CHARLESTON, W.Va. — West Virginia’s state school board has a new president and vice president, four new members and another still to come — plus the desire to upend the A through F school grading system the previous incarnation of the board put into place just last fall.
This all happened at an emergency meeting called because previous board president Mike Green and vice president Lloyd Jackson resigned immediately Tuesday evening, indicating their ideas don’t align with the vision of new Gov. Jim Justice.
The prior week, Justice had named three new board members all at once, filling two vacancies plus another he had created by naming board member Bill White to direct the state Office of Minority Affairs.
On Wednesday evening, Justice named new board member Dave Perry, a longtime Fayette County educator and state delegate, to join his previous three appointees — Miller Hall of Raleigh County, Barbara Whitecotton of Hardy County and Chuck Hatfield of Putnam County.
So Justice has named four new members of the 9 voting members of the state school board, all within the first two weeks of his administration — and still has one more to name.
HOPPY KERCHEVAL: School board members Green, Jackson, see handwriting on the blackboard and step down
Tho four Justice appointees were part of unanimous vote this morning to name Tom Campbell, a longtime member of the board from Greenbrier County, as the new president of the board. Hatfield, who served as Putnam County superintendent of schools from 2004 to 2016, was selected vice president.
The emergency meeting was simply to introduce the new board and to select the new leaders. But in interviews afterwards, members of the new board expressed criticism of the A through F school grading system put in place last fall by their predecessors.
“There’s a great deal of interest both from people in the system as well as the governor that we move things along,” Campbell said in a brief conversation after the meeting.
“We need to provide calm to the system but also support to the system. We’re talking about a lot of children here that are affected by what we do. A to F — it’s been really hard to the people in the front line. Really hard.”
The reshaped 9-member board gives Justice an immediate majority to carry out his vision for West Virginia’s education system.
I will appoint more reformers to the state board who will join me transforming WV. We owe every one of our students a world-class education.
— Governor Jim Justice (@WVGovernor) February 1, 2017
Justice is a billionaire businessman who has his teaching degree, spent a short time on the Raleigh County school board and coaches high school basketball in his spare time. He has made education one of his top priorities.
Prior to the election, the campaign platform on his website featured a section about education policy that included three bullet-point items: get the politicians out of the classroom, prepare students for a career in West Virginia and pay our teachers what they’re worth.
In his inaugural address — and with different turns of phrase — he hit on all those points while also taking aim at the new A through F grading system for schools that debuted last fall.
“We’ve got 600 classrooms in this state that can’t even field a teacher,” he said. “We’ve got to get the bureaucrats out of the way. We’ve got to worry about our kids getting an A through F versus our schools getting an A through F. We’ve got to listen to people on the ground instead of trying to administer from Charleston when we don’t have a clue what’s going on and we have proven — we have proven — we know how to be last.”
During an appearance in Bridgeport last week before the West Virginia Association of School Administrators winter conference, Justice reiterated his dislike for the A through F grading system for state schools that just made its debut last fall.
We’ve got to stop the A to F grading of our schools! #wvgov pic.twitter.com/sbbxasaeWG
— Governor Jim Justice (@WVGovernor) January 26, 2017
Justice in Bridgeport said he would replace the state’s Smarter Balanced standardized test, which weighs heavily in the A through F system, with the ACT. The state Board of Education is already considering moving away from Smarter Balanced, believing students have little incentive because the test doesn’t affect final grades or college readiness assessments.
“Not only would students be preparing for a test they take if they are college-bound, but they will take this much more serious than the state assessment,” Justice said at the association of school administrators. “We are testing these students so much that they are going through the motions with their heads down and not trying.”
With the new board, Justice has the backing to carry out his ideas.
Taking a hard look at how students are assessed will be among the first priorities, said Campbell, the new board president who also served on Justice’s transition team. In addition to A through F, the board will likely seek a replacement for Smarter Balanced, the achievement test that made up the bulk of how A through F was determined for schools.
“That was on our agenda anyway from the other board,” Campbell said after the meeting. “We have a 30-day comment period to go from Smarter Balanced to end-of the year assessments.”
He said the accountability methods used by the school system will soon change.
“The one we have now will not look the same way it does,” Campbell said. “I would be shocked if it’s not radically changed. There has to be accountability, but I think the way that system has been designed and implemented I’m not sure it’s even achieved accountability.
“When you have a system that is hard to implement and perceived as so unfair, I don’t think you’re really getting the results you want. Accountability should only be done to improve results, and if we trust our professionals in the classroom and the principals — not one of them has ever told me they don’t want to be held accountable — but they want to be held accountable in a fair manner that doesn’t take a lot of their time so they can teach the children.”
One of the new board members, Whitecotton, who retired as Hardy County’s superintendent in 2016 after 41 years as an educator, echoed Justice’s desire to return control to county school systems.
“I would like to see more accountability back at the county level — in other words, local control. Absolutely, emphasis on our students and our teachers and our students learning to their maximum capacities. I’d like to see us put the students first. And let our school systems do what they need to be doing.
“That doesn’t mean they’re not held accountable. I believe in strong accountability, but I believe we can have a system of accountability while still allowing our county school systems to do what they need to do in order to get our students learning at the level we know they can learn.”
She expressed misgiving about the A through F school grading system.
“I am not totally supportive of A through F. I have grave concerns over A through F — and just providing labels,” she said. “I think the F concept really is a negative thing for everybody concerned. I think we can have an accountability system without making people think they’re failing, and that F means failing. Probably every school we have in West Virginia needs some kind of improvement, and that’s our jobs.”
The Smarter Balanced standardized test that provides much of the determination for the A through F grades also deserves reconsideration, Whitecotton said.
“Smarter Balanced has given us challenges — challenges in the reporting that goes back, challenges in getting the test results back in a timely manner that we can make decisions on student achievement with our individual students.”
Miller Hall, a new board member who has served in the Raleigh County school system for more than 40 years in various capacities, said he agrees with Justice that power needs to be returned to local school systems.
“I’ve been in the central office, I’ve been the principal, I’ve been a little bit of everything — and I think they need to make decisions and have accountability at the local level. Some things the law says we have to do and some things we don’t, but I think with the governor and local control we can get a lot of things done.”
Hall said the A through F system diminishes community confidence in schools and students’ confidence in themselves.
“A through F was based upon students. When you start grading the whole system A through F that hurts the community. When a school gets an F, the community says ‘Are the teachers not doing their job? Are the kids not learning anything? They don’t know what they’re doing.’
“You don’t want to hurt those kids because it gives them a lack of confidence. You don’t want to make the kids feel like they’re not being successful. You see an F school, some of those kids are making great grades. It’s something we need to work on. We will look at it.”
The newest board member, David Perry — a former teacher, principal and state delegate from Fayette County — said he was contacted Wednesday to see if he would be interested in serving and then met with Governor Justice that night. By Thursday, he had an official nameplate and a place at the board’s table.
He, too, would like to ax A through F.
“Well, I’m not in favor of the A to F, and I think it was poorly imposed,” he said after the meeting. “The A to F grading system came from the state of Florida. It was implemented quite differently and implemented with certain incentives and bonuses and so forth, and none of that accompanied the A to F grading system in the state of West Virginia.”
In an earlier, separate conversation with reporters about a variety of issues, House Speaker Tim Armstead said he sees common ground with a lot of Justice’s education ideas and that legislators are ready to work with new board members.
“The state board is in transition now, we had been talking with some of the board members who are not there now,” Armstead said. “We’re going to need to regroup and work with them, but we’re willing to do that.”
Armstead said West Virginia’s education efficiency audit, completed in 2012, described a top-heavy system.
“That’s not the way we should run our school system,” Armstead, R-Kanawha, told reporters during a discussion in his office. “We have talented teachers, principals and superintendents, and they have their hands tied.”
He singled out the Smarter Balanced test for criticism.
“It is now, I believe, a universal belief that the Smarter Balanced test is not working,” Armstead said. “It takes too much time. They have to do it by computer so if you only have limited computer resources in your school it can take up to two or three weeks to do that test for everybody to do it. It has become a huge obstacle for them.
“We need to revisit and look at a different method of testing our students.”
Armstead said he was surprised by the resignations of Green and Jackson.
“It’s a little unfortunate we’re at this situation right now. If we’d had a little bit more stability as we went into the session, it would have helped,” Armstead said. “When those new members get in and they start their job, we’ll start working with them.”
But, he added, “I really hope we can work with the new board to not follow the course we’ve followed in the past, which is a very Charleston-centered approach. If we get a new board that is willing to look at trusting our teachers, trusting our principals, trusting our superintendents, letting them do their job then I think we’re all going to win with that relationship.”