And that, boys and girls, is why elections, even to stupid do-nothing positions like school boards, are so important…

I’m so sick of the American Taliban that I could scream, cry and throw up.  They oppose most of our Constitutional and civil rights and little to no understanding of what the U.S. is based upon.  How do we deal with these people?

Oops. that is “they have little to no understanding…”

We need some sort of political office that people can hold where they can be highly visible but have absolutely no authority whatsoever.  Something people have to hold before they get any higher in the social hierarchy.  Then, maybe, you can nip the crazy in the bud.

Their friends at Americans for Prosperity, eh?

Chicago’s having a bit of the same problem.  We had a court case that ruled we could no longer use race as a determining factor for our magnet schools.  #1 is siblings of current students, then the neighborhood gets a guaranteed big chunk, then they try to balance using income levels.

They’re hoping to maintain racial balance that way, but the black people in Chicago are outraged.  They feel that they’ve worked so hard within the system to build up those magnet schools, and now that the economy is bad, the white people just don’t want to pay for private schools anymore and want those magnet school spots.

My kids are okay, b/c they’re already in, and now the baby’s chances are 100% to join her sibs, but Chicago is so segregated anyway, being a city of ‘neighborhoods’, that I also worry about what the results are going to be.

I don’t think the CPS authorities are trying to end desegregation, but when they can’t use race at all, what can they do?  That’s why I think they stuck ‘siblings’ in as a top factor—hoping to retain current families with their current racial makeups.

Of course, if we’d just fund all our schools equally, it wouldn’t be such a big deal.

Well, the truth is that the fundies and right-wingers saw an opening they could exploit by using neighborhood schools as a wedge issue, causing otherwise middle of the road voters to give their support to those fundie candidates.

This is, really, the fundie strategy: find openings where they can exploit divisions and tensions and use them to get votes from people who wouldn’t otherwise support fundies.

I’m a product of the Wake Co. magnet program and proud of it. The diverse classrooms and unique programs made me who I am today. The former school board *did* do a piss poor job of managing growth and too many kids were getting reassigned to different schools much too frequently. I personally knew a lot of families who had to switch schools several times in just a few years (none of them magnet students though; they don’t tend to move us around a lot, which is one of the perks) and, yeah, it was ridiculous and the school board did little to address it. But the problem was poor planning and management, not the overall goals of the diversity program. Good luck explaining that to the white flight set, though. The whole situation makes me want to throw up. My little sister is leaving high school this year, but I want to be able to bring my own kids up here and I am dreading what the situation is going to look like then.

ElleDee, you and me both.  (I wonder if we went to high school together.)

It was explosive growth combined with poor development planning, not busing for racial or economic diversity, that led to students in Wake County getting transferred a lot.  Had I not attended a magnet high school, I would have been transferred from one wealthy, white, suburban high school to another (I was a middle-class suburban white kid).  Hardly an issue of diversity; it was about population centers.  But these people will never believe it.

They’re torpedoing a nationally-known public school system so their kids won’t have to go to school with black kids.  It’s just incredible.

These are the same divisive dim-bulbs that refer to civil rights as a “social experiment.” The further one heads into fundie-land, the more likely there’s overt racism:

Interracial dating must be approved in writing and verbally by the parents of both students.—Page 16, Crown “College” Student Handbook

Referencing this comment from the previous NC-related thread…

More on the new board chair, Ron Margiotta, who is a transplant to the area from NJ:

...yeah, sure is a good thing all those “enlightened northerners” are coming down here to straighten out us poor, backwoods, red-necked, religious-nut-crackers, huh?

Feh.

Clearly your North Carolina mind can’t comprehend the regionalism that exists in the United States.  Perhaps you should crawl back into the hole from whence you came? I jest…just because you’re southern, western, northern, or what not it doesn’t make you right or wrong, better or worse.  Since you are southern I am sure you have a chip on your shoulder for being considered backwards and mildly incompetent, but when your school board does things like this in a major region something is of question.

To be wholly on topic, the most important position in government is school board.  Perhaps president or governor may slightly out rank it but overall being president of the school board means you get to decide what children learn and what they don’t learn.  Growing up in a major urban area I learned extensively about the civil rights movement, slavery, and the general liberal ideology that comes with understanding how being a competent moral creature is esssential.  When I attended a more rural university for the quality of their education program I found my compatriots were routinely taught little about civil rights, black-white relations, and some had next to no knowledge of what happened after 1950 because the school districts didn’t feel it was necessary to instill such values in the children.

School board campaigns are usually fairly cheap to run and win.  If you have children in the district, attend meetings, and talk with your local party representatives.  In most cases if the party can’t offer you monetary assistance they’ll give you favor by placing you on the ticket and use of the political machine which can take you rather far.  Defeating fools like this is not only healthy for our political and ethical future but for the future of school districts in general.  When this imbecile goes to make a ruling that is clearly unconstitutional he won’t have to pay a dime to defend it but he’ll bleed the school district dry and still lose.

I realise that I may well be asking a question that goes to the heart of the US version of democracy - but why are School Boards elected?  Whilst I appreciate that many many more local government positions are elected posts in the US than the UK (where I am) as a general rule, surely there are certain jobs where expertise in the field is considered more important than micro-democracy.  Wouldn’t the School Board be one of those jobs?

What’s happening in Raleigh mirrors what happened in Charlotte 10 years ago.  I went to an excellent, integrated high school that is now 90% rich white kids, thanks to the “neighborhood” schools program, which redrew the lines of “neighborhoods” until schools were segregated again. 

I feel really bad for the folks in Raleigh.  Durham is not far away and we have fantastic, integrated schools that get a bad rap from folks in Wake Co just because they are integrated.  It’s also a really wonderful place to live.

snowmentality, it’s very possible we went to the same high school, though I’m not sure how old you are, so it’s hard to know if we’d have been there at the same time. I want to maintain some amount of internet anonymity, but lets just say that my high school was the best and the kids that went to the other magnet high schools think we’re annoying for thinking so, even though they’re just jealous, lol.

Hydropsyche, don’t count Raleigh out yet… the wingnuts harnessed some very understandable anger over constant reassignments, which all the magnet parents largely stayed out of because it didn’t affect them. The magnet program isn’t perfect by any means, but it’s generally well loved by all the highly educated, vocal parents who send their kids there to get gifted programs, foreign language programs, arts programs, etc. As long as this is about “neighborhood schools” those parents will not be motivated to get active. When the magnet program is threatened or is Wake County starts to introduce Christianist bullshit into it’s policies I think we’ll be hearing a lot more from the other side.

To be fair, I actually have heard a lot of families concerned about the shift in the school board now, but I just don’t think there was enough momentum and political will to go up against all the highly fired up anti-reassignment people. The anti-reassignment sect has been organized and campaigning for years now anyway and we’ve managed to hold them off so far, but the former school board was inept for so long we lost too many people in the middle.

Devil’s Advocate - Jesus! I clicked through and read the whole handbook. Who would willingly submit themselves to that kind of constant surveillance?

I realise that I may well be asking a question that goes to the heart of the US version of democracy - but why are School Boards elected?  Whilst I appreciate that many many more local government positions are elected posts in the US than the UK (where I am) as a general rule, surely there are certain jobs where expertise in the field is considered more important than micro-democracy.  Wouldn’t the School Board be one of those jobs?
Comment #12: Katherine on 12/15 at 04:53 AM

The way most school boards work is that a superintendent usually with a public school adminstration degree is hired to do the actual day-today running of the schools.

The idea with elected school boards is that they present a check on the purse strings and educational ideas, a bridge between the community values and the school experts, who can become narrow in vision over time.  Having the educators have to explain the value of teaching x or teaching x convincingly to lay people does have its advantages, and the opportunity to hear from the community at large is, too.

And our history is such that public (read prosperous folks who weren’t themselves literate hired the “schoolteacher” directly) education was often a grassroots movement in more rural areas.

ElleDee, internet anonymity understood (which is why I didn’t mention the name of potential schools).  But I totally agree with your analysis that magnet parents stayed out of it because they didn’t get reassigned—and that they will hit the roof if the school board starts talking about killing the magnet schools.

hydropsyche, I’m also afraid Wake will end up as a replay of Charlotte, where I understand that some schools are now totally rich white kids, and other schools are considered untouchable because they’re mostly poor black kids.  I hope ElleDee is right and the other side starts arguing more.

Devil’s Advocate, I know it’s totally OT, but having read your link…WTF is “organized soul-winning”?  It sounds terrifying.