All you can do is chuckle at the mess CMS has created. The root of the problem is the crazy quilt of “full magnets” and “partial magnets” that CMS maintains as part of its social engineering impulse.

As the Gantt Commission suggested oh so many years ago, the current magnet system needs to be scrapped in its entirety. In its place would be a parallel “choice” system that operates essentially separately from CMS and competes with it for students. You can see why that suggestion got no where.

Yet magnets are at the heart of the Eastover and Myers Park-East Meck issue. You can swap kids and programs around, but you still have a fundamentally unstable system. What CMS has done now, in classic CMS fashion, is set up a test of wills between fans of the IB program at Myers Park and parents at Cotswold Elementary. CMS is cynically testing which group is stronger and more organized. It will side with whichever groups makes more noise.

This is a horrible way to do education. But as we’ve pointed out over and over again, CMS is primarily a political entity with an expensive educated-related jobs program grafted on.

Bonus Observation: Housing values are not a valid determining factor for public school assignment decisions.