The fight over schools in Charlotte

February 19, 2004

The "problem" with the new plan is that parents now have a choice of schools and their children are guaranteed spots in neighborhood schools. Parents are choosing those local schools, and the result is that schools are gradually becoming as segregated as their neighborhoods. The district is 43% black and 42% white, and some fear that the black schools are destined to go downhill.

Superintendent James L. Pughsley acknowledges that the system faces a crossroads: "Are we going to be one of those large, urban districts that allowed themselves to slip behind? We don't have to be. We have a chance to define our destiny."

A white parent, William Capacchione, sued the school system in 1997, alleging that its race-based admissions policy for magnet schools was unconstitutional. That lawsuit eventually led to the reactivation of the Swann case. In 2001, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, in Richmond, Va., affirmed a lower-court ruling that Charlotte's schools were free of the vestiges of segregation...

What followed, some observers caution, could undo the gains Charlotte made during the years of desegregation.

"The Charlotte-Mecklenburg system may be allowing individual choice by parents to take such a predominant role, without doing the social math and looking at the communitywide impact of those decisions," says Jack Boger, the deputy director of the University of North Carolina's center for civil rights in Chapel Hill. "The system will become terribly segregatedwith no single person having done a wicked thing."

Do I hear a complete disregard for individual choice and parental involvement in that statement? Are parents supposed to do the "social math" before they decide where to enroll their children? For that matter, before they move to the safer suburbs where the tax base is stronger and the schools presumably better?

more at link

________________

Charlotte forum: Relocating from New York with children & Husband