An Open Letter to the Board of Education, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools:
My name is Greg Garrison, and I’m the father of four students at Smith Academy of International Languages: two in French (fourth grade and second grade) and two in Chinese (second grade and Kindergarten). On top of this, my wife and I have four other children and a multitude of creatures that run, scamp, swim, crawl, slither, hop, and eat (continuously).
There will be no quiz, so you need not remember these details, but suffice it to say that life in the Garrison household is complicated and rarely quiet, to put it mildly. While I'm making introductions, I should mention that this is an open letter from a single individual, and the direct language and opinions expressed in this note are mine alone. I am not a representative for other parents, the school leadership team, the PTSA, etc.
My four Smith children will be impacted by your upcoming decision regarding facilities for next year, and I know that you’re putting your time and best effort into making it judiciously, which I appreciate. The quality of their lives will be affected significantly, whether our program moves to Waddell and thrives, moves to Harding and withers, or stays where it is while we hope for a future facility that is bigger and better.
The students at Waddell and Harding also, obviously, face a good deal of uncertainty, and whether we like the outcome or not, I think that it’s fair to say that families at all three schools will find breathing an easier task once your decision has been announced.
The late economist Milton Friedman once said, “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.” I have no doubt that everyone’s intentions are pure. I have no doubt that the people who built the programs at Harding, Smith, and Waddell had great intentions, good ideas, and genuine love for children. I have no doubt that you have the best possible intentions and want the best for every student. I imagine that your belief in the importance of guiding principles is well-meant, and objective standards and guiding principles are important. If, however, we allow an intention to follow through with our best laid schemes (neighborhood schools) to outweigh the known, tested results of successful schools (Smith and Harding), don’t be surprised if those plans go awry and we find ourselves wondering what happened.
We are faced with two scenarios, and they have different outcomes, which we can ascertain reasonably by reflecting and looking at history. The decision that you are making will affect a few thousand students (and the education that lays the foundation for their lives), and so great care must be taken to ensure that we achieve the optimal outcome, that which brings the most amount of benefit while conferring the least amount of harm.
Scenario 1
It is my contention that the original proposal (or something very much like it) will lead to the far better outcome. To state it more plainly, moving Smith to Waddell, disbursing Waddell’s student body to other schools, and leaving the program at Harding intact (while, perhaps, leveraging any excess capacity with additional students) is the far better choice for students at all three schools.
The students at Smith will thrive at Waddell (I don’t know what the new school would be called, but something like Smith-Waddell or Waddell-Smith seems reasonable, retaining the Smith brand while demonstrating the appropriate level of respect and tribute due to the late Dr. Elbert Waddell, as he was such an important educator and community leader). All parties agree that it is an excellent facility, and it is close enough to the existing campus (~2 miles) that moving there would not place an undue hardship on Smith families (Harding is ~8 miles away). With larger, newer, better facilities, the program would almost certainly expand. It deserves to. Successful programs should be celebrated, expanded, and replicated. Good schools draw and retain families and businesses (Bad ones drive them away). I’d go into detail about how Smith specifically has drawn families to Charlotte, but others can and have done it better than I could.
The students at Harding already thrive at Harding, and as long as it is done judiciously and carefully, with an eye on adapting new students to the culture at Harding and not the other way around, it is likely that they will continue to thrive with an influx of students in an auxiliary program, if there is an issue of excess capacity. The goal should be to achieve financial savings for the district without diminishing or endangering the success of Harding students.
The students currently at Waddell, it is argued, get the short end of the stick in this scenario. I contend, however, that they will have a better opportunity to get a good education, because they will be able to leave a program that has failed them for ones that have better records. The word failure is a strong one, but it is apt. Its educators are highly qualified, experienced, and educated. It is not lacking in things like computers (two for every student). But for whatever reason, it barely rises above the 50% mark for grade-level English proficiency, and its math proficiency is even worse, just slightly above 40%. Calling these results dismal is an exercise in understatement.
The students at Waddell would be best served by something radical, and as there is no proposal to close the school and reopen it as an academically rigorous charter (or something along those lines), moving its students elsewhere seems to be the best way to give them the opportunities that are currently beyond their grasp.
This is not an issue of individual students, teachers, or administrators failing to work hard. It is the outcome of a program (and, I would argue, a larger educational system) where the incentives and constraints are not appropriately aligned to achieve high rates of success. Such success is possible at majority-minority schools, as Smith, Waddell, and many other schools across the United States demonstrate. This is not the appropriate forum for discussing how best to align incentives and constraints, and given the urgency of the situation, Waddell students will probably be best served by relocating to programs that have demonstrated success, as long as their relocation does not alter the successful models at other schools. There is no reason to suspect that it would.
Every year that a school system fails an individual (for whatever reason) is an important developmental year that the individual cannot recover. Children at Waddell are being placed at a disadvantage that will haunt them for years, and perhaps for the rest of their lives. Can they become successful despite their poor education? Certainly, as individuals, they can make it up, if they’re willing to work a little bit harder than everybody else for a few years. Anyone can be a success in America with enough hard work and determination. That, however, is beside the point. As long as we keep these children in a failing program, we are letting them down and knowingly increasing the disadvantages that they face in life. A graduation rate with a five in the first digit is inexcusable for any school, for any reason, and no matter how emotionally attached students may be to their campus and their friends, the system is failing them when almost half exit high school without a diploma.
Scenario 2
The alternative scenario is likely to lead to bad outcomes for all parties and for CMS (since Smith and Harding are two of its greatest success stories). By splitting up Harding and sending its students to multiple, less successful schools, moving Smith into Harding, and leaving the failed program at Waddell intact, we will be failing all three student bodies.
Smith is likely to lose a significant percentage of its students. Because of the unique nature of language immersion, this could threaten the viability of the program or, at the very least, injure it for a few years. Doing that to one of the best schools in the United States--harming its students, putting them at risk, placing them in a facility that (from what I understand) is not appropriate for small children--all for the sake of a social experiment, political expediency, and guiding principles that are totally untested--demonstrates a shortsightedness and refusal to learn from history that is, frankly, inexcusable. I know how well-intentioned each of you is, and I’m sorry if this leads to a bruised feeling or two, but I see no reason to temper my language when something as serious as knowingly failing our children is a likely outcome of a decision that I might be able to affect.
The students at Harding will fare no better than the Smith kids, and probably worse. They work hard, and the fruits of their labor have been extremely high proficiency rates and graduation rates. It makes no sense for their final reward to be relocation into a school with a dismal academic record. Rather than liberating the Waddell students by offering them equality in an effective program, we would be handing Harding students “equality in constraint and in servitude,” to borrow from Alexis de Tocqueville. If you want to know what will probably happen to Harding, read the tragic story of Dunbar High School in Appendix A, below.
It has been argued that Harding students would help to set a good example for Waddell students and bring up their performance. This would be a good argument, except that it makes no sense. Half of the students at Waddell aren’t dropping out because they lack moral exemplars among their peers. A lack of International Baccalaureate students isn’t what makes a school fail, and their presence will not lead to a failing school’s salvation. I have not heard a compelling argument that any fundamentals would change for the students who are being and will continue to be failed by Waddell. It would be bad enough to harm one set of students to help another, but this will serve to harm the Harding students without helping those at Waddell.
Summary and Conclusion
It has been argued that the majority of CMS students attend non-magnet schools and should, therefore, receive priority for funding. "[M]any of them need more help to succeed", and presumably, that help should come from students at successful schools. I don't doubt the veracity of this assertion, but I question its reasoning. Is there any evidence that harming the educational experience of one set of students will do anything to improve learning for another? Education, like economics, is a nonzero sum game, and one group need not suffer in order for another group to succeed.
Ronald Reagan once said, "We have so many people who can't see a fat man standing beside a thin one without coming to the conclusion the fat man got that way by taking advantage of the thin one." The suggestion that Smith and Harding students must lose in order for neighborhood schools to win is a similar application of this classic misunderstanding.
Please, choose the scenario that can lead to growth and positive change for students from all three schools. Otherwise, your decision will lead to a diminution of success (where we have it), a precedent of putting students in successful schools at risk in order to placate the parents of students at unsuccessful schools, and a new standard of regression to the lowest common academic denominator.
I implore you: Do not sacrifice our children on the altar of guiding principles. Rewarding and replicating successful schools is a much better path to a better tomorrow.
Sincerely
Greg Garrison
Appendix A: An Example From History
In 1870 a public school called Preparatory High School for Colored Youth was founded in Washington, DC. In the 1890s, it was known as the M Street High School, and in 1916, it was renamed Dunbar High School, after turn-of-the-century poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, a son of Kentucky slaves who authored the poem “Ode To Ethiopia”.
From 1870 to the mid-1950s, Dunbar was an extraordinary school. The sole black public high school in the District of Columbia, it regularly out-performed national averages on standardized tests. It also had less absenteeism and tardiness than the three white high schools in the District of Columbia.
Dunbar took academics very seriously and demanded that all of its students work. Its early principals included Mary Jane Patterson, the first black woman to receive a college degree in the U.S. (from Oberlin, in 1862) and the first black man to graduate from Harvard. Four of its first eight principals were Oberlin graduates, two Harvard.
In 1916, six of the nine black students attending Amherst were Dunbar graduates. From 1918 to 1923, Dunbar graduates earned 25 degrees from Ivy League colleges, Amherst, Williams, and Wesleyan. From 1892 to 1954, Amherst admitted 34 graduates of Dunbar. 74% of these graduated; over 25% of these graduates were Phi Beta Kappas.
The first blacks to graduate from West Point and Annapolis were Dunbar graduates. The first black American full professor was a Dunbar graduate, along with the first black federal judge, the first black general, the first black Cabinet member, the first black U.S. Senator since Reconstruction, and a scientist who discovered a method for storing blood plasma.
The students at Dunbar were reflective of the surrounding demographic: black families of every socioeconomic stratum and many professions. The facilities were unimpressive, located in a very bad neighborhood. Every student at Dunbar who was willing to work hard, however, was able succeed.
In the 1950s, in order to comply with Brown v Board of education in a manner that would fly with their constituents, District of Columbia politicians carved DC into neighborhoods, and Dunbar became a regular, neighborhood school with regular, neighborhood kids and a regular, neighborhood curriculum. Its classical rigor and demands for hard work were replaced by whatever happened to be the most popular way to educate children. It became, in short, an easier school.
Its success vanished immediately.
(Dunbar's story is extreme, due to its historical successes, but it is not unique. For more information about Dunbar and other world-class, majority-minority schools that were destroyed by political, social experimentation, I recommend “The Education of Minority Children” by Thomas Sowell.)
Appendix B: Class Configurations at Smith and the Challenges Created By Attrition
Smith is unique because it is a language immersion school. A brand-new student enters Kindergarten with a commitment to learn the majority of his/her school subjects in a foreign language (See “Magnet Program Expectations Agreement – World Language” that parents must sign). English is taught in parallel to the students learning Asian languages, and as students come closer to their EOGs, those in European languages begin taking English as well.
If a student above the first grade attrites (above the sixth grade for middle school), s/he cannot be replaced, except by a new student who is fluent in the target language.
In other words, we can’t backfill if we lose students. This is because children must be grade-level fluent in another language in order to keep up (since almost all subjects are taught in a foreign language). Since teachers are allocated based on the number of students, a drop in student enrollment will lead to a matching drop in teachers employed. It is unclear what percentage will leave when the new busing plan is implemented; I’ll use 25% to make the math easy.
If, say, 25% of third grade students attrite, a traditional school would have the opportunity to save 25% by laying off 25% of the third-grade teachers. For a school with eight third-grade classes, then, 25% attrition would create the capacity to lay off two teachers and one assistant (if an assistant is shared between classes), a savings that maintains the same level of efficiency (student:teacher ratio).
At Smith, however, there are two classes for each language. In effect, this means that it is equivalent to four small elementary schools and five small middle schools that share some resources, because languages cannot be combined to make a new class. So, to use our 25% example again, let’s say that 25% of the third-graders at Smith attrite and that this is uniform across the languages. We lose 12 of our 48 French students, 12 of our 48 Chinese students, 12 of 48 German, and 12 of 48 Japanese. Now there are four programs that are running at 75% capacity, and no teachers can be laid off without botching the programs.
With cuts of this sort, we would have two choices: 1) Create a class with 36 students for one teacher (A 36:1 ratio is, obviously, absurd for elementary students) or 2) Consolidate classes by grouping grades creatively (but sub-optimally, from a learning perspective, and counter to the current learning model at Smith)– in other words, to continue our example above, we might have one second grade class for each language, one third grade class for each language, and one combination second-third grade class (or three combination second-third grade classes). It is unclear how students could be fairly allocated into these three theoretical mixed-grade classes.
In either of these scenarios, Smith must reinvent how it educates students, even though its current model delivers outstanding performance. Expecting Smith to continue its current high level of EOG performance (to use one example) under these conditions is an exercise in wish thinking (which is generally, though not universally, frowned upon for adults).
In addition, as I mentioned earlier, either will also lead to a number of Smith teachers, who are in the United States on work visas with a goal of citizenship, having to go back to their country of origin. Considering the investment that CMS has made in these new Americans (or, technically, potential Americans), willfully implementing a policy that undoes their path to citizenship is a gross waste of dollars that CMS has already spent helping them to become great teachers and freshly-minted national resources.
It is not an overstatement to say that this presents an existential threat to Smith. I have a hard time imagining Smith being able to manage 36:1 student:teacher ratios or the grade-combo classes mentioned above. How else can it manage?
If we change the location and transportation for Smith so much that students must leave, we will break faith with the families who entered Smith, trusting that their children could reasonably expect to complete the program, and with those teachers whose visas we’ve sponsored and who give so much to teach our children.
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