Perhaps this cartoon will remind you of recent news stories on the cities that that have the highest dropout rates in America. The figures, in fact, show that surrounding the miserable rates of graduation in each of those cities are suburban school systems with low dropout rates. Is anyone surprised?Let's put these statistics into perspective for CCSD. Cities such as Detroit and Cleveland have school districts that are SEPARATE from the surrounding suburbs. Students do not legally cross those district lines to attend school.
Such is NOT the case in CCSD. Thanks to the Consolidation Act of thirty-some years ago, here in Charleston County the "urban" (if you can call it that!) "hole" is part of the same district as the suburban "doughnut" that surrounds it. Students cross from the hole into the doughnut (and vice versa) in large numbers every day. They are able to do so because the county is all one school district, unlike the situation in larger urban areas. Yet the outcome is amazingly the same!
How could that be? Well, how could it be that downtown Constituent District 20, containing a majority of white students of high school age, has one high school (Burke) that, for all intents and purposes, is all black? Why do up to 30 percent of students attending Burke come in from the suburbs? Where do the majority white students disappear to every morning? How did that come about?
And, what is the result in terms of dropout rates? You guessed it. Burke's matches inner-city Detroit and Cleveland, while suburban high schools like Wando match their counterparts in the suburbs of those cities. North Charleston doesn't count: it is rapidly becoming the "hole" for the "doughnut" districts of other counties.
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2 comments:
This is a good question for the investigators from the OCR (Dept. of Education, Office of Civil Rights). It's anyone's guess why OCR has so far delayed releasing their finding of the pending investigations on this and related complaints already filed.
As for what CCSD has done and is continuing to do, it's called "De Facto Segregation". That's a nice Latin legal phrase that even elementary school kids in the 1960's could pronounce, spell and define. (Too bad we don't teach Latin to the average kid anymore.) It looks like this ancient legal creature isn't extinct after all, thanks to the rotten leadership at CCSD.
There's no reason why Charleston's public schools shouldn't be leading the nation in setting good examples on how to resolve its educational problems....except our school leaders lack the will to do it. Instead our CCSD leadership seems content to using the failures of other larger cities to justify their personal failures claiming it's "the system" instead.
Maybe it's because Detroit is hopeless and lost. The students have no motivation to succeed. They can just grow up and become drug dealers like their parents.
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