. As more months passed, she presided over decisions to keep students in remote or hybrid classes longer than many surrounding districts.
Dashew says the board did the best it could, given that knowledge of the deadly virus was evolving and constituents were split over how to proceed.
“So given what we knew I don’t have regrets. But of course had I known …” Dashew trails off and recalls that she spoke with officials from surrounding school districts not long after CMS finally brought all students back in person.
“And I said to them, ‘You all were right. We were wrong. You were right to open up sooner,’ ” she said.
Bridging differences
Being able to have that kind of conversation is one of the things Dashew is most proud of. She’s a Democrat, and so are most of her colleagues on the CMS board — unlike most board members in adjacent districts.
“We’re talking about very, very Republican boards who saw us as these radical wackadoodle Democrats,” she says, laughing. “And (they) found out that, you know, really we all want the same thing. And we get frustrated with the same things, too.”
Dashew says she has built bonds with former adversaries — including county officials who fiercely criticized CMS leadership and suburban town leaders who clashed with the district. She says school board members have learned to work through their own differences, too.
“We’ve had board members who were on opposite sides of some deeply held, deeply felt cultural political issues and with the help of what we’d all kind of agreed upon, we were able to talk it out, person to person, and kind of work through it,” she said.
Mad about what matters
Dashew doesn’t argue that people should be content with CMS. In fact, she says it’s perversely satisfying to hear so many people uniting in frustration with lingering achievement gaps and the academic challenges that have persisted even as in-person classes returned.
“I’m OK with people yelling at us if they’re yelling at us about something that really matters,” she said.
The board has spent the last couple of years focusing on its worst academic outcomes in hopes of finding solutions. The idea is to keep from being sidetracked by issues that are more important to adults than kids. So when Dashew, who didn’t run for reelection, heard most of the candidates in this year’s election demanding better results for the Black, Latino and low-income students whose pass rates remain stubbornly low, she was pleased.
“Student outcomes are the hardest to wrap your head around, the hardest to make a difference in — and yet the most important thing we need to be focused on,” she said. “I think that’s taken some culture shift, and we’re well on our way with that.”
Turning off the superintendent carousel?
Another criticism of the board during Dashew’s tenure has been its difficulty hiring and keeping a good superintendent. Four superintendents have left during her eight years on the board, including an interim who didn’t finish his short-term contract. One superintendent was fired, and one was pressured to resign.
Dashew says the board has been clarifying its own role in working with a superintendent. She says that boils down to: “Be really clear on what you expect out of the superintendent. So it’s high expectations and clear expectations. And then get out of the way.”
That’s easy to say, and tough for boards to do. But Dashew says the board’s work paid off when this year’s national search drew a strong field of candidates, culminating with the hiring of Superintendent Crystal Hill in May. And Dashew hopes it will pay off in the long-term leadership stability that the community told the board it needs.
Brace for more change
Tonight, Dashew will step aside as two new members, Monty Witherspoon and Liz Monterrey, join the least experienced CMS leadership team in recent memory. Last year’s election, which was delayed a year waiting for Census data to draw election districts, saw five new members elected. Monterrey, Witherspoon and some of last year’s victors are now at the early stage of parenting where Dashew was when she first got involved.
“I’m really glad that we have more and more young people on our board,” Dashew said. “And what goes along with that is they’re not retired and they’re juggling full-time jobs and raising kids and school board.”
Dashew says she has also learned that “curve balls come from every direction.” Nobody was prepared for the pandemic, so she can’t be sure what CMS will face in her absence. She does have one prediction, though: Artificial intelligence will bring massive upheaval faster than most people expect.
Some of that, she says, will be helpful. For instance, she predicts that AI will soon produce good translations of material for parents into the dozens of languages spoken by CMS families. But some of it is difficult to imagine.
“I feel like where we are right now with AI is kind of where society was in 1995 with the internet. The way the internet changed the world, AI is going to do that times a thousand, and a thousand times faster,” she said.
Dashew isn’t ready to say what’s next for her. But she has some advice for those taking on the task of running North Carolina’s second-largest school district in a time of constant change: Do your homework. Admit when you make a mistake: “You’re going to make assumptions and find out your assumptions were completely wrong.”
And above all, keep trying to connect with people, even when they’re angry with you.
