Editorial: How to confront resegregation
The school board is tiptoeing into perhaps Charlotte’s most important public policy debate in decades.
Faced with more resegregated and struggling schools, the board is exploring options.
Build more magnets? Bus students? Leave low-income students where they are and re-think how we help them?
Any option you pick, you’ll have vocal and angry parents standing in opposition.
Still, the school board is asking the right question. Charlotte, a model for desegregation in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, has lost ground in the wake of U.S. District Judge Robert Potter’s 1999 court order banning the use of race in student assignment.
Despite research showing that low-income children fare worse at high-poverty campuses, the number of high-minority, high-poverty schools in Charlotte jumped during the 2000s from about 10 to more than 40. Today, 62 out of 164 campuses are more than 90 percent non-white.
It is not a coincidence that a recent study ranked Mecklenburg 99th out of 100 large U.S. counties in economic mobility.
Clearly, the question must be asked. But how do you answer it without sending suburban parents stampeding off to private schools or to the growing number of charter schools?
It’s a tough proposition. We would offer these general guiding principles to help the board get started:
Don’t overreach. The charter option makes a return to busing unlikely. Find the best solution within existing constraints. Perhaps a clustering system like the one in Louisville, Ky., which groups diverse neighborhoods into integrated regional attendance zones.
Tackle the elephant. Everyone will ask: Do I keep access to my neighborhood school? If not, then tell people clearly and early on what different levels of overall diversity will cost in terms of neighborhood school switches. There’s a tipping point for how much change the community can accept. Identify it.
Pull in other leaders. This is about more than schools. It’s ultimately about zoning issues, housing patterns, economic development. Get members of the City Council, county commission, suburban town councils and Charlotte Chamber around one table and ask what they’ll do to help.
Don’t freelance. Remember the messiness surrounding the 2011 closure of Waddell High School? No more 11th hour zig-zagging. Be transparent. Give people time to digest and react to any change in plan.
Hear everyone out. School board member Tom Tate drew plaudits recently when he crafted a consensus-seeking discussion outline out of his colleagues’ concerns.
Follow that impulse going forward. We don’t all get to vote on the final plan. But we all have a stake.
We should all have a voice, too.
This story was originally published August 15, 2015 at 12:52 PM with the headline "Editorial: How to confront resegregation."