Source: Rhino Times Greensboro

Survey Says: School Skeptics Still Around

by Paul C. Clark

January 28, 2010

Guilford County Schools has released the weirdly honest results of a lengthy survey of parents and other county residents on their level of satisfaction with the school system.

It may sound odd to be surprised that a school system has done an honest accounting of the opinions of the customers it serves, and the taxpayers who pay for that service. But Guilford County Schools has traditionally, when doing such surveys, put its thumb heavily on the scale by giving respondents a choice of answers, all of which are acceptable to administrators at the North Eugene Street headquarters.

So, in recent years, you saw surveys with questions of this sort.

Do you think the level of service from Guilford County Schools is:

A) Great

B) Nifty, or

C) Swell

Another favorite tactic of the school system was forcing a card on respondents in questions that asked for solutions to particular problems. If administrators liked three particular options for addressing school violence, they would list those options, ignoring others that probably made more sense to people outside the North Eugene Street ecosystem.

Such tactics made the feel-good surveys generated by the school system under former School Superintendent Terry Grier suspect, to say the least, as the results never quite jibed with what you heard from parents or the public. The new survey, the results of which were released at the Guilford County Board of Education retreat on Saturday, Jan. 23, seems more trustworthy.

Part of that change may be because the survey was conducted by an outside group, the National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA), which surveyed 412 parents and 400 county residents in November and December 2009 and held focus groups. Another part may be attributable to the administration of Superintendent Mo Green, which has been more open in its dealings with the public and less resistant to criticism.

Participants in the survey were tentatively favorable toward Green and his administration for its new culture of transparency – but weren’t reluctant to slam the school system for its top-down management style in recent years. That’s another reason the survey seems trustworthy – it contains criticisms rarely aired publicly under Grier.

According to a summary of the results presented to the school board by Guilford County Schools Chief of Staff Nora Carr, county residents see Green’s administration as more open than Grier’s, but still have a way to go before they will fully trust the school system.

“They said you are in transition from being autocratic to being democratic,” NSPRA Executive Director Rich Bagin wrote. “Those who remain skeptical because of the past are still waiting to see if the new superintendent can walk his talk.”

In the waning days of Grier’s reign, some school board members, including Darlene Garrett and Garth Hebert, talked about what they called a “climate of fear” in the school system, in which teachers and parents were afraid to voice their criticisms of Guilford County Schools. Administrators and other school board members dismissed such statements, but the NSPRA found that the fears were real.

“Because of the culture of non-trust in the past, some staff members and a smaller group of parents seem to exhibit a fear of reprisal if they speak up against the policies and practices that they feel need improvement,” Bagin wrote. “They see surveys, focus groups and listening tours as ‘window dressing’ because they feel that their input will not be used.”

Some other findings of the survey:

Most parents and community leaders are unaware of Green’s reorganization of the school system into five regions.

“When some acknowledged them, they thought that they were set up as buffers to shield the superintendent,” Bagin wrote. “While others, as those in the community focus groups at High Point, thought the regional superintendent there was making a difference in his outreach efforts.”

The school system’s efforts to brand the regions with identities parents will identify with seem to be failing. Of parents surveyed, 73 percent had no idea what region their child was in.

Parents generally gave the school system, Green and other employees, and the school system’s programs good-but-not-great reviews. On a 10-point scale, all rankings for school system performance fell between 6.4 and 7.7

The highest rankings on the list were the school system’s magnet schools (7.7), its teachers (7.6), its advanced-learning program (7.5), its principals (7.3) and its support staff (7.2). Following those were the school system’s quality of education (7.0), choice programs (7.0), central office administrators (6.7) and regional superintendents (6.7).

Parents ranked Green a 6.9 on his performance as superintendent – and the school board trailed the list, with a lackluster 6.4.

Carr said that school boards are just one of those things people love to hate, and regularly score low on such surveys.

Several school board members said the survey showed that the school board needed to improve. Garrett said, “We need to work harder.”

The county residents surveyed gave the school system a 6.8 on doing a good job, a 6.6 on being headed in the right direction – but a dismal 5.6 on spending taxpayer dollars wisely.

School board member Kris Cooke said that score was as important as any in the survey. She said, “I think even the Board of Education does not understand how money is spent in some cases.”

The top three concerns county residents had about the schools were education quality (34 percent), the need for better teachers (21 percent) and school safety, including violence and bullying (20 percent). If you added lack of discipline (11 percent) to the last figure, school safety came in second.