Next fall, when the school buses roll, they may be hauling up to 7,400 additional kids from urban elementary and middle schools with empty seats to suburban ones that are already crammed to the gills.
If the school system manages to ram through a measure up for a vote Tuesday night, one that as of deadline has gotten virtually no coverage in the local media, they’ll have won a major battle in their war to reintegrate our schools.
The new weapon? The part of the Bush Administration’s No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) that allows children to flee dangerous and failing schools that accept federal Title I money. Because 15 of the system’s 37 Title I schools didn’t make their annual yearly progress goals last year, every child who attends them by law has the option to attend another school that isn’t failing.
But here’s the catch. The school system could offer these kids the option of attending other non-failing schools with empty seats. Instead, it has decided to go way beyond what the NCLB requires and offer them the option of attending any school in the county in the school lottery, no matter how packed it already is. And rather than sending these kids’ parents a letter advising them that they have the right to opt out, every student at failing Title I schools — which may have only failed in one of dozens of categories — will now have to fill out a special application if they want to return to their home school that pushes parents toward choosing another school, something the NCLB doesn’t require the system to do.
The plot thickens further once these kids enter the lottery, where they’ll rank ahead of other kids in the attendance zone who are coming from private or home schools or just moved here. In the new changes the school board will vote on, every other category of kids in the lottery is limited to no more than 25 percent of the seats in any given school except the Title I kids. That ultimately means that every Title I student who wants a seat in a particular school will be given one before suburban students who live in the attendance zone can compete in the lottery to go there.
The suburban schools these kids will compete to attend are already more than 11,000 seats over capacity at the elementary and middle school level. If this policy passes and the number of failing Title I schools continues to grow, the crush in the suburbs could be unimaginable in coming years.
The real outrage here is that the urban schools Title I kids would be vacating are some of the same ones we’ve spent three-quarters of a billion dollars to rebuild and renovate in recent years, while suburban schools burst at the seams.
The urban schools are already dotted with empty seats. (Exactly how many depends on which set of school capacity figures Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is slinging this week — they’ve distributed two versions to politicians so far this school year. It’s amazing how you can make embarrassing empty seats disappear on paper by fiddling with the way the number of music rooms in each school is counted!)
It’s not like the school system didn’t know this was coming. Congress passed No Child Left Behind in 2001, yet for three years, we spent an obscene amount of money rebuilding and renovating far more seats in urban schools than we needed (while, as we have reported, little effort was put into bringing in more experienced teachers).
You may have thought this county’s war over diversity ended when the courts banned busing for desegregation six years ago, and officially, it did. But unofficially, those who run the school system never got over the loss, and so they fight on.
The result? Busing Title I kids to the suburbs will only accelerate the suburban crunch I’ve long argued the system was deliberately trying to create. The tighter it gets in the suburbs, the greater the justification for gradually beginning to run the buses in the opposite direction, shipping suburban kids to empty seats in the inner city. After all, how can we justify spending billions more building suburban schools when so many urban schools sit half empty?
Of course, as usual, it’s low-income and African-American students who will pay the price. While the most experienced teachers in the system may be in the suburbs, the programs targeted to help these kids are in the inner city schools. Either way, they lose. In the suburbs, they’ll pass the system’s most experienced teachers in the halls as they fall through the cracks. In inner city schools, they’ll have the best of everything, including programs to help them, but they won’t have access to the system’s best teachers. Ask most school board members about this and all you’ll get is an uncomfortable silence.
And the bill for all this madness? Well, you know where that goes.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Nov 24-30, 2004.
