The “Margiotta School Board” was a disaster for Wake County. A handful of wingnuts, elected in a low-turnout race by other wingnuts, managed to embarrass the County and hurt children. The diverse schools they resent so much are crucial. Thus, it‘s troubling that the new Board has not moved decisively to reverse Margiotta’s handiwork.
Wake’s diversity approach was a triumph of education policy. Begun in embryonic form in the Seventies, the policy finessed thorny issues with a focus on social mobility. This choice let the County escape tensions that had rocked other areas, from Boston to Charlotte, and focus on the pursuit of academic success. And closing achievement gaps remains a central goal of the system.
They pursued that goal the right way: Socioeconomic diversity works. In essence, poor children learn middle-class habits from their more privileged peers, and wealthier kids’ performance does not suffer. Walking away from this formula is a dangerous gamble. That’s because the other strategies rest on oft-murky evidence and are not guaranteed success. Bluntly put, the Board is overthinking things.
I don’t want to sound like a zealot. As a Wake student in the ’90’s, I experienced the nerve-wracking instability of reassignment. Parents poor and rich understandably crave respite from that annoyance. But at the end of the day, school systems exist to educate all children. Diversity is the best, proven way to achieve that goal.
Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.
Mr. Jones, what did the Margiotta School Board do that diminishes diversity? I’ve heard lots of talk about it but I’ve never heard anyone say what it is that was done. I know we’re still busing kids to schools when there are closer schools to the kids’ homes because my kindergartener gets bused to a school 2 miles away when there are 3 schools closer to our house, one of which is just 1.5 blocks away. All 4 of them are good schools. I like our school the best although it is 2 miles away, so I’m not complaining. Surely this sort of busing is to promote diversity. If busing to farther schools is not to promote diversity then why do we bus kids to farther schools when there is a school walking distance away?
It seems odd to me that we don’t have a walking-distance zone assigned for each school, maybe a 5-block radius around each school, in which kids would be assigned to the school down the street instead of being bused away. It seems as if we could have such a walking zone and still achieve diversity…
I’m digressing. Can you tell me exactly what the Margiotta School Board did that diminishes diversity?
The whole 2009 school board fracas was over neighborhood schools. When you let people go to neighborhood schools, you tend to concentrate poverty in some schools and concentrate good teachers, adequate resources, etc in the schools in the upper middle class areas. Balancing-out resources tends to float all boats. But even the new Wake School Board can’t use diversity in schools to address the real problems caused by income inequality – lack of jobs, low wage jobs, cuts in benefits, etc. The only real way to make a more long-term fix for that would be to start taxing the rich and redistributing income.
And the folks who ran and took over in 2009 were running a campaign based on retribution for electing an African-American President in 2008. It wasn’t front and center on the yard signs or the mailers, but you could read between the lines.
Liberals lose an election and play the race card. That canard has been so discredited that even the liberal press will no longer buy it. You need come up with so new vitriol.
“merely shuffling students around” has worked, and its about the only legitimate option the school board has. How does the school board address the root cause that you speak of? That’s not their job, that’s the job of the legislature.
merely shuffling students around Wake County won’t work. What the school board and the county commissioners should be doing is addressing the root cause of the problem: economic inequality. But I doubt they will do that since the corporate masters that donate to both parties want economic inequality.