Magnet plan as easy as iPhone? CMS is still building it

By January, Elyse Dashew hopes the new version of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ magnet lottery will be as easy for families to use as an iPhone.

But the school board’s vice chair warns that Tuesday’s presentation, which will be most people’s first glimpse of the full plan, will be more like listening to someone talk about building one. “The complexity is a little daunting,” Dashew said Monday.

Seven of nine board members on Monday reviewed the most detailed version of the plan released yet, preparing for Tuesday’s meeting. They heard how the staff plans to use a new measure of socioeconomic status to award seats in popular magnet programs, and how students in a handful of persistently low-performing schools will get new opportunities to switch schools.

Board members and staff repeatedly emphasized the importance – and the challenge – of making a complex system clear.

“This is only as good as the communication and marketing,” Superintendent Ann Clark said.

For starters, there’s a new acronym: SES. It stands for socioeconomic status, a measure that uses average household income, single-parent families, adult educational attainment, English proficiency and home ownership to rate each Census block as high, medium or low.

This could be especially confusing to people who are used to talking about school poverty levels, where “high poverty” signifies schools with the greatest challenge, noted policy adviser Sarah Crowder. Under the new system, schools and neighborhoods with low socioeconomic status have the most disadvantaged students.

Each family will be asked – but not forced – to report their own income and parents’ education level when students apply for school options. That will be merged with the Census block data to rate each student as high, medium or low SES, as the district tries to ease away from the high poverty concentrations that characterize many schools today.

For full magnet schools, the goal will be to admit equal numbers of students from each category, using an elaborate lottery system that awards seats based on various priorities and guarantees.

For magnet programs located in neighborhood schools, the magnets will be used to balance the neighborhood demographics. That means in a school that is overwhelmingly low SES (remember, that means high poverty), most of the magnet seats would be set aside for high and medium SES students. Only if those seats remain unfilled would they be opened up for any other applicants.

In addition, students from schools that have been on the state’s low-performing list for three straight years will have a high priority for magnet seats and a chance to switch to other neighborhood schools through the January lottery. For 2017-18, those schools are Cochrane, Eastway, McClintock and Sedgefield middle schools and Sterling and Tuckaseegee elementaries.

That’s a smaller pool than the 25 CMS schools that were rated low-performing in 2016, based on student proficiency and growth on last year’s state exams, or the 22 the state considers persistently low-performing because they’ve earned that rating two out of the last three years.

District officials say they’re trying to strike a balance: Offering alternatives for students who need them without undermining schools that are working toward better performance.

Each student who qualifies for the “school performance priority” will get an individualized list of neighborhood school alternatives that have space and are close to that student’s home. Student placement executive Scott McCully said academic achievement will also be a factor.

Board Chair Mary McCray and member Ericka Ellis-Stewart said previous opt-out plans have offered students alternatives that are little better.

“As a parent, if my children are currently sitting in an F school, you’re going to give me a D school?” McCray said, voicing skepticism she expects to hear.

“They should have access to A’s and B’s only,” said Ellis-Stewart.

Meetings and public hearings on the student assignment revisions will continue through this month, with a Nov. 9 vote scheduled for changes taking effect with the 2017-18 assignment lottery in January lottery.

On Thursday CMS is scheduled to give Mecklenburg County commissioners a report. McCray said that will provide a first test of the district’s ability to explain the plan clearly. Commissioners control the CMS budget, and while the cost remains unknown, the changes are expected to bring expenses.

“It’s important that (commissioners) see that it is an investment in our families,” she said. “If we’re investing, we’re going to need their investment as well.”

This story was originally published October 10, 2016 at 2:06 PM with the headline "Magnet plan as easy as iPhone? CMS is still building it."