Boom for Whom?: Education, Desegregation, and Development in Charlotte

Chapter 5 Political Fluidity and the Alchemy of School Reform

107 Chapter 5 Political Fluidity and the Alchemy of School Reform The vision is to ensure that the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System becomes the premier urban, integrated system in the nation. —Revised vision statement adopted by the school board in September 1991.1 A brilliant superintendent . . . one of the three best in the country, and I can’t think of who the other two would be. —William Bennett, former U.S. Secretary of Education, talking about CMS’ superintendent, John Murphy, December 1991.2 I always thought Murphy might get away with all our gold. I just never figured it would be in his teeth. —Comment by school board member Susan Burgess about the superintendent’s request for reimbursement for $14,000 in dental bills.3 With the start of the 1990s, CMS again attracted the attention of educators nationally, just as it had twenty years ago. But this time it was not for mandatory busing but for a high-profile program of school reform, one aspect of which was the dismantling of most of the mandatory busing plan and its replacement primarily by magnet schools. Just as the magnet plan reflected a national movement away from mandatory desegregation strategies in favor of voluntary ones, so too did CMS’ school reform program embody much of the prevailing wisdom about ways of improving urban education. The program 108 Boom for Whom? enjoyed the vigorous support of some of the most influential members of Charlotte’s business elite, as well as of some of the nation’s most prominent advocates of school reform. But despite initial local and national rave reviews, both the program and its architect, Superintendent John Murphy, became increasingly controversial. Voters rejected two school bond referendums, the first such defeats for CMS in over a generation. Moreover, in November 1995, one of Murphy’s bête-noires became chair of the school board, and Murphy subsequently resigned, effective the day before the new board took office. Finally, although it was not apparent at the time of Murphy’s resignation , subsequent analyses indicated that although CMS’ reform program had received national praise, educational outcomes were—with only one exception —generally the same or worse than those of comparable North Carolina urban districts that did not see such sweeping reform.4 Events in CMS during the early 1990s thus provide ample material for a discussion of the complicated relations among civic capacity, local politics, the development and implementation of educational policy, and educational outcomes. This chapter begins by summarizing the reform program’s auspicious start and main characteristics. It then proceeds to review the program’s political difficulties and the shortfalls in civic capacity that arose from the superintendent’s leadership style, conflicts over resegregation, inadequate support for bond referenda, and changes in representation on the school board. After covering such political issues, I turn to educational ones by first indicating how little success the reform program can claim in improving outcomes, and then I consider the program’s flawed conceptualization, development, and implementation. The chapter concludes by discussing how the reform program’s emphasis on symbol rather than substance also was counterproductive. A NEW SUPERINTENDENT AND SCHOOL REFORM ON A GRAND SCALE The Hiring of John Murphy In choosing John Murphy from among four finalists for superintendent in 1991, the school board hired a man who had already attracted national attention that was exemplified by a front-page Wall Street Journal article that appeared shortly before he assumed CMS’ helm. Headlined “Forceful Educator Gets Teachers and Children To Be More Productive,” the article discussed Murphy’s tenure as superintendent of Prince George’s County, Maryland, and noted that the county, a suburb of Washington, D.C., had been a laboratory for ideas that President Bush and Education Secretary Political Fluidity and the Alchemy of School Reform 109 Lamar Alexander wanted to apply nationally.5 It called attention to Murphy’s emphasis on magnet schools, Milliken II programs,6 tests, accountability, and a self-described management philosophy of “applied anxiety” that had led to demoting principals, transferring teachers, and freezing salaries “when he didn’t see results.” Accompanying the programmatic changes, the article indicated , were concerns that magnets were creaming resources and that teachers were teaching to the test. The article also indicated intense conflicts between the head of the National Education Association’s (NEA) local chapter and Murphy. It also noted...