The Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system went down the road to resegregation after it scrapped diversity for “neighborhood” assignments. If that’s where Wake County wants to go, the Charlotte Observer editorialized on Sunday, at least know that it won’t save Wake’s taxpayers any money.
Far from it, the newspaper advises in a piece headlined “Wake schools turmoil hauntingly familiar.” If Wake really cares about the performance of economically disadvantaged students after they’re caught in high-poverty schools (and the Wake school board’s Majority Five is nothing if not insistent that they care so much), know that it will cost the county some very big bucks:
But it’s not as though Wake school board leaders don’t know what they need to do. They’ll have to persuade county commissioners to raise a ton of money through new taxes in a difficult period to provide instruction, resources and support for the students they’re about to assign to new high-poverty schools if they really hope to help those students. How they’ll raise that money is another question, but they’ll have no excuse for arguing they didn’t know what they were facing in their headlong enthusiasm for social engineering.