Education Re-Segregation Looms in North Carolina

It's not easy for a mom to decide where to educate her kids these days, but I'd think twice before enrolling my daughters in a system based on classism and segregation. Parents in Wake County, North Carolina, are fighting amongst themselves and with the school board in what appears to be a three way tug-of-war for the educational rights of their children. The big issue nobody can agree on is diversity.

Seriously, guys? This late in the game -- when you're ranked as one of the best school systems, and after you've come so far since the Civil Rights movement  -- you just let all the effort go to hell? Go team.

What is happening to Wake County is no accident. After abolishing race-based busing of students to schools outside their neighborhoods in 2000, the district switched to a socio-economic model of placing students so that no single school has more than 40 percent of its attendees receiving free or reduced price lunches. So now, while the inner-city kids are bused to affluent communities, the suburbs are shuttling children into the city to even the score. We don't need to guess who isn't a fan of this program.

Why can't we just put some of the poor minority kids into suburban schools to even things out? You have your proud, Southern heritage to thank for that one. Because of our nation's notorious past (and present), the Supreme Court has wisely decided to limit how school systems use race when determining school placement. This 2007 reversal has resulted in other parts of the nation looking to Wake County as an example of alternative solutions to integration. The program's benefits include increased racial diversity by promoting socio-economic diversity, and the opportunity for students to engage in academically advanced courses through inner-city magnet programs.

There is one reason why this beacon of equality is doomed to fail: long bus rides. Concerned for the extended period of time their children are forced to sit on the school bus, suburban parents have rallied behind newly elected, Republican-supported school board members to put an end to student integration. These champions of justice have determined a bus ride -- an hour long in the most extreme case -- to be the factor tipping the scales toward terminating the entire program. Sure, I thought, a legitimate contention -- until I realized there weren't any inner-city residents voicing similar concerns. How curious. Oh, but don't worry, social stratification has nothing to do with it! Statistics show middle-class white kids have a harder time coping on the bus than their minority counterparts.

Since this all seems like nonsense when you consider the consequences of an economically and racially segregated region, the opposition naturally invented rational-sounding factoids to support the agenda of the 4.5 percent of voters they represent. Ron Margiotta, newbie school board chairman of Wake County, claims the busing program isn't working, and is taking the focus off neighborhood schools (somebody isn't paying attention). He obviously hasn't been reading the New York Times, and I bet the conclusions drawn by researchers at U.C.L.A. and the University of North Carolina, Charlotte are news to him as well. The children of Wake County, North Carolina, are only the latest victims of a right-wing filibuster that threatens to set the state back by about 50 years. As usual, it's students who suffer because of politically expedient ignorance and malevolence.

Photo Credit: woodleywonderworks