Luke Neal. Photo credit: Times-Dispatch
by James A. Bacon
One of the obstacles to enacting school reform is the difficulty in ascertaining and apportioning responsibility for Virginia’s failed schools. Is the root problem aging school buildings and unequal resources for poor school districts? Is it the inability to get rid of bad teachers? Is it the disruptive behavior of students, particularly those from poor families? A plausible case can be made that each of these plays a role.
But an article in the Times-Dispatch today makes it clear that a big contributor to educational dysfunction can be the school administration. Zachary Reid profiles the story of C. Luke Neal, a 30-year-old teacher who attended Richmond public schools, graduated from North Carolina A&T University, successfully taught several years in Greensboro and Charlotte public schools, and then returned with high hopes to Richmond to teach sixth graders at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School.
Neal quit after one quarter. He now plies his profession at Fairfield Middle School in Henrico County (no cushy setting; 70% of the students qualify for free or reduced lunch).
Neal poured out his complaints in a 3 1/2-page letter to the City of Richmond school board and other government officials. The physical conditions were deplorable — no soap, no toilet paper and mold growing on the walls. The administration was slipshod. He never received an employee identification card or email address, and his health care did not kick in until he had been on the job for more than a month (a matter of more than passing concern, as he had special needs stemming from a previous liver transplant).
Moreover, discipline was deplorable. In seven years of teaching in North Carolina, he had never experienced a fight in class. In Richmond, a “huge fight” broke out in his classroom in the first week. The students were back in class the next school day.
Neal attributed many of the problems to maladministration. “The administrators have no systems in place to make this a functional place to work and learn,” he wrote. “They don’t realize that there aren’t systems and, when an attempt was made to bring the obvious to their attention, they acted as if it’s all going well when it’s not.” Neal finally quit in exasperation when he was unable to get permission to use a website he had created for his class.
Next month, students, teachers and administrators will move into a brand, spanking new school building, part of a larger effort by the city administration to upgrade its physical plant. The move will make a nice controlled experiment. Will the quality of education improve enough to be measured? Or will the flaws in the public school administration render Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School as dysfunctional as ever?
