A – Accountability
B – Basics
C – Maximum Local Control
During the long session of the 1995 General Assembly, the State Board of Education (SBE) was directed to completely restructure public education. After months of public hearings and surveys and interviews with education professionals, the ABCs of Public Education was formulated. The plan outlined the framework for the most comprehensive restructuring North Carolina public education had seen in recent memory. The next year, more than 100 schools, in 10 school districts, piloted the new education initiative.
The plan included several novel ideas that increased accountability on the school level while eliminating a sizeable amount of state control. Accompanying this independence was greater accountability: a series of end-of-grade tests for students used to measure growth in student performance.
Between 1996 and1998 additional components were added, among them:
The ABCs of education not only concentrated on holding schools accountable for student improvement, but focused on offering financial flexibility.
Ultimately, as a result of the ABCs, districts were allowed to allocate funds where they deemed necessary. This financial flexibility did not take effect until 2000, when the Department of Public Instruction allowed 83 percent of funds to be transferred with local discretion; the remaining 17 percent were funds earmarked for at-risk students and incentive pay. Administrators assert that the ABCs program allows each school to make decisions about how to spend money and what textbooksand materials to use, allowing schools to figure out how to meet their particular students’ needs.
While critics of the ABCs applaud local flexibility and less control from Raleigh, they feel that the bonuses that are attached to the incentive programs are too liberally disbursed. According to the Greensboro News and Record, six Guilford high schools qualified for more than $500,000 in ABC bonuses, even though those schools were on the governor’s “watch list” of low-performing schools. These critics argue that ABC bonuses should be allocated on a teacher-by-teacher basis rather than on the school level. The Department of Public Instruction has responded to these criticisms to some extent. Although bonuses are still distributed on a school basis, the performance results are now reported at the classroom level to hold individual teachers publicly accountable.