Wake educator charts an inspiring path

Joel Medley got his first taste of teaching at his kitchen table, where he would take a break from his high school homework to help his father, a textile mill worker, study for his GED.

His first student's success hooked him.

"The day that he walked across the stage ... I knew education was the path for me," says Medley, who grew up in Burlington. "I was so proud of my dad."

That unconventional start to an education career is fitting for Medley, who occupies an unusual corner of the educational world. Recently appointed director of the Office of Charter Schools, he will soon oversee what could be a rapid expansion of the state's charters.

Medley, 36, has been a teacher and administrator for both traditional public schools and charters - public schools that operate independently of local school districts and are exempt from some state and federal regulations.

He took his post earlier this month, and in a few weeks, he'll take applications for the first charter schools to exceed the 100-school cap that has been in place since the state first allowed them 15 years ago. The General Assembly voted to lift the cap earlier this year.

His new job is ripe for conflict and riddled with uncertainty. The hundred schools he oversees could double or triple on this watch - or not - along with his three-person staff.

And the growth in charter schools will undoubtedly have critics. Local school boards and administrators have long voiced concern that charters rob traditional public schools of much needed funds.

But charter advocates say he is the right man to take over a challenging job - and to usher their movement into a new era of prominence.

"He's brought with him confidence that he is there to support charter schools, and that has been missing in the past," says Eddie Goodall, president of the N.C. Alliance for Public Charter Schools. "Joel has one of those unique abilities to communicate and to manage, but at the same time, he's willing to roll up his sleeves and do the work."

For Medley's part, he's not concerned about the number of schools or the potential for conflict. An avid bow hunter who relieves stress by zeroing in on homemade bulls-eyes, he says his blood pressure has actually dropped since he took the job.

"Yes, we want to see more charter schools," he says, brushing off the possibility of an ideal number of schools. "But we want to see more quality. That's the key."

A passion for education

Medley wears a subdued veneer that is easily shattered by his enthusiasm for a variety of topics: Civil War history, bow hunting, and, most importantly, education.

He was the first person in his family to earn a college degree; he has since earned two master's degrees and is in the process of completing his Ph.D.

His office is lined with books on education, though the snippets he offers from his varied teaching career seem anything but conventional: teaching an elective class on "street law" with an emphasis on crime and personal freedoms, for instance, or teaching a fellow hunter to use the Pythagorean Theorem to improve his aim.

His first teaching job was about as challenging as teaching gets - at a live-in charter school for students who had been removed from their homes by the Department of Social Services.

He taught history at Lakeside Charter School in Elon but also had to teach an algebra class at the short-staffed school. The student body brought any number of personal problems to the classroom, in addition to disabilities and previous educational failures.

"I learned a lot in those three years," he says. "I learned that a kid is a kid, and you have to get through that excess baggage before you can get to the teaching."

After three years in the classroom, he took over as director. He's been an administrator ever since, though he says he likes to keep up his classroom skills - he teaches Sunday school, and he often leads training sessions for charter administrators and teachers.

His wife is also a teacher, though she is currently staying at home with their two young children.

He went from Lakeside to Guilford Middle School, a traditional public school where he was assistant principal. He was at that job when, on a whim, he applied for a consultant's job in the state charter school office in 2005. He didn't think he was qualified, but his experience in both charter and traditional schools helped him land the job, he says.

A few years later, he was recruited by the South Carolina Department of Education, where he oversaw that state's charter and magnet programs for two years. When he feared the federal funds that paid his salary would dry up, he called up his old boss Jack Moyer, then the charter office director, for a reference.

Moyer told him that he was posting a new position; Medley applied and was hired. Six months later, Moyer retired, and Medley took over as interim director, then as director.

Small staff, big impact

The office he heads has an administrative assistant and three consultants, including Medley, who are each in charge of all the charter schools in a region of the state.

They visit the schools, handle their voluminous paperwork, and advise them on everything from personnel law to finances to testing requirements.

He will soon hire another consultant to take over his region so that he can focus on his role as director.

Advocates hope to see his office grow so that it can handle more new schools. Goodall, whose group represents charter schools statewide, fears that without a larger staff, the number of new schools that can open will be limited.

Legislators left unanswered the question of how many new schools would be allowed, though charter advocates hope there will be enough to meet the demand of tens of thousands of students on charter school waiting lists.

The job of choosing which schools will get charters beyond the current 100 will fall on an advisory board of educators and other citizens. Medley's office is currently setting up procedures for the board, and will be charged with both helping the schools to be successful and sanctioning them when they're not.

Some charter schools have been criticized for low performance, while others have been accused of skimming the best students from traditional public schools. While they have long been popular among Republicans, the Obama administration has touted them for creating innovative models that traditional public schools can then emulate.

Medley says a charter's success hinges largely on planning - and making it through the many unforeseen issues that can derail even the best plans early on. He's fond of quoting author Jonathan Schorr, who in his book "Hard Lessons" called the first year a charter school is open a "traumatic fight for survival."

North Carolina charter schools used to regularly fail. Some suffered from funding shortages, or couldn't keep teachers on staff.

Others simply underestimated the task of starting a new school from scratch: from meeting codes for building safety to managing student conflict.

Medley says the state has stemmed this problem by making each school go through a complete year of planning - none of the schools that have gone through his department's planning-year program has closed, he says.

Charter school operators say Medley is capable of walking the fine line required to help fledgling charters succeed, while also weeding out the failing schools that give all charters a bad name.

Michael Pratt, headmaster of Rocky Mount Prep charter, says Medley is a "professional realist" who supports charter schools but is capable of making careful compromises when needed.

"It's a demanding job," Pratt says. "You have to have great judgment."

Medley hopes to see charter and traditional schools work more closely together, swapping ideas that work for students and blurring the sometimes contentious line between charters and traditional schools.

"Instead of saying 'My school is doing better than your school,' I think we need to stop those conversations and figure out why whatever works in your school is working and transfer that to the other school," he says. "We're both public schools working for the public good."