Many of you have commented on this post, in which I declared Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools officially unattendable by the middle class. Unfortunately, I assumed about a decade of knowledge of Mecklenburg County School politics on my readers’ part, and got a backlash from our liberal readers who just moved here. Let me explain how we got here.
First, to recap, here’s the evidence:
The county is 55 percent white according to Census.gov, yet only 32.5 percent of public school students are. What is happening here is that white enrollment in raw numbers hasn’t increased in a decade in our public schools, while minority enrollment has.
This is because middle class families with school age children — who tend to be white – know our public schools in this county are, with just a few quickly fading exceptions, largely unattendable. This is why for much of the earlier part of the decade we were adding a few hundred white students a year while white enrollment in surrounding counties exploded by an average of 4,000 to 5,000 a year.
That’s the significance of the 55 percent countywide white population versus 32.5 percent white school population number. Mecklenburg County is not a minority majority county, but its schools are majority minority because white, middle-class parents have flown the coop, creating a large, poor urban majority minority system where there need not be one.
When the white, middle class flight began just a short 12 years ago from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, 55 percent of the school population was white. These parent didn’t flee for reasons that were racial. They fled because they were targeted for punishment by our loopy school board.
What happened was that a group of suburban parents won a multi-million dollar lawsuit against the school board. The board insisted it wanted to continue to assign students to school by race. The courts said the school system couldn’t do that anymore. So suburban children, most of whom were white, were then sent to the schools closest to their homes. For the first time in years, these schools were overwhelmingly white and urban schools were overwhelmingly black.
So parents didn’t begin fleeing suburban schools close to their homes for racial reasons. What happened was that these schools were bursting at the seams, desperate for teachers and space.
The loopy liberal school board deliberately refused to expand them to punish the white middle class. Classrooms with 35-40 students weren’t unusual. Lunch began at 10:00 to shuffle students through the cafeteria in waves. At times the hallways were practically impassable. These schools’ reputation for choas grew just as school systems in surrounding counties began to take off.
Meanwhile, the school system and the county went on a billion dollar school building binge, building new schools in largely black and urban areas where existing schools weren’t even full. The legacy of that decade is massive property tax hikes and urban schools that are half full. Almost nothing was built in the suburbs, which were already starved for classrooms because kids had always been used as racial pawns and shipped to urban schools.
All of this was deliberate. The idea was that eventually fire codes that prohibit overcrowding and continued growth would force the busing of the white kids out of the suburbs and back into the half empty urban schools and desegregation could be achived by restricting space.
One problem. School systems in surrounding counties had begun to take off. You could live in a much bigger home, pay less in property tax, and send your child to a brand new school with higher test scores than Mecklenburg County’s had with none of the self-created headaches of CMS if you simply moved to Union County.
Our school system made this worse by shifting the attendance lines over and over again for suburban schools in an attempt to force more suburban kids into urban schools. Buying a home in a neighborhood with a stable school assignment became a risky proposition. The rug might be jerked out from under a family at any moment and their kids sent to an underperforming school — or two or three of them — with a corresponding immediate 15 percent drop in property values.
Those who wanted to live in Mecklenburg could only avoid the chaos by sending their kids to private schools.
In the process, the school system achieved a remarkable feat. The decline of the percentage of white students in the system from 55 percent to 32.5 percent in just over a decade.
The board’s main obsession, even today, is how to force the few white children who remain out of schools near their homes and into largely minority schools. None of this has anything to do with education. It is about payback. You can’t even attribute a genuine desire for diversity to the school board anymore, because there are no longer enough white, middle-class children left to achieve diversity with. This is about punishing the few that remain.
The school board over the last decade has done more to destroy the marketability of this county than just about anything else that has happened … and I’d even include the banking crisis uptown in that.
Why put up with the headache of sending your kids to school here when you can simply locate your business elsewhere?
