Strange to say, Superintendent Nancy McGinley of the Charleston County School District has managed to voice aloud what everyone already knew: many, if not most, of the schools within the district are de facto segregated in constituent districts where housing is not.
Take District 20, where if Burke High School students see a white face all day, it must belong to a teacher. If there's only one public high school on the peninsula (Burke) and the peninsula is majority white AND there are more white than minority children, then how can that be?
A dirty little secret. Parents can appeal to constituent boards to allow their children to attend schools outside of the district for convenience, and if the constituent board disagrees, they can appeal to the CCSD Board of Trustees who will rule on the matter in closed session and no one will ever know what the inconvenience was. And for the peninsula it was a means of keeping affluent students in the public school system, albeit elsewhere.
Interesting word, convenience. Taking the answers.com definition, it means " the quality of being suitable to one's comfort, purposes, or needs."
I'm sure there are cases where transfer is justified, but the wholesale transfer of white students out of a constituent district and the wholesale transfer of minority students in as necessary strains credulity. Which is why the Board's committee proposal to stop transfers on the basis of convenience makes sense--to a point.
Most likely McGinley hopes that her convoluted plans for mini-magnets within each constituent district will satisfy those parents unsatisfied with failing neighborhood schools. Now she wants transfers out "to have a sound rationale." Convenience suddenly no longer meets that standard.
You have to wonder: would McGinley, if she had any, send her children to a school that is failing to educate its students? Because the rest of the committee's proposal is to prevent students slated to attend failing schools from transferring out.
Justice? Where is the justice in that? Is it even legal, given NCLB rules?
Thursday, February 03, 2011
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4 comments:
Why is any of this a dirty little secret?
Parents should be able to transfer their kids anywhere in the district that has space. I don't care if the reason is that they have an irrational dislike of the name "James B. Edwards Elementary" and an irrational love of the name "Sullivan's Island Elementary".
The school district acts like these children are their slaves on the CCSD plantation, so they have to have special passes to be able to move around freely.
Sounds like NJM is just discovering Charleston really does have racially diverse neighborhoods. She should consider the part CCSD has played in making racially segregated schools in spite of the neighborhoods that surround them. It could be the lack of quality education and poor leadership is what causes parents to vote with their feet. Keeping their kids chained to failed schools isn't going to turn those schools around. Try raising the standard of what is offered in those schools and she might see parents and their children return to neighborhood schools.
The super can't tell us it's about race when the most successful charter schools have a racial make up that reflect the district better than most district schools. Let the parents choose. If too many North Charleston students are attending Mt. Pleasant schools, then why not fix the North Charleston schools? Then there's the option of deconsolidation....
McGinley discovering the schools are racially segregated is sort of like two years ago when she discovered high school students couldn't read. Keep in mind she was the chief academic officer when these high school students were still in elementary school.
Why do we have to import idiots like McGinley. Thanks to CCSD we should have plenty of them right here without having to bring another one in from Philadelphia and pay her more than the governor.
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