There seems to be considerable confusion this morning over the role school choice plays in educating Triad-area children.
First, you have Guilford County school board member Garth Hebert’s proposal that will allow parents to choose between Southwest and Andrews high schools and Welborn and Southwest middle schools.
As fellow board members Walter Childs and Dot Kearns expressed concern that Hebert’s plan would effectively change the redistricting that hoped to better balance the racial makeup between suburban and inner-city High Point.
The real fear, as this morning’s N&R lead editorial points out, Hebert’s plan could be a step toward school resegregation:
High Point’s school board representatives are divided over a proposal one says offers more choice and the other fears will further separate white and black students….
“The whole crux of the matter,” Childs added, is the chance that Hebert’s plan would increase racial isolation at inner-city schools and reverse the better racial balance that has occurred in the Southwest schools — to him an unacceptable outcome.
That may be the dilemma facing the school board: whether to grant parents more choice, pleasing many of them, but enabling further resegregation.
Then there’s the Winston-Salem chapter of the NAACP which, for some reason, doubts the results of a recent study showing that school choice has had no effect on WSFCS test scores.
I don’t understand the NAACP’s reaction to the study, considering the fact that it cited the system’s school choice plan when voicing opposition to November’s successful $250 million school bond proposal. It seems to me the NAACP would be citing the study as evidence that school choice plans don’t work.
Help me out if I’m missing something here.
