School board on the brink; Debra Goldman has the comm
The Wake school board will debate a resolution Tuesday calling for all hands on deck (not you, Del Burns; or you, Chuck Dulaney) to write and begin to execute a plan for community assignment zones over the next 9-15 months — in time to take effect at the beginning of the 2011-12 school year. The full resolution is copied below the fold.
In short, the new majority, or at least four of its five members, are chomping at the bit to junk the current policy of balanced student assignments — assignments which are based on proximity to a school but factor in as well the desirability of diverse student bodies — in favor of their preferred “neighborhood schools” approach.
To critics, this amounts to re-segregation of the county system three decades after the Wake-Raleigh schools merger and integration.
Here’s the heart of the majority’s proposal:
Whereas, stability and continuity play a critical role in the positive development and support of our children, families, and communities. Within a framework of stability providing logical feeder patterns with limited disruptions in child placement, families should be provided with reasonable application options for their assignments, taking into account capacity and utilization of local facilities.
Whereas, extensive growth over the past two decades has resulted in our existing node-based assignment modeling to require numerous adjustments that have compounded over the years, resulting in challenges to meet demand and efficiency. Further, with the current three year assignment plan set to expire in 2012, a new plan will need to be implemented.
Whereas, the Wake County School Board supports community based school assignments. The alignment of these assignments with the existing zone based management tools of the Wake County Public School System, such as but not limited to Transportation Services, Facilities Maintenance and Management, and Staff Leadership, would produce more efficient and cost effective operations.
Be it hereby resolved:
1. The Wake County Board of Education commits to establishing Community Assignment Zones. A zone based assignment model will be developed during the next 9 – 15 months with input from our community stakeholders (as noted above), WCPSS staff, and other government planning and zoning officials.
[If that's not John Tedesco's patented Pittsburgh syntax, I'll buy him a bagel.]
I wrote about assignment zones as Tedesco seems to envision them a few weeks ago in the Indy. To put it mildly, I think they’re a terrible idea.
Community assignment zones would sound the death knell for a unified Wake County school system that’s earned national acclaim.
A unified system like Wake’s (and Wake’s system is rare in a country that segregates its residents, and their children, by income) stresses equality — rich and poor kids in every school; no “bad schools.” That’s what the diversity policy is about.
Zones, by contrast, are inherently unequal. Wherever you draw the lines, you create winners on one side — the more affluent side — and losers on the other. Tedesco and Board Chair Ron Margiotta know that from first-hand experience, as I do — all three of us are former residents of New Jersey, a state where virtually every one of the 566 municipalities is its own school district, or in some cases two districts. People move to be in the “better” district. The “bad” ones have schools with lots of poor kids and no taxes to educate them.
On Wednesday, the board’s policy committee debated stripping diversity out of the current student assignment policy (Policy 6200). In a surprise, when Chris Malone moved to adopt the new majority’s proposed language, fellow majority-member Debra Goldman demurred, declining to offer a second to his motion. She said she wanted to think about it awhile and look at whatever data people wanted to bring forward about the impact of diversity on student achievement.
Two days later, Margiotta puts out an agenda for the next full board meeting that, in effect, would go around Goldman — if it passes. But it won’t pass without her vote; the 5-4 majority isn’t a majority without her. If she’s not ready to go along, the resolution will fail.
Is she ready? Stay tuned.
It might be prudent for the board, before it plunges everyone in the county into the pitched warfare that will accompany any attempt to draw zones, to hold hearings on whether the idea itself makes any sense.
On the other hand, even if the majority does decide to jump off the cliff, it doesn’t necessarily mean that their attempt to create assignment zones will actually result in zones; indeed, it may be that it will take them trying to do it, and flopping around in the public spotlight while they do, for them to realize how destructive zones are.
Committee of the whole meets at 12 noon Tuesday. Official session follows at 3, with a public comment period at 4 — which should be prior to any possible action on the resolution.
