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Saul Cooperman, a former New Jersey state commissioner of education, offers a provacative idea in a Nov. 2 commentary (registration may be required) for Education Week.

Cooperman, who is the president of the N.J.-based Citizens for Better Schools, suggests that perhaps small class size is not all it's cracked up to be.

"There is an alternative to the lower-is-better panacea that is not complicated at all," Cooperman writes. But he adds that it is "heretical to most educators and parents alike."

His idea?

"Increase class size and use the money saved to pay teachers more."

Fights. Bullying. Students talking back to teachers.

Theses problems aren't unique to Kiser Middle School, but the school has struggled with discipline issues this year. Kiser has suspended 187 students this year - that's one-quarter of the total suspensions for all 19 middle schools.

Part of that apparently is because Kiser officials are taking a hard line on student behavior. Students who act up are getting help, but if they still don't behave, they get suspended.

Many parents say they are concerned about the school's climate. Others say they don't see much of a problem.

Tuesday night is a big night for Terry Grier and the Guilford County Board of Education.

The board will conduct Dr. Grier's annual review - and discuss possibly raising his pay - at Tuesday's meeting. But if you plan to go, bring a book and maybe a pillow: the item is the last one on the agenda and the review will be in closed session, although the board will read a brief summary and announce any pay raises afterwards.

There's plenty of other stuff on the agenda, though, including continued redistricting discussion and an update on Northern High School. To read the full agenda, click here:

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UPDATE: You can read today's story previewing Dr. Grier's review here.

The North Carolina Child Advocacy Institute in Raleigh has put together an interesting new database on children and families in North Carolina.

Using this database, you can look up demographic information on each House and Senate district in the state. What kind of information is available? Well, you can find out how many kids dropped out of school in your neighborhood, how many are being raised in single-parent homes, how many are poor or non-English speaking and how many are being raised by grandparents.

It's valuable information and just as importantly, it's now easy to access.

You can look up your House and Senate district on the NCCAI Web site using your zip code. But here's a quick list for Guilford County:

The merry pranksters of north High Point are at it again.

Last month, we told you about their Halloween exhibit, which poked fun at school board members Dot Kearns and Susan Mendenhall. Mrs. Kearns and Mrs. Mendenhall aren't the most popular folks in the world among Southwest High School supporters, as anyone who has ever read this blog or the N&R knows.

As you probably know, the pranksters have a new exhibit up on Southwest School Road. This one depicts a giant turkey named, well, Terry and a group of students asking to go to school across the street at Southwest. But why am I telling you all this? A picture is worth a thousand words....

Whew! School board afficionados got their money's worth last night. The meeting was so eventful that we had two stories for today's paper.

The big news is that the school board didn't give Terry Grier a pay raise. However, Dr. Grier will be able to earn a performance bonus next year based on the 2005-06 school year. The board will decide those specific goals at their next meeting.

The closed-door review of Grier's performance started around 9:40 p.m. It ended right at 1 a.m. That meant it was too late to get in our Rockingham and High Point editions, unfortunately. But we got it in the Greensboro edition and it is online, plus we'll follow it up for everyone on Thursday.

But that's not the only news. The board deadlocked 5-5 on a vote to approve a contract to build the new Northern High School. That means the construction project will be delayed - by a month or two or as much as a year.

The Northern project, as presented by the staff, was $10 million over budget. But they said that was as good as it was going to get, given the sharp rise in construction costs in recent months. They asked the board to approve a contract and get this badly-needed school built.

But board member Deena Hayes had a big problem with the fact that zero dollars of the $37 million project would be going to African-American contractors.

Staff members said that minority contractors are scarce to begin with in some fields and others aren't able to get bonded, as state law requires. Basically, a bond is a financial guarantee to the customer that the work will get done, but it does require that the contractor has some up-front money.

Anyway, the board's three African-American members (Hayes, Amos Quick and Walter Childs) formed a coalition with its two most fiscally conservative members (Anita Sharpe and Darlene Garrett), who were concerned about the cost overruns. This voting bloc was able to defeat the project.

So would the contract have passed had Marti Sykes been present? We don't know. However, Mrs. Sykes had a valid reason not to be there - she is representing the Guilford County school board at the annual SERVE conference on school improvement, which is taking place in Savannah.

The Guilford County Board of Education has called an emergency meeting for 1 p.m. Friday to reconsider the Northern High School construction bid.

Tuesday night, the board deadlocked 5-5 on a proposed $37 million contract to build the new high school. Some board members weren't happy that the bid was $10 million over budget. Others expressed concern that no African-American contractors received any business.

Local elected officials got a lesson in the so-called achievement gap Thursday from a Guilford County Schools statistician.

Gongshu Zhang gave a presentation to members of the Guilford County Board of Commissioners and the Greensboro City Council. Zhang said that poverty and academic performance are more closely linked than race and academic performance.

Superintendent Terry Grier and board member Dot Kearns said this shows the need for socio-economically diverse schools, which certainly has been a controversial subject.

Thursday's meeting was sponsored by the Guilford Education Alliance.

And on a related note, liberal education author Jonathan Kozol speaks out for diverse schools in this interview in the new issue of NEA Today magazine.

Sigh. Another week, another Guilford County Board of Education meeting.

Last week, the board had two meetings: a marathon Tuesday night session (that stretched well into Wednesday morning) and an emergency Friday afternoon get-together.

On Thursday, the board will meet: 5:30 p.m. at the GCS Central Office, 712 N. Eugene Street in downtown Greensboro. The biggest item on the agenda probably will be the closed-session discussion of Terry Grier's performance goals. If Dr. Grier meets these goals, he can earn a pay raise.

The board also will discuss redistricting and the calendar for the 2006-07 school year (we'll have more about this in Wednesday's paper)

You can read the agenda here. I've got a feeling this one could be another long one.

We had a request to post today's thought-proviking guest editorial by Richard B. O'Neal. Mr. O'Neal, a retired educator, shares six ideas for improving the local schools. Here is what he had to say:

"The child is the center of our educational pursuits. The teacher is hired to serve as an assistant to the child in his or her education. The principal is hired to make sure the entire staff of the school serves the child to the best of its ability.

Guidance, health services, custodians and cafeteria staff provide their own unique services. The central office, including the superintendent, are minor functionaries.

A question: Why is there so much money allotted to the central office? I had the good fortune to be a teacher in the Greensboro public school system for 27 years before I retired. My firsthand experience informed that rarely did anyone in the central office (professional staff) provide my students or me with a valuable service.

My solutions to Superintendent Grier and the school board are:

North Carolina's second-largest school district is looking for a new superintendent.

Bill McNeal, superintendent of the Wake County Schools (Raleigh), has announced his retirement at the end of the school year. McNeal will become the executive director of the N.C. Association of School Administrators upon his retirement. He was the national superintendent in 2004.

The state's biggest school district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, also needs a new leader, since James Pughsley also is retiring at the end of the school year.

Lindalyn Kakadelis, executive director of the North Carolina Education Alliance, has written a rebuttal to a New York Times article that gave credit to Wake County's student assignment plan for improving academic performance.

The Wake County plan seeks to create socio-economic diversity in the schools. Yes, academic peformance is up in Raleigh. But as Ms. Kakadelis points out, it's up all across North Carolina and most schools don't have busing to create diversity.

How does this relate to Guilford County Schools? Well, the majority of school board members and Superintendent Terry Grier have expressed support for socio-economic diversity as a means to improve schools. This, of course, is the basis of the High Point high school reassignment plan that anyone who has paid attention to the News & Record in the past two years knows about.

To read Ms. Kakadelis' editorial, scroll down to page 9. This is in pdf format, by the way, so you'll need Adobe Acrobat to read it.

Last night, the school board set its 2005-06 goals for Dr. Grier.

If the superintendent meets these goals, he could receive a pay raise next fall.

The board had some trouble striking a balance between being specific and demanding more than can be done in six months. For example, the board originally wanted Dr. Grier to conduct an employee job satisfaction survey and respond to those results. Some board members felt that was too much to do in a short time, so they altered that goal to simply designing a survey. The results will be collected and acted on for the 2006-07 school year.

And here is the rest of the news from last night's school board meeting.

We've had a couple of requests to start a thread on a new High Point workforce preparedness study. This certainly relates to education, since the public schools are where most people get their basic training for the work place.

Also, you can read the News & Record's editorial about this study here.

We're always glad to take requests on discussion topics; after all, this is your forum.

Frequent poster Barbara Ann sent me this story from the American School & University Website about a school in Houston that is housed in a renovated factory building.

That brings to mind some good questions about Guilford County. The school district obviously needs space and many of the current bond projects are coming in way over budget. Could some abandoned buildings around the county be a cost-effective answer? If so, what buildings do you think would make good schools?

The school district already has found one creative way to create more space by starting middle college high schools. These small high schools are located in existing buildings on college campuses, meaning the taxpayers don't have to foot the bill for a new building.

It's been a (thankfully) quiet holiday week in Guilford County Schools. But the school board is getting right back to it at the start of next week.

The board will meet with members of Guilford County's legislative delegation to discuss the minority contractors situation. The lunch meeting is scheduled for noon at the GCS central office, 712 N. Eugene St. in Greensboro.

This was a big controversy earlier this month. Several board members, particularly Deena Hayes, expressed concern that none of the $38 million budgeted for Northern High School's construction would be spent with African-American contractors.

White students are leaving the Cupertino, Calif. high schools in droves. White enrollment at Lynbrook and Monta Vista high schools has dropped by nearly half in the past decade and many white families say they are avoiding the city's public schools altogether.

Lynbrook and Monta Vista must be failing, right? White students must be leaving because they aren't being challenged academically.

Well, not exactly. White students are leaving because there are too many high-performing Asian kids in the Cupertino schools. The schools are among the highest-performing in northern California and grades are so high that students with a "B" average are in the bottom third of their class.

Perhaps the most troubling thing to me is that white families aren't leaving high-performing (but whiter) schools in nearby Palo Alto. The message seems to be, "We like academically competitive schools, but we don't like competiting with Asian-American students."

This seems to be a sharp contrast to something Ronald Reagan said. Reagan, when he was governor of California, proposed eliminating race as a criteria for admission to the state's universities.

Someone asked him, "Well, what if Asian students beat out white students for those spots?"

Reagan's response: "So what?"

The Guilford County Board of Education has a choice to make on redistricting: Do they redraw attendance lines across the county, as board member Anita Sharpe has suggested, or do they simply redraw lines to fill the new schools that will be built? Sharpe has requested maps that will put all students as close to home as possible.

Board members once again will discuss redistricting at their Dec. 6 meeting. They still hope to have this all finished by January.

It's short notice, but I just learned that three school board members are hosting a public forum on minority student issues Tuesday night.

Topics will include test scores, suspensions and expulsions, the impact of redistricting and minority academic successes. The forum will be hosted by Guilford County Board of Education members Walter Childs, Deena Hayes and Amos Quick, all of whom represent heavily minority districts.

The forum will be from 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday at New Light Missionary Baptist Church, 1105 Willow Road in Greensboro (near Dudley High School.)

Don't say we aren't giving you your fill of school-related news this week!

For starters, the Guilford County Board of Education met with state legislators yesterday to discuss the minority contractor situation. We've talked about this before and Doug Clark has a thread going on his blog, but the short version is that some board members want more African-Americans hired to do construction work for the district.

Also on Monday, Guilford County's newest school, McLeansville Elementary, opened its doors. Or should I say reopened. The school was a middle school for decades, but closed in 1999. It's been refurbished and looks really nice. The new school will help with growth in the eastern part in the county.

Finally, we brought you the sad story of Charles McMillan. McMillan, a former Andrews High teacher, pleaded guilty to improperly touching a 16-year-old student.

Last night's minority student issues forum was a thought-provoking session.

About 70 people attended the forum, which was called by school board members Deena Hayes and Amos Quick. Most of the talk centered around student discipline and suspensions, which are high among African-American students.

A new state report released Wednesday shows crime in Guilford County Schools rose for the fourth year in a row, and was higher than the state rate. (Table 6b lists school districts and individual schools.)

The report tracks 17 offenses that schools must report to law enforcement. The crimes range from assault on an official and rape to burning a school building and drug possession.

Read the full story in the News & Record Thursday.

What do you see happening in the schools? What will the district need to do to prevent these crimes?