For the most part, you haven’t heard me discuss the issue going on here in Wake County, NC, where the school board was elected to do away with the current policies and go back to local schools, which would do away with many of the issues going on with the previous policies. Originally, the school boards wanted to increase diversity, and put kids from lower economic areas, which tended to be poor scoring schools, into better performing schools. This wasn’t just a black and white issue, but one of increasing standards. What came of that policy was students being bused all around the county, which left them tired. Meeting other kids they could only be friends with at school, because they lived a long ways away. Parents having low involvement in their child’s education, because the school was so far away. No increase in education (some say it decreased).
And, the issue that led to the election of a majority that wanted local schools was kids being constantly moved to different schools year after year, and sometimes one child would be in a regular session school, and another would be in a year round school. Wake County parents were tired of this, and tired of the previous boards not paying them a wit of attention. The board did not respond to parents at all, and wanted no input from the parents of the snowflakes. From Wikipedia, for brevity
For the 2008-09 school year, for example, the school district has stated that it will reassign some 6,464 students…
In February 2009, the school board approved a plan that would move 24,654 students to different schools over the next three years
Parents were rightly Pissed Off. They had very little say in the matter, and this would cause lots of problems in their family planning, not to mention snowflake having to start over at a different school.
There’s been a big kerfuffle over this ever since the board was elected in 2009. That’s right, 2009. November. When the TEA Party was still mostly in it’s infancy, and not focused on local politics. But, hey, that means nothing to Stephanie McCrumman of the Washington Post:
Headline: Republican school board in N.C. backed by tea party abolishes integration policy
Except, it wasn’t backed by the TEA Party as such. Many of the voters were surely involved with TEA Party rallies, and there was a synergy with the growing movement, but, it had nothing to do with the election. Nor was it about abolishing integration. In fact, Raleigh is pretty damned integrated as it is, as are surrounding areas. Parents aren’t thinking of desegregation: they are thinking that it would be better if snowflake went to school near home, and didn’t have to be concerned with yet another reassignment.
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.
Name the national backers, Stephanie. You can’t. This is simply a hit piece, attempting to portray members as racists.
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.
Again, pure drivel and speculation. Plenty of liberal parents, and, being Wake County, there are quite a few (Wake tends to vote majority Democrat, like so many big city areas), wanted the same thing, which is why there are a majority of Republicans on the board. But, that is Stephanie’s entire amount of “evidence.” Nothing else is offered in the story.
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.
Stephanie barely bothers to name those problems anywhere in the story. She touches on the reassignments later on, well after the next excerpt
The story unfolding here is striking because of the school district’s unusual history. It sprawls 800 square miles and includes public housing in Raleigh, wealthy enclaves near town, and the booming suburbs beyond, home to newcomers that include many new school board members. The county is about 72 percent white, 20 percent black and 9 percent Latino. About 10 percent live in poverty.
Officials in Raleigh tried to head off that scenario. As white flight hit in the 1970s, civic leaders merged the city and county into a single district. And in 2000, they shifted from racial to economic integration, adopting a goal that no school should have more than 40 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, the proxy for poverty.
So, the Democrat led board had already ditched the racial diversity program in 2000? Goodness! We found that out on page 2 of the web story.
Stephanie mostly focuses on negative comments by those against the local schools plan, and uses the most incendiary type of “those people are racists!” ones. Interestingly, through this whole debate, which I have read about but almost never posted, the central issue of providing the best education for the snowflakes has rarely been discussed. And, isn’t that what it is all about?
