If you brought in a cartographer from Alaska who knew nothing about local politics and showed him last year’s maps of where Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools planned to build and renovate schools in the next decade, he’d be baffled.
The colorful dots representing the new schools CMS has now built, or planned to build or renovate at the time, are mostly in the center, where the bulk of the county’s population doesn’t live. A few stray dots are scattered in the suburbs, where most people in this county do.
The date of these maps, which were part of the Long-Range School Facilities Master Plan, is September 2003, just before a suburban majority took over the school board. This was far more than a building plan; it was a desperate blueprint for one last stab at integration by the same school board that fought in court to keep the system integrated. It was a plan not just to renovate schools, but to cluster the bulk of the newest seats in and around its center, which over time would force white kids to be bused in, reintegrating the system. That’s why many schools already built and renovated under this plan now sit half empty. They were overbuilt, and that was no accident.
To understand how we got here, you’ve got to understand the thinking of the last school board. They knew that without busing, suburban schools would get even whiter, the best teachers would follow, and the disparities would snowball in an endless Catch-22. So the way they saw it, they had three choices: Shut down dilapidated schools in the county’s center, forcing minority kids into suburban schools; build new seats in the center of the county, which would eventually force suburban kids into those schools; or dictate to teachers where they would teach and let the kids follow them, a game teachers wouldn’t be eager to play and that low-income children would never win.
The last school board was midway through option number two when the unforeseen disaster occurred. They lost control of the school board after suburbanites finally noticed that all the school construction they kept voting for didn’t include much for them. The new board has, of course, no intention of filling the extra seats planned and built in the center of the county with suburban kids. Instead, it has completely reversed direction, leaving some of the center county schools that still need work in limbo. Before they’re done, the new board will likely blow hundreds of millions more on suburban schools we should have built five years ago.
But in the midst of this never-ending racial tug-of-war over where white kids and black kids will go to school, the part where we actually educate them is still getting lost.
The result is a mess that only gets lip service, at best. Folks can stick all the “we support our schools” signs they want in their yards, but it won’t change the fact that on average, the higher the percentage of minorities you find at a school, the greater the number of inexperienced teachers you’ll find (See “Flawed Priorities,” CL, April 28). Nor will it change the fact that the best teachers in the system are piled on top of one another at two dozen of the system’s top-scoring, largely white schools. And it won’t change the fact that if you don’t live in the zone around one of those schools, you’re just vying for the best mediocre education you can get for your child, if that.
This doesn’t just mean that the poorest schools get robbed, which goes without saying. It means that schools where no one race dominates run the gamut from below-average to average test scores and experienced to inexperienced teachers. For suburbanites, it means you still either have to move or put your kids in private schools if you want an education for your child that’s consistently the best. School administrators can whine all they want about how that hurts the school system, but the truth is that until they put out an educational product that’s at least somewhat consistent throughout that system, they can’t legitimately expect parents to buy into it.
For the last decade, our school boards, including this one, have made a big show of where they’re building schools, but have shown far less interest in what’s going on inside them. I think that’s because they really don’t want to know why teachers leave certain schools at a higher rate than others. They don’t want to talk about the true scale of the discipline problems. Some school board members are willing to talk about the fact that some principals at low-performing schools in this system needed to be shown the door a long time ago. But none of the board members I’ve talked to are willing to go so far as to actually do anything about it.
And they definitely don’t want to talk about how the hundreds of millions of dollars we spent on shiny new schools and all the cool new stuff inside them isn’t attracting teachers like they said it would. So, in short, we wind up with the same old system wearing a shiny new veneer.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in May 5-11, 2004.
