Educational Genocide? 

For nearly a decade, Mecklenburg County has tried to heal the racial wounds of the past with bricks and mortar. While suburban schools in the fastest growing areas of the county burst at the seams, the community methodically rebuilt historically black schools that had been long neglected. Even when it became obvious that some of these schools were only partially full, the county didn't stop building, because to tear one down without replacing it would have been a slap in the face to African Americans.

Hundreds of millions of dollars in voter-approved bonds later, things look starkly different at many largely poor, largely black schools. The leaky pipes, faulty thermostats and stench of old, rotting carpet that had become an urban school trademark are mostly gone. Today many of these schools have shiny computers, new library books and sprawling media centers, all built and distributed according to exacting standards so that everything is at least equal to those at schools in the suburbs, and sometimes even better. On paper, it looked like the African-American community was finally getting somewhere. Equity-obsessed political and educational leaders were so confident of this that last fall they turned their attention to the suburbs and put together a bond package that began to address overcrowding in suburban schools.

But all wasn't well at many of those new, predominantly African-American schools. Inside, the educational rot continues, although this time it isn't in the walls or the carpets or the pipes. It's in the one place nobody wants to talk about fixing: the classroom. Last year, a study by Creative Loafing found that the one factor experts agree is the most important to providing equity for poorer schools -- good, experienced teachers -- had gone virtually unaddressed by the school system. A year later, an updated study shows that all the window dressing still hides a systematic educational disparity so stark that it shocked some school board members when they first learned about it last year.

When it comes to teacher talent and experience, this district remains a caste-like, three-tiered school system that breaks down with surprising predictability along class and racial lines. Suburban schools with white majorities are still stacked with the system's most experienced teachers and have the greatest number of teachers with the much-sought-after National Board certification. Schools with the highest concentrations of minority and poor children, called Focus schools by the system, are the dumping grounds for young, inexperienced teachers who leave in a seemingly endless stream only to be replaced by more fledglings just like them. The rest of the system -- which includes schools with more balanced populations in terms of race and socioeconomics -- still lags behind the majority-white suburban schools in the county's highest-income zip codes, but not as far behind, on average, as the county's majority black schools.

After CL wrote about the problem last year, the school system briefly toyed with ideas for moving the experienced teachers who teach suburban kids into inner-city classrooms. In June, the county commission declined to fund a $17 million plan, which combined incentives to attract teachers to low-income schools and included mandatory transfers.

Then this fall, a whole new set of statistics came out that showed what was going on in CMS's inner-city classrooms during the 2004-2005 school year, while political leaders flirted with addressing the teacher problem. At Garinger High School, where 70 percent of the student population is on the free- and reduced-lunch program, a new crop of fresh-faced teachers straight out of the college dorms showed up to do combat with a new class of inner-city freshman. Nearly 40 percent of the teachers at Garinger had less than one year experience and nearly half had less than four years experience.

Peter Komarisky, a biology teacher at West Charlotte High School with 15 years experience, is blunt about why this happens. "Experienced teachers avoid the inner-city schools like the plague because they get no support," he says. That leaves first-year and inexperienced teachers to fill the slots the departed leave behind.

"The organization and support that new teachers should get, they don't," said Komarisky. "They are stuck with larger classrooms with lower-achieving children. That happens more in inner-city schools."

Veteran CMS teacher and department head Frank Machado, who retired last year after more than two decades in the classroom, says new teachers don't have a clue what they are going to be facing in the classroom, because the schools those teachers graduate from aren't preparing them to handle students. Machado believes it takes most new teachers at least three years to learn how to control a classroom well enough to actually teach in it. Meanwhile, the kids in those classrooms often don't learn much, said Machado.

"I can tell you what I think is going to happen," Machado said of Garinger High School. "Out of those [40 percent of] teachers that are first-year teachers, half of them will be gone from one year to the next."