McClellanville Schools Badly Mismanaged by McGinley

Here sits the original McClellanville Public School, right in the heart of the town. Isn't it beautiful? Doesn't it look as a school really should, rather than resembling a loading dock on a warehouse, as so many modern schools do.

In 1921 the school housed all grades. It operated for more than fifty years, then was shuttered as the Charleston County School District attempted to force integration of its schools. (How did that work out for ya?).

Then after Hugo, the school was renovated at a cost of $4.4 million in taxpayer dollars (OPM). It operated as a middle school for about 19 years; then CCSD shut it down again.

That was more than five years ago, and for five years the building has sat unused, after spending all those millions. It must be nice that the school district is rolling in so much money that now as part of its new "penny" sales tax scam, it proposes to spend half a million on studying plans to renovate the building yet again to make a high school of it. That's not half a million to renovate; that's half a million to plan to renovate.

Really, this would be a joke if the Charleston County School District did a better job of educating its students in McClellanville. It's not funny.

You can easily predict that after studying the problem, McGinley will again propose sending McClellanville's high school students to Wando High School on a cost-effective basis. And why wasn't Wando built in a more northerly part of Mt. Pleasant? Could anyone look ahead to see the long bus ride that would be foisted upon McClellanville?

Nah.

Sheheen's Incestuous Relationship with SCEA Showing

The South Carolina Education Association wants to be the equivalent of a teachers' union for South Carolina. If Vincent Sheheen has his way, it will become one.

Meanwhile, Sheheen will parrot every desire of the association. His "back-to-basics" education plan is anything but. What Sheheen knows about education can be written on the head of a pin, and a small one at that. He knows where his backers are, and "back-to-basics" has a nice ring to it. Too bad it's not about basics!

No, it's about money, otherwise known as OPM. Sheheen's education plans should be called "spend-more-money" education.

CCSD School Board Cowed into Raiding "Rainy Day" Fund

What is a "rainy day"? Well, really, it's an emergency fund, so why not call it that?

Because the emergency in the case of the Charleston County School District came about through a consultant's study of administrative salaries that the CCSD Board of Trustees approved on Superintendent Nancy McGinley's recommendation.

The emergency? the bloated bureaucracy at the Taj Mahal needs to be paid more.

McGinley and Chief Financial Officer Michael Bobby have cloaked this raid on the emergency fund by allowing the ordinary step increase in teacher pay! Imagine that! What an innovation!

Still, 75 percent of the pay increases will accrue to administrative staff in the Taj.

You can't make this stuff up. In fact, the $7.4 million taken from the emergency fund (It's an emergency! These bureacrats might leave!) doesn't fully cover the $8.5 million for denizens of the Taj. And these are ongoing salary increases that only partially meet the recommendations of the consultant's study for salary increases.

Instead, dollars for low-income middle schools get the ax.

To complete the farce that purports to be a responsible school budget, the Board, again at McGinley's recommendation, voted to forgo taxes from two TIF districts, no doubt in order to please Mayor Riley. Certainly it is not in the best interest of CCSD to forgo tax dollars when it must raid emergency funds for ongoing salaries.

You can see where this is headed. Time for an outside audit.

SC House Signs on to CCSD's One-Cent Sales Tax Extension

Don't you love it when politicians get together to spend Other People's Money? Our state House has now made it possible for voters to approve an extension of the tax for capital building programs in both Charleston and Horry Counties in the next election cycle. Otherwise, those districts might actually have a chance to pause and take stock of whether previous capital expenditures were really worth it.

My favorite statement from Michael Bobby, who is in charge of CCSD's capital program?

"The school could use the money to finance long-term bonds instead of a "pay-as-you-go" system, which they say would reduce the overall cost of projects. They could also use any additional funds generated by the 1 percent tax to reduce property taxes."

In other words, what we really need is long-term debt. And we can promise the voters that we might reduce property taxes. Actually, I've always been a fan of "pay-as-you-go." That must make me old fashioned. If you think this tax will lower property taxes, well, I've got a bridge. . . . Furthermore, sales taxes are the most hurtful to the poor among us, something CCSD Board Vice-Chairman Tom Ducker apparently doesn't mind.

As you read, Superintendent McGinley and Bobby are busy conspiring to dream up a list of "necessary" capital projects that will be of interest to voters in every corner of Charleston County. They've been working on it for months. You get the picture.

Call or email your state senator and tell him or her to vote against this bill if it actually comes to a vote in the state senate! And ask the CCSD Board of Trustees for an external audit of capital expenditures. It's past time.

CCSD Officially Crosses Insanity Line with Expanding APs

You know the definition: doing something over and over again and expecting different results.

How do you know when Charleston County School Superintendent McGinley is lying? Yes, when her lips are moving. She claims that spending another $900,000 to place 14 AP teachers in low-performing high schools is important because "we have to address the very capable students and make sure they're not being forgotten in some of our schools." Not.

No, the problem presents itself when capable students in areas served by low-performing schools petition the School Board to transfer to schools that have more AP courses. McGinley is attempting to keep more capable students in their own designated schools, thereby raising the academic climate in those schools. Nevermind that many years ago CCSD made the decision to skim off the academic cream and put it into the Academic Magnet and School of the Arts at the urging of "haves" such as Gregg Myers, thus leaving only middle-to-poor performing students in the rest of the high schools, with the exception of gigantic Wando. (CCSD could put all 300 of Burke's students into Wando with the effect of an elephant's swallowing a gnat.)

AP courses are great--for those students who have the background to succeed in them. AP preparation needs to begin as early as sixth grade for students from low-income and low-educational background to succeed. Burke's AP Academy is a case in point. Prior to AP, students need "Pre-AP," or Honors-level courses for at least three years. The accepted wisdom of the edublob is that would be discriminatory, so students who might have been otherwise capable will not qualify on the AP exam, which cannot be fudged, as with so many other measures of academic merit. No doubt Burke's AP teachers are competent and motivated and take their charges as far as possible, but spending $1.2 million over a four-year period to get a result of 10 "passes" out of 376 exams taken is wasteful. The students would be better off if the district gave each of them the $120,000 that their scores represent. Don't forget that most of the testing fees for these 366 students who did not pass were paid by the taxpayers of South Carolina. 

CCSD needs to get real about enriching programs in the lower grades feeding these high schools if it is to avoid throwing good money after bad. 

Oh, that's right. It's OPM.

CCSD's McGinley Attempts to Straddle BRIDGE She Created

Slick. That's the apposite adjective for Charleston County School District's Superintendent McGinley. No wonder she's in the running for CCSD's longest-serving top administrator.

Allegations regarding the district's BRIDGE program are flying fast and furious. Teachers are outraged. Well-known education experts such as Ravitch are taking pot shots on the national stage. Time to call a meeting.

According to McGinley's latest insights, "there might be another way" to assess good work by students. There might be an "adjustment period." There might be uncertainty over results from a new statewide test. McGinley needs a "better confidence level" than what she has now.

These statements follow upon the heels of a surprise pay raise for a top administrator who attended the Broad Institute just to learn how to implement the BRIDGE. After implementing a pilot program in CCSD to reassure teachers that the following year their objections would have been dealt with. Of supreme confidence that BRIDGE was the way to go. After all, McGinley in her quest for Race to the Top funds has guaranteed the feds that the district would use such a program. She never hinted that she had any idea of the mounting evidence that value-added scores were bogus. After all, CCSD's paying Mathematica more than a million for its take on the formula. That's OPM.

Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst is the only local group vocally supporting BRIDGE. So you're not going to be surprised to find that Eli Broad gave that group half a million dollars in start up funds.

Your edublob at work. Now CCSD begs the feds to postpone what it asked for in the first place.

EdFirstSC Finally Comes to Its Senses over CCSD's BRIDGE

Blame Bill Gates and the Obama administration.

Even though EdFirstSC finally sees the train headed for the wreck, its spokesman tries to blame SC Education Superintendent Mick Zais for the genesis of value-added teacher compensation. Zais visited the Charleston County School District to discuss Superintendent Nancy McGinley's plan to change the way teachers are compensated. EdFirstSC's members must lean heavily towards teachers who are Democrats. Yes, Republicans want teachers to be accountable, but the machinations behind BRIDGE must be laid squarely on the shoulders of the edublob and the Obama administration, especially U.S. Education Department head, Arne Duncan. They're all liberal Democrats.

Blame McGinley for applying for Race to the Top funds and accepting them. Federal money always comes with strings attached, and she knew full well what they would be. As a result of winning the grant, the district must follow Common Core standards AND implement a teacher evaluation system based on the fatally-flawed value-added model pushed by the Gates Foundation and Arne Duncan. In preparation McGinley sent Audrey Lane to the Broad Institute just to learn all about the new teacher-evaluation system and then rewarded her with a nice fat retroactive raise. And the edublob, in the form of Mathematica, got a nice $2 million (of Other People's Money) contract to figure out how to make the system fair, a goal that even those mathematicians must know is impossible.

This new system will never be fair to teachers or students. Look at the abundance of research on just this topic that Duncan, and McGinley, choose to ignore. Going after these funds and implementing the value-added compensation system in CCSD is McGinley's personal effort at her own "race to the top."

If you think testing is overrated and too important now, wait till teachers' jobs hang on these unfair results.

CCSD's McGinley Wants Extension of Tax to Groceries

Maudlin complaining about not being able to put a sales-tax extension on the ballot in 2014 without special dispensation is one thing; planning that the tax will extend to local food shopping is another.

When South Carolina was a really poor state (not so long ago for those of us over 50), the sales tax applied to everything that moved and some things that didn't. Money to run the state had to come from somewhere. That included a tax on groceries and a tax on prescriptions! Talk about regressive! Now well-heeled outsiders like Michael Bobby, Chief Financial Officer of the Charleston County School District, and his boss, Superintendent Nancy McGinley, have a bright idea: bring back a tax on groceries. To hell with the poor.

Strangely enough, or maybe not, this push from CCSD administrators has been undertaken without the CCSD School Board's approval--just the recommendation of a committee of the Board, members selected by you-know-who. They're telling us poor taxpayers that 30 percent of the sales tax revenue comes from tourists.

Well, if that is true, it won't be for long. Have you ever seen long lines of tourists standing in line at the grocery checkout? I thought not.

Common Core Testing: Edublob at the Trough

Proponents of the Common Core standards initiated by the states and adopted by most of them are fond of stating that the federal government isn't imposing its standards on anyone. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The education "establishment," or edublob, is practically salivating at the funds and promises coming out of Washington. Entire school districts and entire states (except Texas!) are trashing their own standards and textbooks in jockeying for position at the OPM trough.The Charleston County School District is a case in point. South Carolina's adoption of Common Core under the aegis of Democrat State Superintendent Jim Rex allowed the district to receive funds to finance its ill-advised teacher evaluation metrics. The edublob gets a big chunk of the money to devise ways in which student results can be calibrated to factors such as poverty (i.e., expecting the children of the poor to learn less!).

The latest sally in controlling content to issue from the U.S. Department of Education is grants to two edublob entities, Smarter Balanced (http://www.smarterbalanced.org/) and PARCC (http://www.parcconline.org/), to use OPM to develop testing appropriate to the Common Core standards. Out go the tests developed over the years that match previous standards.

Do you realize how many millions, if not billions, of OPM are now being thrown into the trash?

Look at the opportunities for earnings: new curriculum and teacher-training sessions for that curriculum; printing all those documents; developing evaluation standards for teachers and students; selling all those new textbooks. . . . Everybody gets his.

You would suppose that at some point they would exhaust their reservoir of OPM, but that will never happen. After all, all they need is to raise taxes.

Coming to a School Near You: Two Free Meals Per Day for Those Who Can Pay

Back in 2010 with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. Since then the aspect of requiring healthy school lunches has gotten all of the media's attention. Little noticed until it kicks in fully in 2014 is the "Community Eligibility Option," already operating in several cities including Boston and Atlanta. Predictably, Superintendent McGinley plans to head for the government trough as soon as she is able.

No longer will those parents seeking free or reduced breakfast and lunch need to fill out a request. No child will experience the "stigma" of being on free or reduced meals. If the community qualifies according to the law's guidelines, everybody, both rich and poor, will have free meals.

Isn't that nice? All you need do is send your child to a school in a community that meets the 40 % "poor" guidelines. Probably McGinley will designate the entire county eligible (well, it is a community). Then students who live in I'On can get free meals.

Boston claims it is saving money by not asking for applications since it no longer needs to employ couriers to pick them up and armored vehicles to pick up lunch money. I'm not making this up.

After all, it's just Other People's Money. No doubt you have often said to yourself, "Why should the rich and middle-class pay for their lunches when the poor don't!"

CCSD Feeds Millions to Edublob in New Teacher Evaluation Scheme

"Will Teacher Evals Tied to Scores Work?" queries the front page headline.

YES!

The Charleston County School District's aptly-named BRIDGE initiative will work--to funnel millions of dollars to waiting members of the edublob. You know, a bridge of tax dollars.

The Princeton-based Mathematica will receive $3 million to create an algorithm to treat each student as a product. Each year what the student learns will be dubbed, "value added." It's the assembly-line, factory model of education, teachers as workers on the assembly line whose worth is measured by how much value they add to each product, i.e., child.  Somehow Mathematica will magically adjust for "other factors, such as poverty, which could affect scores."

No wonder most teachers who are brave enough (or secure enough) to speak up are skeptical.

Let's see. Will the magic formula adjust for pot use? parent in jail? homelessness? parental neglect? How much personal information on each "product" will CCSD garner?

More importantly, will the formula produce reduced expectations for the progress of that child identified as poor? Surely someone else can see where this model logically heads: high expectations for the rich; low for the poor; high for whites; low for blacks and Hispanics. Is that really what Charleston County residents want?

Meanwhile, CCSD is licking its chops after receiving a $24 million five-year grant from the feds to provide incentives to teachers. Michael Ard, former Hunley Park Principal and BRIDGE project director, promises that "no teacher will lose money" when the district switches in three years to a new salary structure based on "quality and effectiveness." The district promises to reward with bonuses even after the grant runs out, but not lower any salaries for "low" performing teachers. The grant money for bonuses will run out after two years. Then what?

Superintendent McGinley has already primed the public relations machine by using another edublob organization, Battelle for Kids of Ohio, for public relations at the low cost of $1.3 million. Battelle will also be useful to blame if implementation of the new salary scheme becomes rocky.

Everyone (well, almost everyone) agrees that good teachers are underpaid and bad ones should be fired. No one will lose a job under this proposal, and in spite of Mathematica's formulas, no one will know under this system which teachers are really superb.

No one seems to be considering the elephant in the room: good teachers don't need incentives. They are already highly motivated, bonuses or not. Who does need incentives, then?

a) parents to then encourage their

b) students to learn.

If any teacher had the magic formula that motivates students, he or she would have retired on his or her millions long ago, and we wouldn't be having such problems in our schools.

Meanwhile, this taxpayer can easily think of many more effective ways for our government to spend $24 million.

Outsourced Day-Porters' Class Action Vs. CCSD

Last week one of CCSD's outsourced day porters filed a class-action lawsuit against the Charleston County School District. As you know, problems concerning final paychecks have been festering ever since those day porters were outsourced. Superintendent McGinley neglected to inform the Board last Monday night, but finally did after Monday's meeting when a Board member inquired why he had not been told.

The class action is for $7500 for the individual, but perhaps a hundred individuals are involved. The jury is still out on whether this outsourcing, which saved the district money on the backs of its least-advantaged former employees, will even save money.

Meanwhile, CCSD appears to have outsourced its maintenance supply and equipment warehouse to Grainger, a private company. As Grainger takes over control of the district's orders, will it reprice materials at a higher rate from its own catalogue?

Just another example of how CCSD handles OPM. Time for an audit.