Yes. And there were differences in the race also on the average. It was
overlapping but the majority showed a difference. It astonished me and
alarmed me, and I asked them if they would withhold that action and not
mandate the cutoff score until we could have some experience with it. I
said you don't know where the cutoff score, the minimum score, should
be. I said it occurs to me that it ought not to be below this point
where at least twenty-five percent of the teachers would be black
because they were twenty-five percent of the population. To be fair to
them we ought not have a score so high that we could not get twenty-five
percent of our teaching replacements with blacks.
[Interruption]
A.C. Dawson, who was the head of the NCAE staff, got wind of it, and he,
of course, was about ready to stir up the teachers about it. I said,
"Well, there is no point in creating a battle here. You've got your
budget to prosecute, and we were trying to get some more money for the
teachers. If you go and have a knockdown, drag-out fight about the
teachers examinations, it will jeapordize the budget. So let's not have
a fuss about it. Let them go ahead and tell us by resolutionn that we've
got to give the examination, and let's establish an experience with it.
There's nothing wrong with it as a law. As people who give tests,
teachers ought not to object to taking a test."
So we reached a gentlemen's agreement that we would do that. We told
Rodenbeau and Wilson and Johnson and all of them that we would give the
test. We would require it to be taken by all graduates of each of the
approved institutions. We would maintain the
records by institutions so that we could see what the experience was.
Then they wouldn't have to establish the minimum. I would see that the
board established the minimum. They agreed to pass the resolution. I
think you'll find in the legislative journal the record of that. I've
got it back there in my files.
Several years passed, I couldn't tell you now without going back to the
record what year it was, that we had finally established the entrance
level test score. It was while Dr. Carroll was there, and it was when we
adopted the so called approved program approach to teacher certification
which was advocated by the National Association of Colleges of Teacher
Education. It meant that we would send committees in to each one of the
institutions to look closely at the programs and evaluate them against
standards that were agreed upon. They would point out weaknesses and
would put some institutions on probation until these were corrected.
Essentially the program is still being followed. The time came for the
approval of the first institutions under that new approach. The
University in Chapel Hill and East Carolina were the first to come up.
Guy Phillips, the Dean of the School of Education at Chapel Hill was on
the board. We were meeting there, at night, and the issue came up. I
said, "Well, now, I will remind you that I've informed you of an
agreement we made with the legislature. I, as the chairman, made the
agreement and informed you of it. I heard no objection to it from the
board that eventually we would establish a cutoff score, and now is the
time to do it." And there was objection. I said,
"Well, I feel that if we do not, then the legislature certainly will. I
will have to tell them that you refused to do it, and I have to tell you
too that I'm not going to approve any more of these programs presented
to us until the minimum score is established as we agreed." That put a
different light on it. Dr. Carroll said, "I agree that we need to
establish a minimum score." I said, "Guy, we are not suggesting that
Chapel Hill can't train teachers. But you are the bellwether of the
whole group of institutions and if you are unwilling to have your
teachers examined, how can you expect Barba Scotia to have its examined?
They go with a degree and get a certificate equal to that of a graduate
of the University of North Carolina and Duke University with no further
examination. If you approve that program, and you're going to approve it
sooner or later, you'll make a provisional approval on some things…"
They're still doing that. I saw in the News and
Observer not long ago where they have given a notice to have it
straightened out in a certain length of time, or they weren't going—same
old ball game. People at Barba Scotia know damn well they're not going
to shut them down. So they are taking their own good time in doing what
they want to do about it.
So we put it on individual acheivement. After all, a student at Barba
Scotia who has achieved well should not be penalized because his
instututin is not up to performance. You're getting at the wrong person.
So we approved a minimum score. I think it was 950, or something like
that, to establish where we would get twenty-five percent of the black
population. The result in the next succeeding
years, we had an improvement in the performance, on the average, of the
institutions in the state of sixteen percentage points.
Craig came to see me when he was running for re-election, and he gently
brought the issue up. He wanted to do away with it, and I opposed him in
the board at formal meetings. Craig is very skillful at getting away
from the press. We all know we had the rule that we couldn't have a
meeting without the press. I told him I would not attend any meeting
that the press was not notified of even if we will have them in your
office, in your home, at Carolina beach, or anywhere else. They may not
be there but they're going to know that we're meeting. We'd go out to
the Rebel Room—you know where Red Balentine had that special room—and we
would go for a social evening together. It was a very pleasant kind of
thing. After the press came and finally got tired of it and left, then
is when we'd raise critical issues. [laughter]
He said he told the board he wanted to do away with teachers'
examinations. I said that would never do. He said, "Well, there's no law
against it." I said, "There's a rule against. There's an agreement with
the leadership of the legislature." He said, "That's ancient history.
They're all gone." Add Hewlett° was no
longer there. Grace Rosenbeau was dead, and Wilson works for the
community college. [laughter] I said, "An
agreement is an agreement. A policy is a policy that we have
established. It's part of the common law of school
policy, and it's dishonest to abolish it without notice, and I will
oppose it.
The primary was approaching. Craig came down to see me one Saturday. We
sat in there in the library, and we talked about everything under the
sun. I wondered what was it he came down here for. Finally he brought it
up. He said, "Since you oppose the elimination of teachers'
examinations, I'm not going to advocate it anymore." Skipper Bowles was
running for governor and I was trying not to get too involved in it, but
of course Craig was running. It went along fine until after the primary,
and Skipper won that. Everybody assumed Skipper would get elected, I
included. I went up to see him and talk about his program for education.
Gerald James had gotten to him and sold him on the idea of a fifty
million dollar increase in vocational education in the public schools.
Gerald used to be head of the Division of Vocational Education in the
Department of Public Instruction. He had had his following at N. C.
State and throughout the state, and he was sincere in trying to get it
passed. I said that I felt it would not be politic at all for the board
to be caught asking for less than what the Governor was likely to be
proposing. So I asked Skipper, "What do you propose to do with the fifty
million dollars?" He said, "I haven't the slightest idea. I'm going to
leave that up to you all." [laughter]
I came back by Raleigh and told Craig and A.C. Davis where I'd been and
what I'd learned. I said, "We've got to do something about that." I
didn't realize, but that's when Craig and I began
to break. He did not want Skipper Bowles, or anybody else, dictating to
him what the budget of the department should be, what we should ask for.
Davis wouldn't move. He was caught in the middle. He wouldn't put it in
the budget.
We went down to Wilmington to the superintendents' conference, and I
found that they had not prepared any fifty million dollar proposals for
vacational education. Barton Hayes was chairman of the committee of the
board, and he was very much in favor of it. He was pushing me. We went
up to see Craig in his room, and he was having a cocktail party, a bunch
of women in there and we couldn't talk business. He had a couple of guys
playing the guitar. I don't go for that kind of stuff. I don't drink,
and I don't care for it. So Barton and I went on downstairs and called
Davis on the phone and told him to come down there. We cornered him and
told him that if he did not put the fifty million dollar proposal in the
budget that Skipper Bowles' proposed that we would do so ourselves and
we were going to make issue in the formal board meeting about it. So I
went on back to Rose Hill. I don't go to conventions of undertakers, and
I don't like to go to conventions of school people where they carry on
like that. Davis called me, and he was almost in tears and said, "We
want you to come back down here." I said, "What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to see Craig. He's going to cause a lot of trouble about
this." I said, "Well, he's just going to have to cause it. I'm not going
down there anymore. I did leave a message." Then I got a call from Jerry
Melton wanting me to call Craig, same story. [I indicated to him that
the issue was not negotiable], and said "I
mean it, and I don't intend to change. Craig will just have to do
whatever he wants to do today."
The result was that Craig called me from Raleigh after the meeting was
over and said he wanted to postpone the board meeting and move it to
Greensboro instead of Raleigh. I said to myself he just doesn't want Ed
Gill to be there because Gill was not going out of town. To make a long
story short, we went to Greenboro and several of them were missing.
Charlie Jordon was there from Duke, and Barton and I. He brought up his
proposal, having button-holed all the members of the board that he could
and gotten them to agree to delete the teachers' exam in the initial
certification of the graduate with a master's degree, and to appoint a
committee to report in December whether or not to abolish the
requirement for the A certificate—that is the baccalaureate graduates.
We were outvoted, Jordan, Hayes and I, by the rest of the board.
From then until December 7, Pearl Harbor Day we called it, Craig had
effective control of the board. He abolished the plan of accreditation
of local schools and substituted the American Management Association
idea which is not accreditation at all. He just abolished accreditation.
I chose to be quiet about it. They could have voted me out of office as
chairman any time they wanted to, and I felt it strategically wise to
let the issue settle down. The News and Observer paid
no attention to it. The Greensboro Daily News had one
paragraph about the abolition of it, and it did not bother them at all,
no editorial comments. I said I must be living in
a dream world. I thought everybody would be alarmed by this. The
situation was very tense from then until December. You know the result.
Skipper Bowles was defeated. Our budget request included the fifty
million dollars. Jim Holhouser came in instead. Neal Rosser, a member of
the board that Governor Moore had appointed, had died. So there was a
vacancy on the board. Bob Scott appointed Doris Horton, Carl Goercu's
daughter. She lived in Pittsboro but he appointed her to represent the
district from Raleigh to Rocky Mount. I told him it was
unconstitutional, and he told me it was none of my business [laughter].