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The Washington Post reports:
IN RALEIGH, N.C. The sprawling Wake County School District has long been a rarity. Some of its best, most diverse schools are in the poorest sections of this capital city. And its suburban schools, rather than being exclusive enclaves, include children whose parents cannot afford a house in the neighborhood.
But over the past year, a new majority-Republican school board backed by national tea party conservatives has set the district on a strikingly different course. Pledging to “say no to the social engineers!” it has abolished the policy behind one of the nation’s most celebrated integration efforts.
And as the board moves toward a system in which students attend neighborhood schools, some members are embracing the provocative idea that concentrating poor children, who are usually minorities, in a few schools could have merits – logic that critics are blasting as a 21st-century case for segregation.
The situation unfolding here in some ways represents a first foray of tea party conservatives into the business of shaping a public school system, and it has made Wake County the center of a fierce debate over the principle first enshrined in the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education: that diversity and quality education go hand in hand.
The new school board has won applause from parents who blame the old policy – which sought to avoid high-poverty, racially isolated schools – for an array of problems in the district and who say that promoting diversity is no longer a proper or necessary goal for public schools.
“This is Raleigh in 2010, not Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s – my life is integrated,” said John Tedesco, a new board member. “We need new paradigms.”
But critics accuse the new board of pursuing an ideological agenda aimed at nothing less than sounding the official death knell of government-sponsored integration in one of the last places to promote it. Without a diversity policy in place, they say, the county will inevitably slip into the pattern that defines most districts across the country, where schools in well-off neighborhoods are decent and those in poor, usually minority neighborhoods struggle.
The NAACP has filed a civil rights complaint arguing that 700 initial student transfers the new board approved have already increased racial segregation, violating laws that prohibit the use of federal funding for discriminatory purposes. In recent weeks, federal education officials visited the county, the first step toward a possible investigation.
“So far, all the chatter we heard from tea partyers has not manifested in actually putting in place retrograde policies. But this is one place where they have literally attempted to turn back the clock,” said Benjamin Todd Jealous, president of the NAACP.
School Board Chairman Ron Margiotta referred questions on the matter to the district’s attorney, who declined to comment. Tedesco, who has emerged as the most vocal among the new majority on the nine-member board, said he and his colleagues are only seeking a simpler system in which children attend the schools closest to them. If the result is a handful of high-poverty schools, he said, perhaps that will better serve the most challenged students.
“If we had a school that was, like, 80 percent high-poverty, the public would see the challenges, the need to make it successful,” he said. “Right now, we have diluted the problem, so we can ignore it.”
So far, the board shows few signs of shifting course. Last month, it announced that Anthony J. Tata, former chief operating officer of the D.C. schools, will replace a superintendent who resigned to protest the new board’s intentions. Tata, a retired general, names conservative commentator Glenn Beck and the Tea Party Patriots among his “likes” on his Facebook page.
Tata did not return calls seeking comment, but he said in a recent news conference in Raleigh that he supports the direction the new board is taking, and cited the District as an example of a place where neighborhood schools are “working.”
I lived in this area for nearly five years with three middle school age children and I found the integration was a problem so much so that when they went to high school I put them in private schools. There was vandalism in the parking lot and other serious issues which could not be ignored.
While in high school we moved to New England where the teachers told me that my children were way behind in their cirriculum and would not be accepted in AP courses because…..they went to southern schools. That was an eye opener. All three have graduated from high school, college and grad school but they had to work long and hard to catch up to the level of their classmates in New England.
I do not believe segregation works anymore. It’s often more trouble than it is worth for those being bused a long distance every morning and every afternoon and creates problems for working parents when their child is in after school activities and sports.
Time for change indeed!
The reason that your kids were behind wasn’t segregation, it’s because southern schools suck. I grew up in New York (integrated school) and Connecticut (RE agents didn’t sell houses to black people in our town) and both were excellent, top rated schools.
I went down to UGA for professional school I did ministry with teenagers. These were kids from one of the “best” schools in Georgia. Professors sent their kids to these schools. As high schoolers they couldn’t write a coherent sentence, they couldn’t string 4 sentences together to make a paragraph and they had laughable critical thinking skills. UGA actual has a remedial program that most incoming freshman attend to get them up to speed.
The TP is fighting the wrong battle. Yes, they are being moronic, but shuffling all the poor kids into one set of schools and the rich kids into another isn’t going to change the problem. Standards are too low, the teachers aren’t very good, the curriculum isn’t very challenging and frankly education is seen as a battleground for adult arguments, not a place to educate children. Until those things change, Southern schools on the whole, with some exceptions will continue to suck.
I grew up when liberals tried their social engineering on schools in Prince George’s County. It didn’t work. The whites engaged in a twenty year process of “white flight.” Prince George’s County schools are the worst schools in Maryland besides those of Baltimore City. Congratulations!
Is this the part where we are supposed to act surprised? Even Meryl Streep couldn’t pull that off convincingly.
Please don’t tell me the Tea Party types aren’t racist. I had lunch with a bunch of my Dad’s friends last month, all Tea Partiers and I heard the N-word 3 times in under an hour. I suppose they think America would be a better place today if we still had segregated schools and drinking fountains? Better for whom? and better how?
“So far, all the chatter we heard from tea partyers has not manifested in actually putting in place retrograde policies. But this is one place where they have literally attempted to turn back the clock,” said Benjamin Todd Jealous, president of the NAACP.”
Maybe Jealous needs to go back to school to learn what “literally” means.
I’m trying to find out what is the point of this article and the picture used, which shows segregationists from the civil rights era.
Is Frum Forum trying to say that the Tea Party is racist by advocating this policy?
I have my problems with Republicans advocating what I think might be a good policy, but I’m not willing to make the jump to calling these folks weird or even slightly implying they are racists.
In these days where we talk about the “tone” of political debate especially on the Right, it seems rather hypocritical to talk about the Tea Party with a picture of 60s racists. I don’t see how that’s respectful.
I would like to think we could talk about public school integration without immediately jumping to saying that all who disagree have to racists.
This is really behind the times. The entire issue was really stirred up in 2007, when the Supreme Court decided that Louisville, KY’s public school integration system was unconstitutional because it used race as a factor, this sounds like the same issue. It’s also not racism (usually). Parents want their kids to go to schools closer to home, especially when children are younger. It decreases transportation time (I was on a bus almost 2 hours both ways when I was younger) and is more convenient for parents in case they need to pick their child up early or go to parent teacher conferences. I agree that race is an important issue to consider in this debate, but I doubt it’s the prime motivation, especially if the schools are of high quality.
I don’t know how the Washingtonian Frums decided to educate their children but I it is pretty much acknowledged that DC whites, except for some living in the upper Northwest, never send them to public schools after elementary school. Are they racist?
Excellent point, DFL.
Hypocrisy hunters on the Left who howl in glee about infidelity or same-sex acts among social conservatives are no less puritanical and judgmental about race, and far more universally hypocritical.
Parents want their children to get the best education possible, regardless of their race or economic background. I’d rather see stakeholders work together about how to make schools better regardless of race. I support what Michelle Rhee is doing, and don’t support what the Tea Party is doing, they are as much social engineers as those that they oppose. They are interested in making sure they are not paying for kids who are different than their own.
I send my kids to private school (at great personal expense) because the local public school is not good and doesn’t reflect my personal values. I’d still like to see all public schools do better as we’ll all benefit when all of our kids get a better education. “we must all hang together, or most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” – Ben Franklin