Pete:

Says here you are going to give a State of CMS Address tonight. Hope it is not too late for some suggestions.

First, ditch about 80 percent of what you said at Christ Church in Myers Park a couple weekends ago. Don’t know who that was intended to reach, but it does not speak to where CMS is today.

Although I recognize you had to be polite considering Ann Clark introduced you that day, I feel a responsibility to point out that praising Clark automatically makes you less credible among CMS teachers. You see — and there is no polite way to put this — Clark is loathed by a great many CMS teachers. Maybe you did not know that, maybe you do not care, maybe you do not believe it — I’ll report, you decide.

But I really want to zero in on what you said about the public perception of and trust in CMS. You seem to believe that you have a public relations problem with CMS that can be fixed by “placing” more positive stories in the local media. This is foolish.

CMS is wasting time on PR as tens of thousands of parents have direct unmediated experience with CMS every single schoolday. They talk to each other, to teachers, and principals and then — by gosh — email each other about what they know. You could personally select and edit every single story about CMS and it would only marginally impact how the public views the system. I cannot stress this enough.

In sum, if you are spending time meeting with the Observer editorial board, you are wasting time that could otherwise be spent improving CMS. Oh, and your complaint about the Observer’s news reporting on CMS being negative is downright bizarre. Although the coverage of CMS is not exactly what I would do — where did the Gantt Commission report go? for example — the paper has been extremely fair to CMS and does try to present a pro/con balance on most CMS issues.

To suggest that the coverage goes negative in order to sell more papers just does not represent the facts and is much, much too quick to dismiss valid criticism of CMS as some self-serving stunt.

Speaking of which, the bonds. The 2005 bond was defeated because of voters’ of lack of trust in CMS not — as you suggested — because voters did not trust the Board of Education. No sitting BOE member lost that day, but the bonds did. The public did not trust the leadership at CMS — that is why you are here in Charlotte today, Pete.

The public understands that the BOE is a circus, a circus with a couple added sideshows caused by CMS’ traditional inability to execute. Instead of a board of directors helping a strong CEO execute his or her vision for the system, the BOE spends its time squabbling over the most mundane issues of boilerplate semantics.

Case in point is classroom discipline or lack thereof. You have not begun to fix this — a couple of expulsions would only be considered a big change in the dysfunctional world of CMS. How dysfunctional? In the first days of classes this year, there was an entire class of 9th graders who refused to pick up their textbooks at one CMS high school. Just told the teacher, no.

You missed a chance to force the BOE to stand with you or against you on the discipline front. Ditto personnel changes at the top of CMS. At one time you were feared by the EdCenter Old Guard now they think you are one of them.

Maybe you think that you could not have risked big changes, that the first priority was creating a united front that could help sell and pass the bond. This is reasonable. However, you need to understand that the way the current $500 million bond is being sold is creating the expectation of another $500 million bond, and maybe another after that. In sum, you’ve jumped on a bond-selling treadmill that might be very hard to get off.

Meanwhile, you continue to labor under the illusion that shifting staff around CMS will somehow have a big impact on educational outcomes. It cannot, not so long as basic, fundamental issues of discipline go unreformed.

Like I’ve said, most people for rooting for you, Pete. Most folks really do want public education to be a success in Charlotte. I myself turn to Thomas Paine’s arguments for a republic’s educational imperative in his Rights of Man. We cannot have meaningful representative government without an educated populace and time is running out.

As Paine observed over 200 years ago, “If those to whom power is delegated do well, they will be respected: if not, they will be despised.”

Best of luck.

Sincerely,
Jeff A. Taylor