Profiles in Transformation: Charlotte-Mecklenburg (North Carolina) Public Schools Strategic Staffing Initiative

CHARLOTTE-MECKLENBURG (NORTH CAROLINA) PUBLIC SCHOOLS STRATEGIC STAFFING INITIATIVE

Overview

Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s “Strategic Staffing Initiative” is former Superintendent Peter Gorman’s effort to improve outcomes at low-performing schools in this 159-school district, which encompasses North Carolina’s capital city. Through the Initiative, the district assigns teams of highly skilled principals and teachers to targeted low-performing schools and grants them additional resources and flexibility in several areas. The new teams commit to three years at the schools and are given that amount of time to show improvement.

Unlike other approaches to school turnaround, the Strategic Staffing Initiative places responsibility for designing and implementing the turnaround plan in the hands of the school’s principal and teaching staff. The principal can design a plan that meets the specific needs of the school.

The initiative focuses primarily on elementary schools and on a smaller number of middle schools. It has not been utilized in high schools. Since its initiation in 2007, the Strategic Staffing Initiative has had positive impacts on student assessment scores in the targeted schools. Results on other indicators (student absences, teacher retention, etc.) have also been favorable.

An evaluation of the Strategic Staffing Initiative (January 2011) found that although each team of administrators approached the turnaround differently, there were common key elements among schools. These included the development of a collaborative, trusting workforce, maintaining a focus on a few changes at a time, and being patient — many of the schools did take time to show improvement.

The district is now confronting challenges to sustaining or expanding the program because it is so heavily reliant on highly skilled leaders and teachers, who are in limited supply within the district.

Strategic Staffing Initiative Principles

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Superintendent Peter Gorman created Strategic Staffing, based on five beliefs:

A great leader with a proven track record is key to making academic progress and to attracting and retaining great teachers.
A team of teachers coming to a struggling school is more likely to have an impact than a single teacher moving in alone.
Staff members who are not supportive of the reform plan need to be removed from the school.
Principals must be given the time and authority to develop and implement a reform plan.
Compensation should match the assignment and responsibilities.

When a school is targeted for Strategic Staffing, the district identifies principals with proven track records and invites them to apply for leadership positions in the schools. Once selected, these principals recruit a cohort of (typically five) highly skilled teachers (the district helps vet the teachers) to move with them. Both the principal and the teachers must make three-year commitments to the school. The principal is permitted to “exit” the same number of teachers from the school. The district offers additional administrative support to schools implementing Strategic Staffing: an assistant principal and a literacy or academic facilitator.

Once the leadership team (one principal, five teachers, one assistant principal, and one literacy or academic facilitator) is in place, the district offers a flexibility package that allows them to design reform plans that meet the specific needs of the school and its students. A range of school indicators (including assessment scores, student attendance, disciplinary actions, teacher retention, etc.) is monitored annually.

Principals and teachers are offered a 10 percent salary supplement on top of their base pay. There is also a $10,000 recruitment bonus in the first year and a $5,000 retention bonus in years two and three. These bonuses end after the third year.

In Practice

Several operational considerations play a significant role in the Strategic Staffing Initiative. After the first year, the district agreed to bring the principals into their new school mid-year — in February. Thus the new principal has several months to assess the school’s individual challenges and to recruit the lead-teacher teams accordingly.

The principal determines the components of the reform plan. The district allows the school flexibility from district rules on instruction, school schedule, student groupings, and others. In most cases, principals focus first on changing school culture to build both teacher and student expectations. The district’s evaluation of Strategic Staffing found that a key component in virtually all the successful schools was work by the leadership and teacher team to build trust and buy-in from the staff. Virtually all principals moved toward more distributive leadership by their second year. Components of this initiative that seem to be most strongly supported all center on the school-based development of the reform plan and the intensive efforts to create buy-in among all parties.

Since the initiative requires some of the district’s strongest principals and teachers to transfer from often higher-performing schools, Dr. Gorman recognized that community buy-in would also be critical to the project’s success. The superintendent along with participating principals and teachers are all utilized to encourage parents in the “sending” schools to embrace the reform. “We are one district and we share our successes and our failures,” says Gorman. Transferring leaders and teachers assure their schools that they are excited to take on the challenge of a new building.

After Strategic Staffing’s first year, the district recognized the potential for disparate impacts on some of its best-performing schools and decreed that no individual school could lose more than three teachers to the initiative. The district now monitors the principals’ selection of teachers to make sure this promise is kept.

Costs

Information on the financial costs of the Initiative has been difficult to find. All principals and teachers selected for the initiative receive increased compensation and bonuses. In addition, the schools are provided with additional administrative and support staff.

Results

The first cohort of Strategic Staffing schools included six elementary campuses and one middle school. The second cohort was the same: six additional elementary schools and one more middle school.

Almost every school began to show gains in proficiency rates within the first year. Increases of five to twenty-three points were typical in both English and math. Science assessment scores have also risen considerably in every school. However, comparisons between Strategic Staffing schools and comparable schools in the system suggest that some of these increases may have been experienced across the board. Results on other indicators (student attendance, disciplinary actions) have been generally positive in the Strategic Staffing schools.

General Reflections

Charlotte-Mecklenburg is proud of its Strategic Staffing Initiative. By their own admission, however, the program has limited potential because of the finite number of highly effective principals and teachers within the system, according to a case study of Strategic Staffing by the Aspen Institute. Lacking a large pool of highly effective leadership and teachers, the district is turning to programs like New Leaders for New Schools and Teach for America.

Superintendent Gorman’s vision of the reform was personnel-based: Put a highly skilled, motivated team into a low-performing school, and it will improve. But given the limited availability of such leadership in the district, it may be more important to tease out more details about what those teams do in the schools – what changes are implemented, and how can the district train and facilitate similar reforms at scale?

The district’s evaluation points to several key elements that seem to have been part of the improvement: allowing significant time for teacher collaboration, instilling a culture of learning among the school staff, improving instruction within the classroom, and improving the administrative functioning of the school so that teachers and students feel supported, and red tape is at a minimum.

A final note: North Carolina is a right-to-work state, and so Superintendent Gorman was not forced to negotiate the details of this program with a powerful teachers union. Gorman acknowledged, however, that he knew that involuntary transfers of principals or teachers would be counter-productive (that teachers would leave the district if they were forced to go to a school they didn’t want to be at). The Initiative was structured so that selection as a principal or lead teacher has become a sought after recognition. While there have been no forced transfers into the targeted schools, however, there are forced removals from the Strategic Staffing buildings at the request of the new principal. It is not clear how these involuntary transfers are handled. The implications of this reform in a district with collective bargaining aren’t addressed by Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s experience.

Additional Information

Charlotte-Mecklenberg Schools website
www.cms.k12.nc.us
“Strategic Staffing for Successful Schools: Breaking the Cycle of Failure in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.” The Aspen Institute, April 2010.
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“Evaluation of the Strategic Staffing Initiative.” Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. January 2011.
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