Let’s say that again: “Poor and minority students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg outperform their counterparts in Wake County.”
And again — Poor and minority students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg outperform their counterparts in Wake County.
You wouldn’t know that from all the crap flung about by the NYT and then repeated as gospel in the past few days by the UPoR, which absolutely knows better. But here we are a week into a flawed storyline which warns that if Wake County abandons cross-district busing, it end up just like — horrors! — CMS. The implication being that CMS disadvantages poor and minority students by not busing them across the county. This is not true.
Fleet Adm. Hood patiently explains the details here. But let me add a few flourishes. For at least a decade before the courts struck down CMS’ own race-conscious busing regime its chief purpose was to hide and obscure low-performing students, not help them.
And for those folks who have moved to Charlotte since 1999, understand what the old system was like. Your middle-schooler in, say, Matthews was bused 45-minutes each way to Randolph Jr. High. Today central planners could pull off a similar socio-economic swap by busing Carmel Middle School students 11 miles away to Spaugh Middle School and vice versa. And that would only be at most a 30 minute bus ride each way.
Make no mistake, there are forces in Charlotte who would love to implement just that sort of student assignment plan, using the “Wake model” as their template. But with the “Wake model” on the verge of being dumped into the dustbin of history, its local fans are not about to stand up and correct the historical record on student performance — even if CMS is getting unfairly shot full of holes in the crossfire.
So as Wake draws closer to ending forced busing, watch for ever more creative and fact-free attempts to portray CMS as a retrograde, segregated system which deliberately handicaps poor and minority students.
