Education
Last month the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board decided on the new school districts that will go into effect as we open our eleventh elementary school this fall. I was always aware that these school reassignment discussions were contentious, but now that my son will be starting kindergarten in 2014, I'm trying to learn a lot more about how our coveted educational sausage is made. Since my neighborhood was assigned to the walk zone of the brand-new Northside Elementary, I was able to wade deeper into the mucky reassignment debate without having much personal investment in the outcome.
I think the board did the right thing in choosing the plan that did the best job of distributing racial and economic diversity. But the process is inherently impossible. There is simply no way to put everyone in the school they want without inconveniencing someone else. In this post I attempt to briefly summarize how the whole 2012-2013 redistricting went down.
The Daily Tar Heel has another editorial today criticizing Governor Pat McCrory for his remarks about education in last night's state of the state address.
The DTH is right to criticize McCrory -- his remarks were wrong and show that he's learned nothing from his recent debacle concerning his views on liberal arts education.
However, I'm still waiting for the DTH to directly address their endorsement of McCrory in the fall. They've said in a previous editorial criticizing the governor:
If the plans for higher education McCrory advocated during his campaign are ultimately going to come down to a gutting of the University, then this editorial board regrets having given him its endorsement.
But this isn't a full retraction of their endorsement. It's sidestepping the fact that they endorsed a candidate -- and actively encouraged students to vote for a candidate -- who is directly opposed to what most students at UNC-Chapel Hill stand for with regards to higher education.
Mark Dorosin - who is the managing director of the UNC Center for Civil Rights, a father of three, and a recently sworn-in in Orange County Commissioner - has written a letter to the Chapel Hill Carrboro School Board about the current school reassignment discussion. I couldn't agree with him more about the thinly veiled racism in the sudden clamor for "community schools." A term which is still fully tainted by the Republican takeover of the Wake County School Board, and rings hollow in suburban Chapel Hill where almost no schools are realistically walkable.
“Unless our children begin to learn together, there is little hope that our people will learn to live together.” Thurgood Marshall
Dear Chairperson Brownstein and Members of the Board of Education:
As you begin to discuss the various redistricting options, I urge you to make racial and socio-economic diversity the highest priority in the redistricting criteria under consideration. As the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board, like its peers across the state, continues to work to improve student achievement and close the gap between white and minority students’ test scores, it is critical that every available resource be utilized. These resources include, in addition to technology, books and high quality teachers, students and families. Extensive social science research demonstrates that students learn from their peers, and that racial and socio-economic diversity among students enhances that learning. All students, regardless of their individual socio-economic status or race, achieve at higher levels in socio-economically diverse schools.
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