He has supported school programs like Project LIFT and the Beacon Initiative to change the way traditionally underserved students are educated, supported and empowered to realize their full potential. The results increase academic achievement and graduation rates by utilizing nationally recognized professional development and providing job-embedded coaching to transform leadership, instruction and culture into sustainable results at each school.
From WFAE-FM, April 6, 2018:
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Superintendent Clayton Wilcox said the district has not seen the achievement gains it had hoped for at Project LIFT schools.
Since 2011, more than $100 million in public and private funds has been pumped into 10 predominately low-income west Charlotte schools to improve them academically.
In a presentation before a joint state legislative education committee, Wilcox said the Project LIFT program has had some successes but still faces a lot of challenges.
When Project LIFT started, West Charlotte High School and its feeder schools were not performing as well as other schools in the district. The plan was to implement new teaching strategies and give the Project LIFT schools more resources. Calendars shifted—some schools added days to the school year and four schools went to a year-round calendar. The program gave students access to technology at home and at school, something many did not have in the past.
...A target of a 90 percent proficiency rate in math and reading was set for all Project LIFT schools. Although those schools are meeting state growth requirements, about 50 percent of the students are still not proficient in those subjects.
“What we thought when this project began was that we were going to simply be able to change the learning outcomes for kids quickly," Wilcox said. "We found the work is much more complex and it’s not going to be solved by simply putting dollars in it - although dollars are a necessary component of it."
Wilcox said another challenge that Project LIFT faces is that students within the program move a lot. Last year, only 30 percent of Project LIFT eighth graders continued on to West Charlotte High School - showing that most students aren't continuing in the program.
"Most challenging to LIFT is that [students] are going to our magnet programs," Wilcox said. "They’re going to our choice program and they are not staying in the program where they began."
New students take their place, but they don't have the benefit of the whole Project LIFT experience - which includes more personalized and innovative instruction, free computers and counseling. For some, it also includes year-round school.
Ford styles himself a problem solver whose mantra is cozying up to Republicans in Raleigh.
In 2016, another of his brainwaves boomeranged when Republicans pulled up the football:
As a 33-year veteran of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, Superintendent Ann Clark knows the district’s twists and turns better than most.
But her most recent foray into state politics surprised and alarmed both the teachers who work for her and members of the school board that employs her.
The political storm arose from an April meeting among Clark, two representatives of the public-private Project LIFT and two state legislators. They talked about state Rep. Rob Bryan’s controversial Achievement School District bill, which would let charter operators take over five of North Carolina’s lowest-performing elementary schools, and how it might be expanded to give CMS more flexibility to improve some of its own struggling schools.
Clark says she has never supported the charter takeover plan, and adds that her proposals for CMS flexibility only reflect what the school board has endorsed in recent years.
But after an Observer editorial linked Clark to Bryan’s bill, CMS Board Chair Mary McCray held a press conference to emphasize the board’s opposition to the bill. Erlene Lyde, president of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Association of Educators, told the school board Clark’s apparent support of the bill left her feeling “blindsided, stabbed in the back and made to look like a trusting fool.”
Beyond the political crossfire lies an essential question: What can be done when most students keep failing at certain schools?
Those schools are easy enough to identify. They show up at the bottom of state test results year after year. Almost always they serve the most disadvantaged kids.
And it’s simple enough to conclude that those schools need something different from the educational formula that hasn’t worked for them.
The charter school movement is one response: Let independent boards create schools that can step outside the district model. With more freedom to hire and fire teachers, set longer school days or year-round calendars and experiment with educational techniques, the thinking goes, those schools can succeed with students who fail in traditional schools.
Bryan, a Mecklenburg Republican, proposed last year that the state try an Achievement School District that would let charters take over some of the state’s most persistently troubled district schools. It drew flak from people who said similar efforts in Tennessee and New Orleans had produced little benefit, and Bryan decided to wait until this year to push for a vote.
...State Sen. Joel Ford, a Mecklenburg Democrat, says he contacted Clark to suggest the April meeting that would prove so controversial. His district includes the Project LIFT schools, and he suggested working with Bryan to get CMS more freedom to improve those schools.
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