Can’t Go Back Again

It seems unfriendly to ask folks for attention to yet another political thing right now, but local elections will always be as important as any, and what’s happening now in Wake County is alarming. A nearly full slate of challengers — some of them quite extremist — is making an organized push to wrest control of Wake County’s school board, and it is worryingly reminiscent of 2009. In fact the District 1 challenger, Deborah Prickett, was involved in that takeover eleven years ago. (Full disclosure: I am married to the District 1 incumbent, Heather Scott.) Prickett won in District 7 that year and spent two years with Debra Goldman, John Tedesco, Chris Malone, and Ron Margiotta as a ruling coalition that considered the other four members of the board “the opposition.” What voters in 2020 need to know is that their brief reign was a catastrophe and it is not worth giving a similar group another chance to do the same.

To fully illustrate the scope of that catastrophe, we need to start the story a bit earlier to show what things looked like before it happened. Wake’s own Bill McNeal was recognized as 2004 National Superintendent of the Year. In 2008, McNeal collaborated with local Republican businessman (and 1999–2003 Wake school board member) Tom Oxholm on a well-received book about their work together called “A School District’s Journey to Excellence: Lessons from Business and Education.” Even as late as the spring of 2009, Wake County’s public schools were hailed as a shining example in a nationally bleak urban public school landscape in a book titled, literally, “Hope and Despair in the Big City: Why there are no bad schools in Raleigh.” The area’s economic competitiveness had never been better.

But nothing good ever lasts forever. Explosive growth in Wake, due in part to the renowned successes of the schools, strained the school system. School buildings could hardly go up fast enough, and the new schools could not be filled exclusively with new residents. Some students changed schools multiple times within a few years. Some students were forced into a year-round school calendar. Some got both. This produced some understandably angry parents. Their dissatisfaction, stewing in a rapidly shifting national political landscape, clashed with the largely satisfied (and therefore absent) rest of the electorate in a low-turnout October 2009 election. The result: all four challengers swept the school board races by blaming Wake’s vaunted diversity policy (incorrectly) for the rapid-fire reassignments and promising to fix them with neighborhood schools and parent choice.

The new majority tried to “fire a shot over the bow,” in Chris Malone’s words, by including diversity repeal as just one part of a massive set of prewritten actions sprung by surprise on their first day. But it wasn’t their top priority. Their first act, after a leadership vote to replace Kevin Hill as chairman with Margiotta, was to agree to offer a no-bid, price-TBD contract for auditing the system’s legal services to Thomas Farr and his law firm. The top-priority nod to Farr, already borderline infamous by that time as the Jesse Helms postcard lawyer among other things, was quite a statement in itself. The message that it sent to many was: “We are aware that a lot of you have grave concerns about our agenda. Our top priority as a governing body is to performatively confirm your worst fears and rub your faces in them.”

Only after voting to hire Farr did they get around to taking diversity out of the assignment policy. Well, almost. They were actually forced to relent and refer the change to the policy committee, because it turned out that despite experienced member Margiotta’s help they actually didn’t have any idea what they were doing. Nevertheless, despite some more bumps along the way they ultimately managed to get it done six months later.

One of the bumps they hit was massive public resistance. Angry crowds at meetings overflowed. The new majority, composed primarily of people who had promised urgently to listen to parents, seemed to be clearly more interested in some parents than others. This should sound hauntingly familiar to folks following the 2020 races. Chairman Margiotta dismissed the booing of opposing attendees at one meeting by mumbling “Here come the animals out of their cages” in front of what turned out to be a hot mic, which would’ve been troubling even if it hadn’t been emblematic of the board’s attitude toward dissenting opinions. The board was subsequently sued for refusing to hold meetings in rooms big enough to accommodate the crowds and using a punishing ticketing system to dissuade would-be commenters.

During this period McNeal’s successor, highly respected superintendent Del Burns, resigned. This opened up one of the biggest jobs in public education in the country. Prickett and her colleagues put their thumb on the scale when hiring his replacement: they spent nearly 10x the price of Raleigh-based NCSBA to hire the search firm Heidrick and Struggles, who was not an initial finalist of their own committee but did have a host of school-reform connections. The result of that process was to hire retired Brigadier General Anthony J. Tata.

Tata was by all accounts of the time a distinguished military officer, but his qualifications and experience in education were short. Less than two years off a sort of vocational certificate for big-city superintendents, he’d been working as Chief Operations Officer in Washington, DC public schools. This title sounds lofty but when Chancellor Michelle Rhee had resigned earlier in 2010, DC schools — a smaller system than WCPSS — did not appear to have seriously considered Tata to replace her. Not only that: despite Tata’s inexperience and the politically charged environment he was entering, the board provided explicit contractual allowance for Tata to continue his side hustle belittling then-President Obama on television. This is the kind of hire you make when your entire purpose, well beyond trying to find someone to do a good job, is to belittle the idea that experience and expertise in education have any value at all.

It wasn’t just Wake parents and citizens who took notice of the 2009 group’s unprofessional behavior and irregular practices. Wake’s high school accreditation was subjected to a “special review” by its accrediting authority, AdvancED. The review ultimately left accreditation in place but in “Accredited Warned” status. Their report, alternating between scathing and flabbergasted, is worth reading in full even today. This excerpt is fairly representative: “Each of the four newly elected Board members, as well as Ron Margiotta, refused to acknowledge the student achievement data compiled by the school system and displayed on large posters in the Board meeting room. Each of the five Board members indicated a reliance on their ‘own’ data to support their conclusions and defend their actions. Board member John Tedesco asserted that the previous Student Assignment Policy distributed low achievers throughout the system so that their needs would be hidden and consequently not be met. Mr. Tedesco has repeatedly advocated for concentrating low achieving students in a school so that their needs are not hidden. However, when Board members were asked how they would ensure that schools with a significant population of low achieving students would be supported there were no solutions or plans offered. High school principals noted deep concern that the new policy would significantly compromise their ability to meet the needs of students. Additionally, principals indicated that there is no plan for providing the additional resources for a school with an exceptionally high proportion of low achieving students.”

Adding to the accreditation problems were a series of Department of Education Office of Civil Rights complaints, which threatened the county’s federal funding. (The federal government typically funds around 7% of the budget, mostly for low-income students and students with disabilities.) There were complaints about student assignment and racially disproportionate discipline. (A separate complaint about discrimination against English-language learners and their parents was filed in 2012.) While these investigations were ultimately ended in 2018 without finding fault on the part of the school system, OCR specifically acknowledged “multiple voluntary and proactive steps” taken by the board since the complaint, including the formation and expansion of the Office of Equity Affairs, as contributing to their resolution. It hardly seems likely that Prickett or any of her fellow challengers is going to endorse or support any of the reforms that happened after her term that helped bring the matters to a close.

If all this wasn’t embarrassing enough, Wake County made national news in a different way when Stephen Colbert mocked the board’s efforts to end the diversity assignment policy on his popular Comedy Central show.

Another bump in the road: the 2009 group’s utter disregard for consensus in any form eventually started to backfire. Their plan lost the backing of the Raleigh Chamber, and Goldman decided to torpedo Tedesco’s “community assignment zones” plan. She did not, however, veer from their overall course on reassignment, so the majority was left to tweaking assignment nodes for the 2011–12 school year while new superintendent Tata tried to take over where Tedesco was forced to leave off. They ran out of time: the 2009 group lost Margiotta in the 2011 election, and with him their majority.

It wasn’t quite over, though. With the new board unsure how to undo it all without even more turmoil, the policy changes remained in place. Tata moved forward with a plan similar to one from Chamber/Wake Ed Partnership consultant Michael Alves. The new plan rolled out in fall 2012. Though Goldman’s reversal had certainly annoyed Tedesco, the overall effect didn’t stray far from what they had all been looking for. Between their noodling with the assignment nodes and Tata’s “hybrid choice” plan, the share of low-income students in schools with a more than 60% low-income student body had tripled.

Despite their initial can-do, move-fast-and-break-stuff approach unraveling into bickering and dithering that outlasted Margiotta’s chairmanship, the 2009 group’s legacy was secure. Mission accomplished? Sure, except that somehow after all those years of wrangling, the rollout was still botched. The school year started with panicked parents calling to search for children who were hours late without warning or notice. Some children waited at stops for buses that never came. That fiasco certainly contributed to Tata’s dismissal later that year.

Really, though, the whole thing had been a fiasco, and it sunk most of the rest of the 2009 group as well. Chris Malone won a seat in the NC House and resigned in November 2012, but the rest had a harder time. Tedesco and Goldman had run for State Superintendent and State Auditor in 2012, and took matching eight-point losses. They were the worst-performing Republican council of state candidates that year. Goldman resigned from the board the following February. Tedesco finished his term and departed. Only Deborah Prickett chose to run for re-election to the school board. District 7 had seen enough of her, however. She lost by fifteen points. The stench seemed to linger in voters’ minds, too. Malone won again in 2014, but every Republican running for Wake Commissioner lost.

What does this have to do with today, one might ask. In fairness, none of the challengers for school board in 2020 have expressed a public opinion on the 2009–2011 board except for Deborah Prickett, who as a member of that 5–4 majority was a voting participant. You won’t see her name very often in the paragraphs above, or in contemporary news accounts, but she was there, reliably voting “aye” or “nay” with her bloc. This story is her record.

Even moving beyond Prickett to the other challengers, there are striking parallels. It’s entirely possible it’d be different this time, sure, but forewarned is forearmed. The 2009 group was full, first and foremost, of folks who were ideologically entrenched to the point that they were distrustful if not contemptuous of mainstream educational experience and expertise. They did not really understand the problems they were trying to solve, were largely uninterested in learning anything about them that didn’t fit their pre-formed judgments before acting, and often seemed to take as an affront the idea that maybe they should. There is more than a whiff of this attitude in public comments from the 2020 challengers. If any of them are elected, and seek to govern in good faith, they will find that the learning curve between “dissatisfied customer” and “subject matter expert” is taller and steeper than they imagine.

One can only hope they are more up to the challenge of surmounting that curve than the 2009 group proved to be, and frankly there doesn’t seem to be a lot of reason to hold out that hope. If you look at the social media for Greg Hahn, Rachel Mills, or Steve Bergstrom and think to yourself, “Yes, these people are sober and serious thinkers on matters of public education who will absolutely be more responsible stewards than the likes of Ron Margiotta and John Tedesco,” you are ignoring (or endorsing) clear signs of trouble ahead: ignorance of the basic role of the board, fundamental lack of understanding of the budget, and a half-inch-deep but opportunistic understanding of student achievement metrics. There’s also a lot of what looks like an itching desire to use public resources to engage in culture-war strawman fights like their 2009 predecessors, as well as the same reckless disregard for nearly certain collateral damage.

It should be pointed out that this is not an assessment grounded exclusively in partisanship, however much some are certain to twist it otherwise. Prickett wasn’t even the GOP’s first choice for D7 back in 2009. On the other hand, there are many diehard public ed activists in Wake County who would, if they were forced to build a board from scratch, happily accept an offer of “five Roxie Cashes” or “five Bill Fletchers” without even asking what’s behind Door Number Two. It is a sign of the times and of the quality of the challengers as candidates that some of their most prominent backers (or loudest, at least) are folks who have little respect for either Cash or Fletcher, who between them have given decades of distinguished service to Wake County.

As for Prickett herself, it is obvious at this point that she does not want to run on her record. During a candidate forum with the League of Women Voters she mentioned a couple of times having been on the school board before[LWV 4:45, 14:04] but managed not to reveal when, with whom she served, or even one sentence about what she believes she accomplished at the time. In select company, on the other hand, she strikes a different tone. While speaking to the Wake Forest Area Republican Club she beamed with pride in the glory of her olden days in the majority[WFARC 11:45]. And yet: even at the WFARC one did not hear the name Margiotta, Tedesco, Goldman, or even Malone.

Instead, she prefers to attack the schools. In those remarks to the WFARC she spoke about the allegedly poorly performing schools in District 1. This lengthy rant was primarily a recitation of NC School Report Card grades[WFARC 15:35] with a nasty swipe at the area’s mayors (all of whom have declined to endorse her) thrown in for good measure[WFARC 16:19]. While District 1’s schools are indeed in need of special advocacy, Prickett’s specific take on this data was revealingly ham-fisted.

To start with, the data she referred to was two years old; her list of “low-performing” schools (meaning schools receiving a D or F grade without an “Exceeds Growth” status) was from 2017–18. While there’s no data for 2019–20 due to the pandemic, data is available for 2018–19 and has been for roughly an entire calendar year. This casts a shadow on her claims to have been monitoring this data up to her choice to file for candidacy[LWV 7:58] and to be “tired of seeing this.”[WFARC 13:57] Frankly, it also raises doubt about “That’s why I’m here.”[WFARC 16:10] It also certainly shows she is unaware of, to pick just one example, the amazing work by many at Knightdale Elementary to reach “Exceeds Growth” status in 2018–19.

Prickett’s focus on school letter grades is also distressing. These grades are calculated using 80% grade-level proficiency rate and 20% student growth. It’s not hard to find sources that explain why this is a terrible way to evaluate schools, from the political to the scholarly to The Onion. Because higher-poverty schools tend to have a much larger share of students who aren’t at grade level to start the year, assigning 80% of the school grade to the proficiency rate blames students for their own poverty and punishes schools for trying to teach them. That point is not especially controversial —even the NC house is passing school report card letter grade reforms in landslide bipartisan votes (see this note for details). This should not be hard to understand. There is no sane way to make an argument that 80% of all the learning that matters is the last marginal question between is/is not grade-level proficient, and in fact trying to do so can set up some unsavory incentives. Yet that is exactly what the school letter grade does, and being unable to see this is a major blind spot.

That blind spot may not have been a disaster in District 7 circa 2010–2014, where the poorest two schools were 53% and 42% low-income. It is disqualifying in District 1, which contains Jones Dairy Elementary with ~8% low-income students but also in which the “low performing” schools ranged from 50% to 74% (using 2018–19 to match the test score data). It is grotesque for Prickett to grandstand on the supposed failings of these schools based on a system that blames them for serving concentrations of poverty which she enthusiastically advocated (still advocates) creating, entrenching, and deepening.

At the same time, Prickett dryly mentioned that they didn’t have such problems with school performance when she was on the board[WFARC 13:59]. That is arguable; negative trends in student growth and achievement appear to have begun during her term. It’s also worth keeping in mind that she took office at the tail end of a long peak in school funding at both the state and local levels. The combined real (inflation-adjusted) state and federal per-pupil funding situation would get worse every year of her term. In that environment, Prickett and her colleagues refused to even ask the county commissioners to fund enrollment increases. The recession was blamed, but local per-student spending in the rest of North Carolina barely dropped relative to pre-recession levels, while Wake’s dropped 10% even as Wake’s economy outperformed the rest of the state.

Real locally funded per-student spending only returned to pre-recession levels in 2018–19, while combined state- and federally-funded real per-student expenditure continued to lag behind. (Even adjusting for inflation and enrollment paints too rosy a picture of today’s situation: see this note.) The students taking tests in 2019 spent years in schools that were suffering from those deficits: bigger class sizes starting in fourth grade, missing TAs, reduced funding for at-risk students and students with disabilities, and on and on. Prickett is wrong to pat herself on the back for inheriting a situation that was at least partly an aftereffect of (comparatively) fully-funded schools while ignoring the cumulative long-term effects of reduced funding, especially when she personally voted for many of the local cuts and continues to champion the state and federal ones.

But Prickett is not just intent on solving the wrong problems: she also has a patently empty solution. Prickett’s pitch for improving school performance is typically a word salad about needing to “hire the right staff into these schools”[WFARC 16:35], “proven turnaround leaders”[Wake Weekly candidate survey 9/17], and a “pipeline of highly qualified teachers and administrators.”[Wake Weekly] Even taking these ideas at face value, an obvious question remains: having ruled out increasing resources, having rejected the idea that demographics are a concern, and with a record of treating the concerns of teachers and administrators with contempt, what credible plan to bring in “proven” or “qualified” people could she possibly advance? With her hiring record, why should anyone trust her to know who the “right staff” are?

Deborah Prickett spent four years on this county’s school board doing just what she’s promising to do in this election: using the wrong tools to punish the wrong people to solve the wrong problem, guided by the wrong data, and in defiance of any need to build or maintain consensus with her board, school system staff, or the public. She learned, it seems, literally nothing from an experience in which she and her colleagues lost first their internal agreement, then their majority, and then finally their own seats in just one four-year term.

With that level of consistency, it is easy to know what to expect if Prickett is allowed to sweep back into office again with any of this new set of hardliners:

• When she says she’s going to be a strong voice and a dissenting vote, what she means is that she would rather grandstand in vain than even attempt to build consensus…and she’s proud of that.
• When she says she’s going to listen to parents, she means exactly and exclusively the parents who want the things she’s already offering…and any negative feedback on her preset agenda will mean less than nothing.
• When she says she’s going to bring in the right people, she means political allies right up to the most important roles…without so much as flinching at prospective hires so ideologically toxic even Mitch McConnell’s Senate won’t touch them.
• When people say she or the other 2020 challengers are going to get back to education and get the politics out of our schools, what that means is that they will pursue their own end of their culture wars…even if it endangers our most vulnerable students, our access to federal funding, our high school accreditation, and our area’s standing with the business community. Prickett personally has done it before, and appears to have no regrets.

It’s taken nine years for our schools to dig out from under the chaos and climb out of the hole left behind by Deborah Prickett and the “wonderful day” of her old majority. Frankly, there’s still serious work to be done. We need serious people to do it. We can’t take another chance on Prickett or any of the others in this new breed. Vote accordingly.

NOTES

NOTE ON NC HOUSE SCHOOL LETTER GRADE REFORMS: A bill to change the formula to weight student growth more heavily passed 108–4 in the NC House in March 2019 but died in the state Senate. Another bill, acknowledging that even EVAAS growth does not fully level the playing field, would have removed “low performing” status from schools that meet growth targets and passed the NC House 112–1 before it too died in the Senate. The division on this issue falls not on party lines but somewhere between a nearly unanimous House vote and NC Senate leadership that won’t even hold a vote. [BACK]

NOTE ON DANGERS OF ADJUSTING BUDGETS FOR ENROLLMENT AND INFLATION: This is a common strategy for comparing budgets across gaps in time, but it cannot completely reconcile all the differences. This can be seen most clearly where cuts were made but never undone. For example, the state-level allotment ratio for teachers in grades 4–12 were cut by nearly ten percent in 2014 and never restored, and that’s just one such cut of many. In 2017–18 the state funded 4,000 fewer teachers and 7,500 fewer TAs statewide than it did in 2008–09, despite serving 9,000 more students. However, real per-student state funding today is roughly $600 higher than in 2013. Where has the added money gone? Much of it has come in two forms: increased pay and employer retirement contributions. Excluding local supplements, average teacher pay in 2019–20 was still below 2009–10 levels after adjusting for inflation. Increased retirement contributions — $99 million in 2018–19 in Wake County alone vs. 2009–10 contribution rates — shore up the solvency of the state retirement fund, but they don’t increase benefits. These things are necessary and important, and they do help with retention and recruitment. However, they do not restore prior service levels by themselves, especially in high-poverty schools that benefited most from extra adults in the building. [BACK]