I keep going back and forth. Is Pete Gorman an evil genius or an idiot savant?
Honestly, where to land after Gorman essentially cut the lights on — and the legs out from under — the re-assignment via obfuscation scam his board had been running for the past few months? Gorman even said out loud that busing for socio-economic balance could cause suburban families to flee CMS — “the deselection factor” in CMS-ese.
That is putting it politely. The path the board was on led two places — getting sued and going broke. Getting sued as the board was basically talking about returning to a race-based busing scheme. And going broke because suburban families would not have just routed around CMS in response — they would route around Mecklenburg County, taking their property taxes with them.
The board, and probably Pete Gorman too, has no conception that surrounding counties are fundamentally difference places than in 1999. They are viable options with infrastructure, shopping, neighborhoods, and functioning schools. But I surmise they are about to find out as CMS teachers jerked around by the EdShed might have an August surprise in the form of bailing on the system for those neighboring counties.
In the meantime, the priority-diversity circus is in a spotlight it did not want, with the end goal fully illuminated. Evil? Lucky? Both?
