N.C. Leaders Make Pitch For "Race To The Top" School Grant
Gov. Beverly Perdue and other officials will try to close the deal to get one of the federal government's "Race to the Top" school reform grants.
Perdue, Superintendent of Public Instruction June Atkinson and State Board of Education Chairman Bill Harrison lead a group to explain and defend the state's proposal on Tuesday before a selection committee in Washington.
North Carolina was one of 16 states named finalists for more than $4 billion in grants to reward states using innovative ideas to improve student performance. The finalists were invited to Washington.
The committee will submit scores to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan for the final selection in April.
North Carolina applied for $469 million over four years in part to expand computer-based assessments of students.
National NAACP President Calls For Ron Margiotta To Resign
The national NAACP is now joining the call for Wake County school board chairman Ron Margiotta to resign following his "here come the animals out of the cages" comment at last week's board meeting.
In a press release today, national NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous said he's joining the state NAACP in calling for Margiotta's resignation as board chairman. He said Margiotta's comment was 'racially insensitive."
“The racial insensitivity exhibited by Mr. Margiotta underscores the lack of consideration for the interests, needs, and concerns of Blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities in North Carolina,” said Benjamin Todd Jealous in the press releae. “We support the North Carolina NAACP in their call for justice and sensitivity in Wake County, and believe the resignation of Mr. Margiotta is a necessary step in that direction.”
Last week, the Rev. William Barber, president of the state NAACP, had said Margiotta was "unfit" to be chairman. Barber used the remark as part of the complaint filed last week with the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
Margiotta has said he was "out of line" for the remark. But he's denied it had racial intent. He's pointing out that he was upset that a mostly white crowd was booing a black speaker for criticizing the diversity policy.
Here's the press release:
NAACP PRESIDENT BENJAMIN TODD JEALOUS, NC NAACP CALL FOR RESIGNATION OF BOARD CHAIRMAN IN LIGHT OF RACIST COMMENTS WAKE COUNTY SCHOOL BOARD CHAIRMAN RON MARGIOTTA REFERRED TO PEOPLE OF COLOR AS "ANIMALS OUT OF THEIR CAGES"
NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous joined the North Carolina NAACP State Conference in calling for the resignation of Wake County School Board Chairman Ron Margiotta based on comments made by Margiotta the organization deems racially insensitive. In a recent public school board meeting, Margiotta referred to several stakeholders of color as “animals out of their cages.”
“The racial insensitivity exhibited by Mr. Margiotta underscores the lack of consideration for the interests, needs, and concerns of Blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities in North Carolina,” said Benjamin Todd Jealous, President and CEO of the NAACP. “We support the North Carolina NAACP in their call for justice and sensitivity in Wake County, and believe the resignation of Mr. Margiotta is a necessary step in that direction.”
Margiotta’s comments come in the midst of a contentious and racially charged battle over proposed changes to Wake County school district busing policy that will effectively re-segregate the county’s school system. While the battle for good jobs, good schools and economic solutions continue statewide, North Carolina NAACP State Conference President Rev. Dr. William Barber II asserts that attitudes like that of Margiotta will only increase the divide between people of all races who are affected by the surrounding social conditions.
“The vivid imagery evoked by Mr. Margiotta of uncaged wild animals takes another step toward dehumanizing African Americans while trivializing our concerns,” said Barber. “The racial undertones present in Mr. Margiotta’s comments stand to undermine cohesiveness between racial groups at a time when it is most needed as we work together to achieve a better North Carolina for all.”
Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization. Its members throughout the United States and the world are the premier advocates for civil rights in their communities, conducting voter mobilization and monitoring equal opportunity in the public and private sectors.
Wake County (Raleigh) Votes To End Public School Busing & Diversity Policy
The new Wake County school board majority plans to put its official stamp Tuesday on sweeping changes that will drop the school district's socioeconomic diversity policy and embrace neighborhood schools.
The majority is expected to pass a resolution that calls for children to be assigned to schools within their own communities. Wake, the state's largest school system, would be divided into separate community zones, each with year-round and magnet school options.
The resolution calls for the new system to be phased in over three years, with the board working out details for the zones over the next nine to 15 months.
Board members say most of the changes likely won't go into effect until the 2012-13 school year.
"People are going to know the schools in their community," said Debra Goldman, a member of the new board majority who co-wrote the resolution, on Friday. "I'll know I can be more invested in the schools because they'll still be my schools a few years from now."
But board member Kevin Hill, a member of the minority faction, said things are moving too quickly. He and other supporters of the diversity policy have warned that eliminating it could lead to economic re-segregation of the schools.
Hill said he thought the board was going to have a work session about the direction of student assignment before any changes were voted on.
"I find it perplexing that it will be voted on before we've had a chance to discuss it," he said.
Also on Tuesday, members of the new board majority say they plan to vote on which year-round schools they'll convert to a traditional calendar for the 2010-11 school year. Staff members will make their recommendations on calendar conversions earlier in the day at a work session.
It's all part of a long day of meetings that will begin at 10 a.m. with a closed-door discussion on whether to remove Schools Superintendent Del Burns before his announced June 30 resignation date. After announcing his resignation last week, Burns criticized the new board and its proposed changes, particularly the plan to end busing for socioeconomic diversity throughout the district.
Tuesday also will include the staff's presentation of a proposed budget for the upcoming fiscal year. It's likely to call for cuts and layoffs of as many as 100 school employees.
But the two items expected to draw much of the public's comments are the votes on the calendar conversions and community-based school assignments. Both were key parts of the campaign platforms of the four new board members who were elected last fall.
Moving Quickly
The four new Republican-backed members, who defeated Democratic-backed opponents, joined veteran board member Ron Margiotta in forming a new ruling coalition on the nine-member school board.
Margiotta and other members of the majority said they want to vote on the school assignment resolution to send a clear message to the community that they're carrying out what they promised to do. The resolution is supposed to guide all other school system actions.
"We're only doing what the community has asked us to do," said Margiotta, who has lobbied for community schools since he was elected in 2003. "There was never any doubt this was going to happen."
Goldman's role in drafting the resolution makes it clear that she backs the majority's efforts to eliminate the current diversity policy in favor of neighborhood schools.
Her commitment to making changes had been questioned after a Wednesday meeting in which she sought more study of the policy before acting. Since then, she hammered out the new resolution with fellow new board member John Tedesco.
The resolution's zone concept has been pushed by Tedesco, chairman of the newly formed student assignment committee. Despite the changes that would emerge, Tedesco said he still expects 75 percent to 90 percent of the county's schools to keep their current calendars and magnet programs.
Limiting The Impact
Magnet school parents and students have been among the most vocal critics of the new board. They fear that the new assignment system will cause many magnet schools to lose their programs.
"I think we can do it in a way that will limit the impact on schools," said Tedesco.
But he said there will definitely be some magnet changes in the next few years, from some schools losing their programs to others getting new ones. The resolution also calls for the immediate elimination of the use of socioeconomic diversity in filling new seats in magnet schools.
Margiotta said the majority is waiting to hear from board attorney Ann Majestic whether the resolution will require one or two votes to be approved.
On the year-round issue, Margiotta said he and other members of the majority want to finalize Tuesday which year-round schools will convert to the traditional calendar by fall. He said it is getting so late in the planning process that the board must act quickly.
"We're trying to give choice to parents," Margiotta said of the conversions. "That's what the public has been telling us. They want the school system to listen to the public."
Once A Leader In School Diversity, Wake County, NC Retrenches
When North Carolina's Wake County Public Schools decided to do away with race-based busing to desegregate schools, local officials came up with a novel solution to maintain balance.
The new method of assigning students by their socio-economic background rather than race helped to keep campuses integrated. Adopted in 2000, it quickly became a blueprint for other school systems.
That policy, however, has never sat well with many suburban parents -- often white and middle class -- who argue that the student assignment plan sends their kids too far from home. And a new school board, swept into office by those vocal parents, appears poised to scrap it in a vote scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.
The issue has brought the term "Segregation" and the weight of history into recent school board meetings. Some parents and students around the state capital are now imploring their newly elected leaders to back away from their plan to drastically alter the diversity policy.
"Please preserve the New South. Don't take us back to the Old South", parent Robert Siegel told the school board.
Reversing the diversity rules would follow a cascade of similar shifts around the South, and particularly in North Carolina, which once was a model of desegregation. Now the state is increasingly starting to mirror an era many thought had past: On one side of the state, in the coastal town of Wilmington, an elementary school of several hundred students has just one who is black. On the other, in the banking hub of Charlotte, a primary school of similar size has just one student who is white.
In the military town of Goldsboro, starkly divided schools have led civil rights leaders to accuse local school officials of creating ''an apartheid district.''
Ron Margiotta, the new board chairman in Wake County, vowed that the change there was in the interest of students because it would allow parents more options and refocus families on the schools in their neighborhood. He bristled at any suggestion that the move had something to do with race.
''It's something that offends me,'' Margiotta said in an interview. ''Nobody's going to go back to Jim Crow days.''
The diversity policy in Wake County became a popular model in 2007, when the Supreme Court limited the use of race in how districts assign students. Its current policy sends students to schools to achieve socioeconomic diversity, which also improved racial diversity by frequently sending lower income black children from the city's center to predominantly white schools in the suburbs. Some schools also created magnet programs to attract students from other neighborhoods with advanced courses in foreign language, science and other topics.
Margiotta said the busing program has not helped minority students and has distracted from focusing on stronger education policy.
''What we're doing isn't working,'' Margiotta said.
But Ebere Collins, a black mother of two students in the district, said her son travels one hour by bus to get from his home in Raleigh to a middle school in the suburb of Wake Forest. While the trip is long, she feels it helps her son mingle with people outside of the neighborhood and ensures that all students have access to the same resources.
''Mix them up, let them experience each other,'' she said. ''By scattering them around, they will enjoy the benefits other people are enjoying.''
Gary Orfield, a UCLA professor who studies busing and civil rights, said the entire South has been resegregating for the past 20 years -- which he deemed ''a gigantic historic tragedy.'' He praised Wake County's current policy and warned that a renewed focus on neighborhood school assignment will be most damaging to children who come from poor or uneducated families because those students benefit most from integration.
''What it does when you go to 'neighborhood' schools is it means that you put the kids who are most affected by school opportunity in the schools with the weakest opportunity,'' Orfield said. ''That's a tragedy.''
If the diversity policy is pulled back, Orfield said, Raleigh can expect to see some of the same impoverished, troubled schools as Detroit, Philadelphia, New York and Chicago.
In Charlotte, the site of a groundbreaking Supreme Court case that led to three decades of busing to ensure racial balance, schools have spent much of the past several years resegregating after getting federal court approval to allow parents more choice of where to send their kids.
At Beverly Woods Elementary, just north of the Quail Hollow Country Club that hosts a namesake PGA Tour event, 79 percent of the students are white. A few miles up the road, at Montclaire Elementary, only 4 percent of the students -- just 19 out of 450 -- are white.
There are no plans in Charlotte to revisit busing. Pamela Grundy, a parent in Charlotte who has decried the divisions within the school district, said leaders in Raleigh should take notice.
''The lesson of Charlotte is that desegregation will go away so quickly. Once you lose it, you can't get it back,'' she said.
Obama Admin. Officials Step Up Enforcement of Civil Rights Laws In Education
Seeking to step up enforcement of Civil Rights Laws, the federal Department of Education says it will be sending letters in coming weeks to thousands of school districts and colleges, outlining their responsibilities on issues of fairness and equal opportunity.
As part of that effort, the department intends to open investigations known as compliance reviews in about 32 school districts nationwide, seeking to verify that students of both sexes and all races are getting equal access to college preparatory curriculums and to advanced placement courses. The department plans to open similar civil rights investigations at half a dozen colleges.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan is to announce the initiatives in a speech on Monday in Selma, Ala., where on March 7, 1965, hundreds of civil rights marchers were beaten by Alabama state troopers.
Mr. Duncan plans to say that in the past decade the department’s Office for Civil Rights “has not been as vigilant as it should have been in combating gender and racial discrimination and protecting the rights of individuals with disabilities,” according to a text of the speech distributed to reporters on Sunday.
It continues, “We are going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement.”
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At the end of high school, white students are about six times as likely to be ready to pursue college-level biology courses as Black Students, and more than four times as likely to be ready for college algebra, department officials said. White high school graduates are more than twice as likely to have taken advanced placement calculus classes as black or Latino graduates.
The department enforces civil rights laws in schools and universities by responding to specific complaints from parents, students and others, but also by scrutinizing its own vast bodies of data on the nation’s school and university systems, looking for signs of possible discrimination. A school seen to be expelling Latino students in numbers far out of proportion to their share of the student population, for instance, might become a candidate for compliance review, officials said.
As it seeks to combat discrimination in schools and universities more aggressively, the administration will be acting in an area in which some Supreme Court rulings in recent years have brought more ambiguity. Federal policy for decades had aimed at compelling school districts to end racial inequality, for instance.
But in examining longstanding de-segregation efforts in the Seattle and Jefferson County, Ky., schools in 2007, the Supreme Court ruled that school authorities could not seek to achieve or maintain integration through measures that take explicit account of a student’s race, a decision that seemed to reverse the thrust of four decades of federal policy.
Some civil rights advocates said they had hoped the administration would move more quickly last year to ramp up the activity of the Office for Civil Rights, the department’s second-largest, with 600 employees.
“This whole area has been a dead zone for years, and people were worried that new actions were too slow in coming,” said William L. Taylor, chairman of the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights, a Washington group that monitors federal policy and practices. “There had been strong hopes that they would move more quickly. This sounds like positive movement, which we’ve all been asking for.”
Russlyn H. Ali, assistant secretary of education for civil rights, said in an interview that the department would begin 38 compliance reviews before the current fiscal year ended on Oct. 1. That number compares with 29 such reviews carried out last year, 42 in 2008, 23 in 2007 and nine in 2006, she said.
“But the big difference is not in the number of the reviews we intend to carry out, but in their complexity and depth,” Ms. Ali said. “Most of the reviews in the recent past have looked at procedures.”
In cases analyzing potential sex discrimination, for instance, federal investigators would often check to see if schools and universities had grievance procedures in place, and if so, take no enforcement action, she said.
“Now we’ll not simply see whether there is a program in place, but also examine whether that program is working effectively,” she said.
The department plans to begin a major investigation on Wednesday in one of the nation’s largest urban school districts, Ms. Ali said. She declined to identify it because, she said, department officials were still notifying Congress and others of the plans.
The compliance reviews typically involve visits to the school district or university by federal officials based in one or more of the department’s 12 regional offices.
The department intends to send letters offering guidance to virtually all of the nation’s 15,000 school districts and several thousand institutions of post-secondary education, officials said.
The letters will focus on 17 areas of civil rights concern, including possible racial discrimination in student assignments and admissions, in the meting out of discipline, and in access to resources, including qualified teachers. Other areas include possible sex and gender bias in athletics programs, as well as sexual harassment and violence. Other letters will remind districts and colleges of their responsibilities under federal law with regard to disabled students.
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Charlotte Schools Block Black Kids From Attending AP Classes
Students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg's high-poverty schools face an "opportunity gap" in access to college-level classes, says a report from a citizen advisory panel being presented today.
Students at several low-poverty suburban schools can choose from more than 20 Advanced Placement subjects this school year, while students at four high-poverty schools have fewer than 10, the report says.
The Equity Committee, appointed by the school board, spent the past year looking at Advanced Placement along with services for students who don't speak English well. The recommendations, designed to boost equal opportunity, are likely to clash with budget-cutting plans.
For instance, the panel recommends that Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools do more to increase AP offerings at the high-poverty schools, where most students are Black or Hispanic. The panel also calls for more minority enrollment in AP courses at all schools. But a consultant advising CMS on the likelihood of budget cuts for 2010-11 has suggested cutting some AP classes with low enrollment to focus on boosting basic skills.
"We're just in challenging times right now," said board Vice Chair Tom Tate. "I think that the board is going to have some pretty interesting debate on this."
AP Challenge
AP offerings range from 25 subjects at South Mecklenburg High to seven at Waddell, the report says. Even at schools such as Mallard Creek High and Northwest School of the Arts, which have large numbers of middle-class black students, AP classes are disproportionately white.
Taking AP classes can help students get into competitive universities, and students who earn high scores on the exams can get college credit. "The lack of a diverse range of core and elective AP courses at all schools raises serious equity concerns," the report says.
CMS offers other college-level options, including classes hosted by Central Piedmont Community College and advanced classes in International Baccalaureate magnets. The report did not look at those.
High-poverty high schools tend to have lower enrollments and more students struggling to meet graduation requirements, both of which can make it challenging to fill AP classes. For instance, Waddell offered 10 options on its "enrollment card" last winter but ended up only teaching seven, the report says.
But those schools also have successful college-bound students. The equity panel recommends offering a set number of AP courses at each school, even if enrollment is low, and urges schools to "actively recruit and place students in those courses."
The report says white students make up 37 percent of CMS's high-school students but account for 62 percent those taking of AP exams. Minority students may be hindered by home support, peer culture or low expectations in lower grades, the report says. Recommendations range from recruiting AP teachers "of various ethnic backgrounds" to "cluster(ing) students of racial groups in AP courses in order to provide peer support."
Language Barrier
On students with limited English skills, the report notes that some schools have so many that students may not be immersed in spoken English, while others have so few that it's tough to provide adequate staff support for kids and families.
CMS has eliminated jobs for bilingual parent advocates, even as the number of students whose families speak Spanish and other languages has grown. The committee recommends restoring those jobs at schools with large numbers of families who need translation, noting that parent involvement is essential to student success.
The report describes a visit to Merry Oaks Elementary, where 19 languages are spoken, most children come from low-income homes, and some students "not only don't speak English but may not have any experience with indoor bathrooms or electricity." Committee members saw a woman arrive to enroll a young child, who did most of the translating between his mother and the school secretary. Two hours later, the child and his mother "were still trying to navigate the enrollment process," it says.
The report urges CMS to make sure schools make better use of available translation services and make it easier for families without cars to get to the Family Application Center south of uptown, where international students must register. City buses used to run along that road, the report says, but no longer do.
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Sources: NAACP, NY Times, AOL News, NC Policy Watch, WRAL, McClatchy Newspapers, Youtube, Google Maps
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