Wake School Board majority continues to change its story

It's hard to say what's more maddening about the narrow Wake County School Board majority – the things that it has actually done or the way it has gone about doing them.

On the first count, of course, the list of objectionable actions is long and growing:

• Moving to eliminate the system's longstanding and widely celebrated socioeconomic integration policy;

• Chasing off a talented and committed Superintendent;

• Hiring the hyper-partisan ideologues at the Pope-Civitas Institute to "train" new members and a Republican Party lawyer to advise them;

• Conducting a survey of school system parents about their satisfaction with their school assignment(s) and then ignoring the overwhelmingly positive results;

• Electing a Board chair who has an enormous conflict of interest;

• Holding closed backroom meetings and engaging in communications beyond the public eye;

• Shutting out public participation and refusing to engage in dialogue with critics; and

• Wasting millions of dollars to relocate a high school site against the advice of experts.

Taken together, this list makes up a truly dreadful "body of work" for the group's first seven months in office. Short of selling the school system off to a for-profit company or instituting some kind of conservative ideology test on all school employees, it's hard to think of many ways in which they could have done a poorer job.

Even so, all of these ideologically-driven and counter-productive actions would be easier to take if the majority would end the con/shell game that it has been using to explain and justify its actions. You know this little exercise: it's the one in which Board members change the story behind their actions on an almost daily basis – depending on the audience.

One day, the majority members are railing against "forced busing" and "social engineering" and touting the decades-old code words "neighborhood schools." These are the days in which Board Chair Ron Margiotta headlines partisan political events and talks about breaking up the unified Wake County school system and in which John Tedesco cavorts at Tea Party rallies.

Then there are the other days – the one in which the majority members claim that their actions are actually motivated by their undying love for poor and minority children. These are the days on which Board members speak with straight faces about their minority friends and trot out newly discovered "experts" to "prove," rather conveniently, that the solution to poor achievement by low income students is for middle class and upper income kids to go to school wherever they want.

The latest story

This week, the majority members' penchant for talking out of both sides of their mouths may well have hit a new level. Confronted with huge and broad-based community protests and even waves of civil disobedience in reaction to their destructive actions, members of the majority unveiled yet another strategy in the their ever-shifting rationalization: denial.

After months of diligent work to undermine the premise behind Wake County's longstanding student assignment policy through direct action and propaganda; after speaking at length on numerous occasions about the supposed folly of "social engineering" and admitting that their new system of "neighborhood schools" would inevitably lead – as it has in Charlotte and numerous other places – to higher concentration of low-income students, majority leaders effected a sudden turnabout.

It was as if the group said: "Did we say our new plan would end socioeconomic integration? Good heavens, what could have given you that idea?"

The apparent about-face began on Tuesday at the Board's latest meeting. Chair Ron Margiotta read a prepared statement in which he pledged that whatever assignment system the majority ultimately comes up with, it will not lead to lead to high concentrations of poor or minority students. The board majority then confirmed that it was beginning to explore a student assignment regimen known as "controlled choice."

As Tommy Goldsmith of Raleigh's News & Observer reported this week:

"A controlled choice model for Wake would create a dozen or more attendance zones, each of which would reflect the makeup of Wake County – no rich zones or poor zones, said Massachusetts education consultant Michael Alves, who's helped design dozens of such systems nationally.

Parents would be able to choose from a wide range of school offerings in their zone, with a lottery to make another choice when schools are too crowded or apply to a countywide system of magnets….Parents would not be guaranteed of getting their first choice, but in systems that use controlled choice, such as Lee County, Fla., and Cambridge, Mass., a large majority do.

"We've been looking at a number of plans from a number of districts across the country," board chairman Ron Margiotta said Wednesday. "He's very close to what we have in mind, to my understanding."

Got that? After months of ideological rhetoric about its evils, the majority now claims that it is ready to explore a student assignment model that sounds an awful lot like the current system – one that sends most kids to their nearest schools, features magnets and promotes diversity.

Retreat or double talk?

Two possible explanations appear to underlie the majority's latest actions.

The first is that the group has had something akin to a change of heart. After months of brinksmanship and ideological appeals to the far right, people like Margiotta and John Tedesco are backing down. Bowing to public opinion and pressure from pro-integration advocates and community leaders, they are now looking for ways to save face. Their plan: find another student assignment plan that's at least somewhat different than the current system so they can appease their base and camouflage the specific reassignments they've granted to their friends, allies and favored constituents without causing the complete community meltdown that true re-segregation promises.

The second and more sinister possibility is that this latest action is just a ruse. In keeping with the majority's previous flirtation with a Duke Economics professor and his mysterious algorithms, the majority is just killing time and putting up smoke screens before it fully implements re-segregated system for the 2011-12 school year. Indeed, as one education analyst noted, the devil is in the details when it comes to adopting a "controlled choice" system. Such a model provides a continuum of options. It's entirely possible to re-segregate the schools while still claiming you're implementing "controlled choice." Given the majority's close connection to the hardball-playing, anti-public education Pope-Luddy wing of the conservative movement, such a possibility is easy to imagine.

Whichever of the two explanations (or combination thereof) that's really at work in the latest developments, it doesn't paint a very pretty picture. Whether the Board majority is pursuing some kind of manipulative, Machiavellian scheme or simply casting about wildly for an illusory solution that would match its own contradictory propaganda, one thing is clear: Wake County residents don't know the whole story. This is because rather than advancing a thoughtful and open process of genuine research and dialogue around promoting excellent schools and student achievement, the majority has been pursuing an ideological, "shoot first and ask questions later" approach to school governance. As NAACP leader, Rev. William Barber noted insightfully this week, "These five members, they came in with a playbook."

At this point, it appears the best explanation we can hope for is that the Board majority's rapidly shifting story is a product of half-baked incompetence; that having failed to make it work, they're abandoning their playbook. Let's hope we find out soon.