Blurred lines between home schools and private schools open the door for possible fraud and abuse Standing in the doorway of her home, Carol Miller remembers when Paramount Christian Academy was a larger operation. Housed by Westchester Baptist Church in High Point more than ten years ago, the private Christian school then had three teachers, [Continue Reading...]
More teachers left their posts last year—significantly more than the previous year, according to a report released yesterday. The report released by the Department of Public Instruction found that last year’s teacher turnover rate in North Carolina saw a significant increase—and the highest rate over the last five years. Between March 2012 [Continue Reading...]
Durham Public Schools high school English teacher Tim McNamara just got his first up-close look into the implementation of the new teacher contracts that were passed into law last July. The contracts, which will eventually replace teacher tenure and are slated to begin with the 2014-15 school year, were described by DPS’ Office of Human [Continue Reading...]
Asheville Middle School teacher Chris Gable has spent the last decade becoming a fixture in this mountain town. Not only has he taught social studies and language arts to hundreds of its students, he also coaches young writers and budding poets, giving them the confidence they need to keep putting pen to paper. [Continue Reading...]
“It’s time to stop being afraid.” That was the message delivered by Clara Stiers, a Westlake Middle School counselor speaking at a town hall in Apex on the day educators across North Carolina took part in a “walk-in” to protest cuts to public education made by the General Assembly over the past several [Continue Reading...]
Educators prepare for a walk-in; others seek greener pastures On Monday, November 4, many teachers and support staff across North Carolina plan to take part in a “walk-in” to encourage a richer dialogue between community members and educators about what is happening in the state’s public schools. Trish Lowe, a sixth grade social [Continue Reading...]
A brief history of the Division of Non-Public Education, the Pearsall Plan, and the deregulation of North Carolina’s private schools Most are familiar with the famous 1954 ruling Brown v. Board of Education, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state laws creating separate public schools for white and black children were [Continue Reading...]
At a meeting of Governor McCrory’s education cabinet last week, Andre Peek, director of Global Technology Services at IBM and chair of the North Carolina Business Committee for Education asserted that North Carolina is now a “net exporter of teachers.” It’s an observation Peek has made from working groups in which he has [Continue Reading...]
Part 3 of an NC Policy Watch series Beginning in 2014, some North Carolina families will be able to use taxpayer dollars to send their children to private schools. School vouchers, formally known as ‘Opportunity Scholarships,’ are offered up by school choice advocates as the cure-all for underserved minority children who are failing [Continue Reading...]
Part II of an NC Policy Watch series State Superintendent for Public Instruction, Dr. June Atkinson, told attendees at a luncheon last month that among all of the insults to public education that this year’s state budget offers, school vouchers are her “favorite.” And by favorite, she means the worst offender. [Continue Reading...]
Part I of an NC Policy Watch series For the first time in its history, North Carolina will allow taxpayer funds to go to largely unaccountable private schools, 70 percent of which are religious institutions, beginning in the 2014-15 school year. School vouchers, enacted by the General Assembly in July by way of [Continue Reading...]
The high cost of spending less Barbara Dell Carter is everything you dream of in a second grade teacher. Seventeen years into her career, she is highly skilled, brimming with warmth and enthusiasm, and, as anyone speaking with her for just a couple of minutes will realize, incredibly passionate about her life’s [Continue Reading...]
Schools chief sees great progress yet continues to hear mantra ‘our schools are broken.’ “Why is it that as a whole we are doing better in education than we ever have, yet at the same time, public opinion [of our schools] is dropping,” Atkinson asked audience members at a luncheon hosted by NC [Continue Reading...]
The actions of a private-turned-charter school in Robeson County have parents and concerned citizens questioning whether the school is trying to limit access to the school, and raise questions about the enforcement of the state law that mandates that charters have fair and open enrollment policies. Southeastern Academy is located eight miles outside [Continue Reading...]
In recent months, there has been a growing movement across the United States to put the brakes on the implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS, or ‘Common Core’), a set of guidelines about what students should know and be able to do in grades K-12 that have been adopted by 45 [Continue Reading...]
