Looks like the shiny shoes uptown have decided to “fix” the schools the Charlotte Way. God help us. In case you’re new to the Queen City, let me get you up to speed. There are two versions of how the Charlotte Way to fix all problems works. In the public version, they pick a committee of all the right people, then hire a consultant to study the problem, then implement the consultant’s recommendations. Only useful idiots and most news editors buy this version.
In the actual version, a small handful of members of the elite decide how they want to solve a problem. Then they handpick a committee of people who can be counted on to go along. Finally, they hire a consultant willing to arrive at their preordained conclusion in order to provide cover for what they planned to do all along, which is generally to spend a lot of money to create a few feel-good programs and probably fire a few people. Since actually solving the problems in our school system would create more negative PR — at least in the beginning — than the problems themselves, that’s not really an option. So they’re going to spin us, hard.
No one is paying me half a million bucks to produce a report, which is too bad because after two years of agitating for change and hearing from hundreds, heck probably over a thousand of you online and by phone, the problems and solutions are pretty plain to me. In fact, unlike said consultant, I can delineate them in under 600 words.
Problem: First, the school system spent seven years smacking the suburbs around in a temper tantrum that began when it lost a school desegregation suit to suburban parents. This included hundreds of millions of dollars wasted overbuilding urban and middle-ring schools while purposely letting suburban schools overflow. For a while, the system was actually using a plan that showed negative growth in the suburbs to justify this. School leaders may be dense, but they’re not that stupid. I’m convinced they did this on purpose. The stealth plan was to force racial desegregation over time by choking suburban schools while gradually shifting suburban kids into middle and inner city schools.
They figured that once they reintegrated these schools with white kids, the good, experienced teachers would come back, so there was no need to bother much with recruiting them to struggling schools until then, regardless of whether this damned a whole generation of low-income kids or not. Remember, the goal is racial equity, not education, and it’s OK if African-American kids pay the highest price in the short term as long as we produce rainbow schools in the long term.
Then they made the mistake of setting the sex offender loose at West Mecklenburg, a kid who had committed the crime for which he earned his sex offender status in a bathroom at North Mecklenburg High, and ignoring teachers’ pleas to remove him. That story, repeatedly reported in this space, was what finally pushed the would-be leaders of the secession movement over the edge, they tell me. Throw in school leaders’ bloated budgets, the 10-point test score gap between white and black kids and their counterparts of the same race in Wake County, and school leaders’ casual assertions that this is an urban system now, so you should expect less, and the whole thing exploded. This isn’t brain surgery, folks.
The solution: Simple. Start by lopping the head off the monster. Do away with our expect-less-at-CMS superintendent and about five or so of his like-minded head administrators. Then break up the school district. There is no rule that says that the only break-up model involves a separate system for Huntersville. Split it two or three ways, keeping the parts racially representative of the county, with separate school boards for each part. This is the only way to give parents of both races a voice and break the grip our lunatic fringe school board has on the system.
You’re still going to have a bureaucratic nut or two who believes sex offenders and regular students can benefit from mingling with each other. But in a smaller system, parents will have a much better shot when they work together in groups at things like removing dangerous and disruptive kids from class so teachers can teach, building temporary or permanent facilities to accommodate them, canning loony-toon administrators and getting schools built where people actually live.
Sure, this would cause upheaval and perhaps even some distasteful press coverage in the short term. But the alternative is far worse. Over the last five years, while the number of white kids has remained flat in Mecklenburg County schools, schools in surrounding counties grew by nearly 10,000 additional white students. Our school system, along with high taxes and significantly lower test scores than those in surrounding counties, has begun to drive white flight. Another decade of this will radically change the demographics of this county.
Believe me, a consultant’s report and a few million-dollar, feel-good programs won’t fool parents. If that’s the route this committee plans to take, I wish them luck trying.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com.
This article appears in Apr 6-12, 2005.
