CREATIVE LOAFING - CHARLOTTE

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Citizen Servatius
Musical Chairs at CMS
... but the song remains the same
By Tara Servatius
Published January 11, 2006

They're not fooling Judy Kidd.

The old official line from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools was that they didn't have discipline problems, no matter how many kids said they didn't feel safe at school. The new official line was, OK, CMS does have discipline problems, and the school system might have - shall we say - "underreported" those problems to the state, but now the discipline program has been overhauled, so everything's great.

And then - voilá! - suspensions started going down, which of course means kids are now under control. Right? Problem solved.

Not so, say Kidd and other teachers, some of whom began calling me before the kids even got off the buses this year. Many teachers were told that the system planned to cut suspensions, which meant the teachers would have to deal with discipline problems themselves. More shocking still - CMS would be making a special effort not to suspend African American kids. (The system got egg on its face for suspending more African American kids last year than any other group in the system.)

That wasn't exactly how the new discipline program CMS laid out to the public was supposed to work. In that version, educators would use positive reinforcement and behavior intervention to keep kids in line, and the end result would be that suspensions for discipline-related matters would go down. But I kept my mouth shut and waited to see what would happen.

A semester later, teachers are still calling me, and I wish more of them would go on the record with what they have to say. They file reports with the police about being threatened and cussed out, but most teachers are afraid to go public.

Kidd, head of the Classroom Teacher's Association, says things are worse, not better, than last year.

"They want to make the statistics look good," said Kidd. "They don't care how they do it, and they're increasing the distraction in the classroom. The kids know they can't be suspended."

Some students apparently feel the same way. According to a CMS survey taken during the 2004-2005 school year at half of the 17 high schools, less then 50 percent of students surveyed said they felt safe at school. In only two high schools did more than 80 percent of students say they felt safe.

The suspension numbers may look great at the end of the year, but if what Kidd and others are saying is true, those numbers won't fool the system's parents or its teachers. And next year, as the number of students in the system grows, the percentage of white and affluent children - middle-class African-American parents have lost their patience as well - will go down again.

The reform plan that the Citizens' Task Force on CMS is trying to push across the county doesn't address this cycle. The task force is currently trying to sell the public on a regional system with regional superintendents operating from regional offices who will supposedly have more autonomy. I guess the task force hopes the public doesn't know the current system already has regional superintendents.

In the task-force plan, these new superintendents - who will probably be the old superintendents with new titles - will work from new offices they haven't worked from before. But essentially, the head superintendent will still retain all the old personnel and the decision-making powers that the current one has. Translation: CMS will add a new layer of bureaucracy and change a few titles. You can change the face at the top of the system every few years, but the same cabal of bureaucrats that ran the system 10 years ago still runs it today, and they are desperate to hold on to their power.

The reason the plan won't work is because the school board majority is fiercely loyal to the current bureaucracy, the same bureaucracy that has been openly hostile towards the suburbs for a decade with disastrous consequences. A campaign is already underway to keep system-veteran Frances Haithcock, who is acting as an interim superintendent, in place - and, by extension, the rest of the bloated bureaucracy beneath her.

If that happens, playing bureaucratic musical chairs won't change a thing.