Say hello to the Mecklenburg Citizens for Public Education. It is, we are being told, the latest group of outsiders trying to flog CMS to change. Except no one in Charlotte really, truly wants CMS to change.
The new group is to be the permanent legacy of the CMS Task Force. You remember the Task Force, the $500,000 panel delivered a report in December that, quite surprisingly, contained many good suggestions for CMS.
Stuff like decentralizing CMS, giving more autonomy to high-performing schools, contracting out non-essential services, ditching an ineffective “partial magnet” program, reforming school construction, and — most importantly — getting CMS out of the diversity business as the system’s primary function. These suggestions were promptly ignored.
Not just ignored, actively campaigned against. This campaign culminated, you might have noticed, with Ed Williams’ ode to the CMS status quo in last Sunday’s Observer.
In that column Williams claimed that a change in CMS “vision statement” boilerplate signaled that the district was moving away from diversity as a goal. This mistakes bureaucratic window dressing for the vast CMS landscape, the Ed Center in particular, which still harbors a deep suspicion of neighborhood schools on the diversity issue.
More importantly, Williams flatly rejected the Task Force’s formulation that CMS could not deliver a high quality education to students if it pursued racial bean-counting as its first and most important task.
Where the Task Force saw that residents of Mecklenburg of all races overwhelmingly want neighborhood schools and sought to provide a competing, parallel county-wide choice or magnet system for those parents who do not want neighborhood schools — a pretty fair compromise considering the cost of a parallel system — Williams demands that all parents, everywhere embrace diversity as a goal. This is simply a call to support CMS in its social engineering efforts, or the devil take the hindmost.
There is also a suppressed premise at work here that is sort of the flip side of the We-can’t-possibly-build-enough-roads premise that infects transportation issues in Charlotte. Diversity enshriners like Williams imply that once upon a time, when CMS bused kids willy-nilly across the county in the name of racial diversity, low-income, minority students were better off.
Well, test scores surely were not any better then, so education surely was not better. As there was no Golden Age of Road Building in Charlotte that did not work, there was no Golden Age of Busing that did work.
These two persistent myths may yet destroy Charlotte.
But there is even more reason to see Williams’ column as the epitaph for the Task Force’s reforms and the new group the tombstone. The first sign is that the new group is getting lavish media coverage all around town, including an Uptown paper of record news story and a supportive editorial. Already. This is a sure sign that all the corporate PR flacks are lined up behind the group. And nothing says status quo quite like corporate PR flacks.
Another sign is that the new group will not be interested in actual reform is that the MCPE is essentially a marriage of the Charlotte Advocates for Education and the Charlotte Chamber’s public school rah-rah efforts. The Chamber has been looking for a way to distance itself from its legacy role as the chief engine behind school bond campaigns — an interesting development in its own right.
Advocates for Education, although on occasion taking CMS to task on dropout rates and violence in schools, has mostly stuck to the official CMS party line — things are great and would be even better with more money. It has also been part of the stealth campaign to impose impact fees on new development in the county as “alternative” source of funding for CMS. The group also strongly signaled that it backed Frances Haithcock for superintendent. In March, CAE managing director Margaret Carnes said an outsider had “better be ready to walk on water” if they got the top CMS job.
Another CAE staffer, Carolyn Allred, also joins Observer fave Pamela Grundy as a current CMS magnet program booster.
Back in 2004 the group did cause a brief bit of Uptown heartburn by noting that graduates of CMS end up in remedial reading programs in college at roughly twice the rate of Wake County grads. But that bit of bad publicly was quickly overtaken by Judge Howard Manning’s focus on CMS’ underperforming high schools as a whole.
But the overall picture is clear. The relatively modest and common-sense reforms of the CMS Task Force have been blunted, absorbed, and wholly co-opted by the existing pro-CMS power structure. In its place we have a new, high-power organization which will, I’ll wager, soon begin planning the campaign for the 2007 school bond. After all, you can’t be for public education and be against a school bond. Or can you?
Securing the $400-500 million bond will be the primary mission statement from Uptown for the foreseeable future — forget
change, get the bond approved. Unless Peter Gorman has almost walk-on-water skills, the temptation will be strong for him to soft-sell reforms and deny there is any fundamental problem with CMS.
Maybe Gorman will surprise. There are rumblings down at Walton Plaza that Gorman still wants to send a “change message,” somehow and perhaps soon. Maybe lightning will strike twice and, just as the CMS Task Force produced a credible blueprint for reform, Gorman will too.
But after watching what happened to a serious plan to improve and change CMS — why would anyone want to try it again?
