Wake school board: the usual 5-4 for “community assignment zones”
(Update: State NAACP’s statement: Intentional resegregation is still illegal — and we will sue. Letter from the Rev. William Barber to Board Chair Ron Margiotta is below the fold.)
You know, there’s a good way to make public policy, and then there’s just ram it through and the hell with anybody who doesn’t like it. That the new school board majority just voted, by the usual 5-4 split, to establish “community assignment zones,” before a student assignment committee has even been named, let alone met, just takes the damned cake, doesn’t it?
Just sayin’ — the Tea Party is in session in Raleigh.
Developing, as they say.
One more thought: I didn’t understand Debra Goldman’s statement that this “directive” for community assignment zones was necessary before her policy committee could move on a new student assignment policy. She said community schools and diversity “can work in tandem … in a holistic policy.” Absolutely right, they can. But not if you draw hard lines, a.k.a, assignment zones.
What puzzles me, listening to Tedesco and Goldman in particular, is what they really envision for the schools and whether, at the end of the day, they have any intention whatsoever of avoiding the resegregation effects of zones. Since they continue to make policy on the fly, without full discussion (let alone thoughtful consideration of what the board minority might think), it’s impossible to tell whether they actually care about diversity but can’t articulate how it might be preserved in a community-schools plan … or whether they’re willing to let it slip away and can’t quite bring themselves to admit it.
If they really want to balance community schools and diversity, they need to get busy with the kind of countywide stakeholders process that Tedesco talked about during and after the election campaign, but which he somehow hasn’t managed to get started in the four months since.
