The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (DPI) has chosen Columbus County Schools as one of two school systems in the state to be part of a new initiative to discover root causes of low student performance and what the districts’ strengths and weaknesses are.
DPI will send a team here and to Lexington City Schools over a three-year period to find ways to reverse low student performance.
Our hope is that the experiment will be a learning experience for both local educators – and especially for DPI.
DPI has a diminished reputation among the local education community that it must overcome.
For too long, DPI has made decisions from its ivory tower in Raleigh, decisions that have translated poorly to rural areas like Columbus County. Words like “out of touch” and “pie-in-the-sky” are often heard.
It’s no wonder that many teachers left Tuesday’s meeting with a heavy dose of skepticism.
But let’s be positive here. This experiment, which Columbus County is lucky to be a part of, has a chance to work.
At least one good decision has been made already – that this is a three-year process, not a six-month or one-year dog and pony show.
The time spent here will give DPI a first-hand look at what it’s like to educate students in a poor area where issues like low parent involvement and literacy, a lack of emphasis at home on education and poverty-related social ills make teaching a monumental task. We can’t think of a better laboratory than Columbus County.
And it’s not like teachers and administrators here aren’t trying. They are, but when one walks through Wal-mart, for example, and sees a parent or guardian slapping their children around, or realizes what young children are exposed to in movies, music and television, it’s easy to see that education has to be more than reading, writing and arithmetic. It’s so sad to see bright, young people beaten down by a crumbling or non-existent support system, but that’s what teachers are up against.
Our hope is that DPI will truly see this as an opportunity to create something that – in their own words – will be “national model.”
Likewise, we hope that local teachers and educators will participate willingly. The folks at DPI may recommend radical changes, and teachers need to be prepared to embrace them because these changes just might work. Radical change may be the only solution, in fact, we’ll be disappointed if at least a few extraordinary and bold initiatives aren’t tried.
If there’s one catch phrase that must be remembered during this process, it is “open-minded,” and it’s got to be from both sides.
Clearly, what’s being done now isn’t working, in large part because of social changes that have occurred outside the classroom over the years.
Education must evolve with those changes.
It will be a shining achievement for both the county schools and DPI if that evolution begins right here.