We’ve been amused, though not terribly surprised, by the school system’s avoidance of any real accountability for the absolutely dismal academic performance reported by the state’s Department of Public Instruction last month.
The Alamance-Burlington school system had the dubious distinction of being one of the 20 lowest-performing school systems in the state. In the state!
We’re not just talking about poor performance by a few schools, as has been the case for several years. Alamance County parents and residents have grown accustomed to that level of failure.
Now a majority of ABSS schools (20 of 36, or 55 percent) have Ds and Fs, so that the whole school system, not just a dozen or so individual schools, has been designated by the state as “low performing.”
The county’s commissioners, who are responsible for funding the schools, invited ABSS officials to come earlier this month to explain this poor track record of academic performance.
But school officials couldn’t find the time.
They refused to come.
School board chairman Sandy Ellington-Graves gave as the lame excuse that the superintendent had already presented the state’s report card at a September 9 school board meeting.
“While I do appreciate the invitation to present the [state’s report] next week at your meeting,” she went on to declare in declining the commissioners’ invitation to appear, “doing so a second time at a different meeting will not bring forth any new information or data.”
Of course, the fact that Ellington-Graves thinks the commissioners, who fund the school system, aren’t entitled to their own rendition – or, perhaps more importantly, to be able to ask critical questions of ABSS officials – is condescending, distressing, and, quite frankly, irresponsible, particularly since one assistant superintendent attributed the academic results for 2024-2025 to “budgets and buildings,” as though the commissioners were somehow responsible.
To her credit, the school board chairman was at least candid enough to characterize the state’s findings as “alarming” in her RSVP rejection to the board of commissioners.
She went on to claim that the school system would be developing “school improvement plans” in the coming weeks. More on those in a moment.
While it is accurate that Fleming at least discussed the DPI report at the school board’s September 9 meeting, we don’t believe he gave the board a very precise indication of exactly how poor the school system ranked in comparison to other school systems across the state. (They might know if they read this newspaper’s earlier report on the state’s report card, but they wouldn’t know it from the superintendent.)
We do not recall that he acknowledged that ABSS ranked in the bottom 20 among 115 school systems across the state and that the school system itself, not just individual schools, had been labeled as “low-performing,” nor that ABSS was the largest school system to place into this elite category of failing school systems.
And, to the best of our observation, Fleming has still not discussed with the school board another dimension of the state’s report card – i.e., the precipitous drop in the ABSS graduation rate.
The school system’s first defense of the poor academic performance, presented by Sean McWherter, the school system’s relatively new assistant superintendent for academics, was to list at that same September 9 school board meeting a hodgepodge of bureaucratic responses. He talked about responding through a program known as MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Supports), which uses data to identify and support students with varying academic, behavioral, and social-emotional needs.
He also pointed to another strategy, known by its initials of PBIS, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports.
He acted as though both responses were something new, creative, and industrious, something that would really impact and contribute toward improving ABSS schools’ poor performance.
In actuality, ABSS has been participating in both of these alphabet soup programs since July 1, 2020, i.e., over five years.
For example, MTSS was listed as one of the strategies to turn around academic performance for 2023, based on school improvement plans presented to the board in September 2023. Ditto for PBIS.
So, just how, exactly, would the school system’s use of these two programs over the next year be any different, or improved, over its experience with the same programs during the past five years?
We filed that question with the school system on September 9 and have yet to receive a response.
We suspect that’s because there’s no indication that such programs will actually improve performance. It was just his first, instinctive attempt to show some “action.”
In essence, this was just meaningless bureaucratic gobbledygook.
So on to Monday night’s school board meeting where the much-ballyhooed “school improvement plans” that the school board chairman had said would be discussed for the lowest-performing ABSS schools.
Instead, it was more bureaucratic babble.
In little more than a paperwork drill, the school board members spent a grand total of about six minutes questioning how the 20 worse-performing schools (that scored Ds and Fs) are going to address their woefully inadequate performance.
We’ve wondered since the reports came out whether the superintendent was going to “shake things up” even a little by moving some of the principals at failing schools around.
No, it doesn’t seem so.
(We think there’s an old saying that doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Welcome to ABSS’ version of educational madness.)
But even with the same “leadership” in place, what creative approaches might the superintendent or his minions take to actually, substantively address these problems?
So, we wondered, for instance, did the school system conduct one or more public hearings over the past month to get parent, student, or any other kind of input on how to improve the atrocious school system performance?
Nope.
Did any individual school conduct any sort of meeting with parents for the same purpose, to improve the performance at any individual school?
Not that we’ve heard of.
Instead, the school board blithely listened to the bureaucratic presentation this week, as though these were actually significant.
Here’s what actually happened: Some of the 20 schools literally lifted, i.e., regurgitated, paragraphs from their previous years’ “school improvement plans” – i.e., the very ones that they clearly didn’t live up to, instead receiving Ds and Fs on the most recent report card.
“Copy and paste” is a command very useful on many computers, but it’s not a very good approach, we would suggest, with regard to these school improvement plans.
Oh, and in some cases, they were so sloppy in their own plagiarism of themselves, they didn’t even bother to update the years. So, there’s not even a promise of improvement by the end of the 2025-2026 school year; instead, there’s a pledge to improve various measures “by June 2025,” i.e., four months ago!
Not to be outdone, at least one school listed as its principal who is setting “the expectation that the school move toward academic excellence” someone who left ABSS two years ago!
So did any school board member, or school officials, even notice some of these most obvious errors?
Apparently not. They spent a grand total of less than 10 minutes looking over the school reports before approving them en bloc unanimously.
We certainly hope the State Board of Education, to whom these reports are to be submitted, will read them more carefully than ABSS officials did.
We might add that if a student turned in such substandard work, he or she would almost surely get a failing grade. But ABSS seemed hardly to care one whit.
School board member Avery Wagner was so delusional Monday night that he actually uttered the thought that ABSS would be in the “top 10 percent” of North Carolina schools next year.
We very much doubt it.
Not with the current leadership, as evidenced over the past month since the state’s report came out.
