Disintegration

You may have seen my home school district in The Word on the Colbert Report this past week or in excellent coverage in national newspapers. Wake County is the largest school system in North Carolina, and one of the largest in the nation, with a good reputation both locally and nationwide. I’m grateful for the education I received there, but right now, I’m frustrated and ashamed.

In the 1970s, when white flight was plaguing all of the South, civic and business leaders in Raleigh and state government did something incredible. They stepped in and united the city and county school districts, in spite of overwhelming unpopularity. The new unified district forged innovative solutions to integrate, being on the cutting edge of things like using magnet schools to reduce forced busing.

Rapid, explosive growth starting in the late 80s and continuing to today meant that new schools were continually being built. When new schools are built, children are redistricted. Suburban sprawl makes zoning particularly difficult for a large county school system, obviously. When I was a student, race was a factor in school assignments. It was fairly obvious when children were redistricted for racial reasons (almost always from lower income areas to higher income ones) and truly, not that pervasive. About ten years ago, the school system switched from race to economics in school assignments, aiming for no school to have more than 40% of children on free or reduced lunch. The county continued to experience rapid growth in all socioeconomic groups.

It’s funny to hear parents and school board members fighting for “neighborhood schools” for their subdivisions of “little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same.” There aren’t enough schools in between the subdivisions to serve them! But the school board members were able to “stop social engineering” and overturn using economic status as a factor in school assignments.

In my experience, the busing has always been done well, I have not heard complaints of people whose children actually have to ride a bus for an hour a day. The vast majority of parents were happy the way it was. The superintendent resigned in protest of the school board decision and it has caused a firestorm of controversy.

Wake County had not arrived and poor students still lagged behind their wealthier peers in testing and graduation rates. But believing that a return to “separate but equal” is okay, or might work better, is infuriating. Beating the cycle of poverty is very hard work. I would have classified where the school system was with the words of Dr. King, “We still have a long, long way to go, but at least we’ve made a creative beginning.” I can’t help but mourn this as a loss of hard-earned progress.

4 responses to “Disintegration

  1. Oh! Your header changed. :) Looks nice.

    As a parent of someone whose children would be attending public school if I wasn’t homeschooling them, I think you have it right. There are some neighborhood schools that are naturally rather diverse- two I can think of are North Ridge Elementary (our base school) and Millbrook Elementary. Both of these have expensive neighborhoods and apartment communities (with many Latinos in particular in those communities) feeding in as nearby neighborhoods. However there are some areas that I can think of- Wakefield, Brassfield- they are just REALLY high income areas, and I am just scratching my head thinking of what those schools would be like. And Poe Elementary is currently an awesome Montessori school (a friend sends her son there, she drives from Cary) and if it was not a magnet school, there would probably not be any white children there, to be blunt.

    Honestly, I hear WAY more comments about the 30-60 minutes that parents are willing to spend in CARPOOL line than I do actual stories about kids riding buses. And many of the magnet schools have longer rides but they get “express busing” to those schools, or something like that.

    And charter schools (the other big thing here) are admirable, but they don’t provide transportation so that eliminates a number of families right there.

    At this point, if we weren’t homeschooling, I would send my kids to North Ridge. It’s a great neighborhood school (and it IS naturally diverse) and I know the principal’s mother, and he is a Christian, actually. (Not necessary for someone to be a good educator, but it is still nice to know!)

  2. Oh to clarify for people who don’t know, we’re in the Wake County school system, and like Kristen, I was educated here. And some of the more affluent areas I’m concerned would be so rarefied without the current efforts were just farmland when I was growing up, basically, or there were just a few neighborhoods.

  3. It changed before my recent flood of posts. I made it to match my twitter background and then twitter switched the layout to be less background friendly… oh well!

    I am glad I am not missing something this far away. It seems like older areas are more naturally diverse except for the inner city. The ES my parents are districted for has changed several times in the last decade but they live in old farmland covered in subdivisions. They are now assigned to one of the two elementaries that are adjacent to one another near the Kroger. Textbook weird, non-neighborhood, but I don’t think the school system can be blamed for the urban planning decisions of the county, you know?

  4. I saw the Colbert Report episode last week and I can totally relate to the situation in Wake County. I didn’t grow up there (I actually grew up in Suburban Philadelphia), but my home school board was recently taken over by a super conservative group representing what is clearly the minority viewpoint in the area. Despite an increasing population of young children and massively underfunded schools in desperate need of expansion the school board has continually cut funding for education, including a recent vote to halt the proposed expansion of one of the areas elementary schools.

    I understand that Wake County is dealing with a different issue in that the recent legislation passed there will severely impact school diversity both economically and racially, but I feel like in both cases the students are losing out due to a school board that doesn’t represent the population as a whole.

    I think it’s common knowledge at this point (or it should be) that education is the key to developing an educated, creative population that will help fuel the economic and social growth that our nation needs right now. The fact that conservatives in this country don’t see the connection between the quality of our children’s education and the future of our country is hard to believe. I think we’ll continue to go backwards in that respect until politicians on both ends of the political spectrum understand the importance of education.

    My heart goes out to those in Wake County. Hopefully this decision can be overturned in the near future and we can all take another step toward progress!

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