THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 27, 1995 TAG: 9508270053
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: BY PERRY PARKS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 185 lines
School officials across the state began a new year last week with more excitement and anxiety than usual.
They're excited by anew state education structure that moves decision-making to the school level, where most educators believe it belongs.
Many districts, including Elizabeth City-Pasquotank, welcome the opportunity to help shape the way schools' performances are evaluated.
But superintendents, principals and teachers also are afraid that dramatic cuts to the Department of Public Instruction will mean a reduction in crucial services to small districts.
Northeastern officials are worried they might lose a regional field office that provides training, legal help and expert advice to local schools.
And educators are nervous about a still-vague accountability system that could hinge principals' and teachers' jobs on students' performance on a single test.
The new order is laid out in a document called ``The New ABC's of Public Education,'' a report presented to the General Assembly in May by the State Board of Education.
The plan eliminates one-fifth of the Department of Public Instruction's 788 staff positions this year and will cut the complement by nearly 40 percent by July 1, 1996.
Savings of nearly $9 million this year went to reducing first-grade class size and for extra money for textbooks, General Assembly officials said.
The goal of the plan is to reduce bureaucracy and move the power and the responsibility for children's educations to individual schools.
That direction is consistent with the ``site-based management'' concept that is sweeping through government and the private sector. Officials from Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. right down to local principals say they favor putting the decisions where the kids are.
``That's what you have to do,'' Hunt said after touring P.W. Moore Elementary School in Elizabeth City last week. ``It's got to mean something. You can only get real site-based management if you really put power back in the local school.''
School officials say they've already noticed the extra freedom to spend more money the way they think best for their students. And they've already begun to worry about losing local expertise when funding regional centers becomes a choice for local districts.
But the plan has yet to produce an upheaval at the school level.
``To be perfectly honest, we're not doing a lot differently,'' Buck Green, principal at Central Elementary School in Currituck County, said last week. ``Currituck has always put an emphasis on school-based leadership. . . . We've really not had to alter our way of operation very much.''
The process of rewriting the book on North Carolina education began early this year, when the General Assembly told the State Board of Education to figure out how to cut the Department of Public Instruction roughly in half.
After a flurry of meetings, hearings and public input, the state board returned with its ``ABC's'' document. Around the same time, the General Assembly enacted a law that strips the elected state superintendent of most of his powers, putting school policy-making authority solely in the hands of the state board.
Four key goals are highlighted in the plan:
The state must set high and clear student performance standards for individual schools and local school systems.
Local school systems should have high levels of freedom in operating their schools.
Schools must ensure that students master basic skills of reading, math and writing.
The state needs a strong ``accountability'' model that measures how well schools are doing their jobs.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Bob Etheridge, who lost much of his influence in May, suggested last week that the reorganization cuts are too deep.
``We've always focused on reading, writing and math,'' Etheridge said, adding that the ABC's plan for now is ``just a slogan'' that must be fleshed out by the board.
Dozens of people, Etheridge said, have already fled the beleaguered department.
``Always, some of your best people leave first,'' Etheridge said. ``We're losing some mighty good people who have really made a difference for the children and the state.''
Many local officials believe that a leaner staff in Raleigh may take some of the red tape out of their jobs. But in a largely rural and poor region so far removed from the resources of the Triangle area, officials are afraid that losing expertise from their regional office could be devastating.
Etheridge was in Williamston last December dedicating a new building for the Northeast Technical Assistance Center, which provides training and consultants for 20 area districts - many of which would otherwise not be able to afford the help.
The state board's plan will eliminate the northeast center and four others next year, shifting the money to local school districts and encouraging them to form their own regional alliances. But many educators doubt that individual districts will have the incentive - or the foresight - to return funds for the good of their region.
``The centers, in my opinion, are there for smaller districts,'' said Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Schools Superintendent Joseph Peel, who is deeply involved in the northeast center's organization.
Large counties with many resources would have little need to pool the newfound money with other districts, Peel said. And smaller counties with tremendous needs might use the funds as short-term solutions to immediate problems.
Either way, regions could end up with less training and less help.
``We're going to have to sell to as many districts as we can why this a better way to go than going on your own,'' Peel said.
Some officials said the northeast might have a good chance of keeping its regional center, because so many member districts are in the same boat.
``We're all small, and we all get limited funds,'' said Mary Nixon, principal of White Oak Elementary School in Chowan County. ``And we're such a long way away from any assistance that our teachers can get.''
With or without the help, schools will be held more accountable for the success of their students under the state board plan.
``The board believes that the accountability `buck' should stop where the student learns or fails to learn: at the schoolhouse,'' the board's May report says.
The document proposes a new concept of measuring each school's performance against itself by tracking groups of students as they move from grade to grade.
And while many educators think comparing a single group's progress within schools is more fair than comparing districts against a state average, they say finding the appropriate measure is difficult.
``You're really going to be in a high-stakes testing situation,'' Peel said in July. ``You need to make sure that the test is the one that's going to tell you what you really want to know.''
Plans for now are to use end-of-grade scores to decide if a school deserves financial reward for good performance or a state takeover for failure. The state board is seeking power from the General Assembly to suspend tenure for teachers and principals at schools it takes control of.
That means school officials' jobs can depend on the ability of end-of-grade tests to determine whether students are learning.
And while testing experts say the exam is a pretty good multiple choice test that requires memorization and some thinking skills, they add that it lags behind statewide efforts to test children on what they can do as well as on what they know.
The Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Schools are a pilot site in a state project to develop standards and tests that ensure students can apply what they learn. The newer concept of performance-based assessment, they say, depends on a lot more than multiple choice questions can measure.
Elizabeth City-Pasquotank is also one of 10 systems helping the state board figure out how it will evaluate schools' teaching performance.
``We're almost like the Wright brothers,'' Peel said. ``Everyone's trying to figure out how to get off the ground with this whole issue.''
A June letter from Peel's boss, Elizabeth City-Pasquotank School Board Chairman Marion Harris, to State Board of Education Chairman Jay Robinson, cautions the board to be careful in choosing how it grades school performance.
``The state testing program needs to become a shared responsibility of local, regional and state authorities, rather than what it is now - a one-sided, shallow and often punitive measure of whether people have done their jobs,'' the letter says.
``If these teachers are to be evaluated (and paid!) based on their students' recall of disconnected subject-area facts on a state test at the end of the year, we fear that our current emphasis on quality student work will be replaced by a 'teach-the-test mentality.'''
These concerns are why Pasquotank officials are happy to be on the forefront of deciding how both student and school performance are measured.
``This is kind of an exciting place to be,'' said Rita Collie, the district's director of testing and accountability. ``A little scary, but exciting at the same time.
``We don't know exactly what we will have to be doing with this trial run.''
Some officials fear that the proposed accountability system will hurt classroom creativity and flexibility - other touchstones of state education reform.
``We are asking the folks in the schools to take a chance, and sometimes as you take risks, try new things, you may fail,'' Rose Marie Lowry-Townsend, president of the North Carolina Association of Educators, said last week.
``You are actually stifling the process of folks having the courage to try new things with these kids.''
With so much new, and so much still up in the air, officials say only time will tell what the results of the reorganization will be. The only definite is that things have changed.
``We firmly believe that, in the years to come, 1995 will mark the year when North Carolina took a new road leading to high student performance and cost-effective administration of its public schools,'' the State Board of Education's report concludes. ILLUSTRATION: Photos
Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Schools Superintendent Joseph Peel, left,
says regions have to be convinced. Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. says it
makes the best sense to put the power in the hands of the local
schools.
by CNB