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August 13, 2004

Update: Bad news from North Carolina as tourism trumps education

Just when you thought things could not become any more difficult for school boards, North Carolina shows us a new way, the Associated Press reports. As BoardBuzz related several months ago, it seems some business groups thought all this extra learning and professional development was somehow slowing tourism revenues. So did they organize their members to go down to their local school boards and have a candid discussion about their concerns? Apparently not. If they had, they might have learned a little something about accountability mandates, achievement gaps, preparing students for a 21st century economy, and persistent public school bashing.

Instead, they went right to the state legislature and lobbied for a state-level decree that no child be in school later than June 10 or before August 25. And, surprisingly, they got their wish. State Rep. Connie Wilson sponsored the bill, the North Carolina Association of Educators pushed hard for it, and Gov. Mike Easley signed it. The North Carolina School Boards Association (NCSBA) opposed the bill, as did the North Carolina Association of School Administrators. The Chapel Hill Herald gets it: School calendars are "best left to individual districts," and now "the burden will be on them." No kidding.

Besides the blatant infringement on local control, NCSBA and others noted that extending summer vacation might not be in the best interests of students' academics, citing the "summer slide" that can occur, particularly for low-income children, when they are away from school for an extended period of time. Read more about this here.

As NCSBA notes, the calendar change includes a reduction in "the number of days in the school calendar from 220 days to 215 by reducing the number of teacher workdays from 20 to 15. Teachers must be paid for the full month of August and, thus, will be prepaid for several weeks of work they have not completed. Salaries also will not be reduced for those employees who would have worked on the five teacher workdays that were removed."

The state department of education recently trumpeted improvement shown in its latest Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) data. Still, nearly 30 percent of North Carolina schools did not make AYP this year. We're curious about where all these business groups and state politicians who made pious pronouncements about these new calendar limitations being good for children, parents, and teachers are in the debate over No Child Left Behind. And now that they've helped push through a plan that actually reduces teacher professional development days and extends the summer break (and potentially the academic slide that often accompanies it), we hope we can count on them to rally around the public schools they've just hamstrung when the voucher crowd tries to argue that North Carolina needs more school choice.

Posted August 13, 2004 12:00 AM