Unchartered Territory

Lawmakers in North Carolina would pioneer a new way to effectively resegregate public education if they pass a controversial bill allowing municipalities to open their own charter schools, critics of the measure say.

The bill, House Bill 514, would authorize four wealthy suburbs of Charlotte that are dissatisfied with the administration of the larger school system to fund their own charter schools and give priority admission to their towns' students. But opponents say the effect would be similar to allowing the jurisdictions to secede from the school system, a practice increasingly used by wealthier communities to break off from larger, more diverse districts and take a disproportionate amount of their funding in the process.

The vote comes as lawmakers on a parallel track have been studying whether to grant cities and towns greater flexibility to establish their own school districts, but a legislative commission formed to study the issue did little to convince stakeholders on either side.

So instead of formally splitting off, the towns of Huntersville, Cornelius, Matthews and Mint Hill would be able to create and run their own schools under the proposal, while still receiving funding from the larger Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools district, the county school district for Charlotte and its surrounding suburbs.

But opponents fear the effect will be to further segregate schools – a result that some observers have already seen in successful secession efforts.

"The actual secession model raises a bunch of legal issues that have been established in other places that have shown segregation effects," says Matt Ellinwood, the director of the education and law project at the North Carolina Justice Center. "This is sort of a novel concept."

The bill's sponsor, state Rep. Bill Brawley, says his constituents asked for it after years of frustration with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools.

"We often speak of the need to improve education in North Carolina. A lot of us believe more parental choice in education facilitates that," Brawley, a Republican who represents the affected areas, said last week.

Many residents of the four towns on the northern and southern borders of Charlotte say the county's school system no longer represents their kids' interests, as concerns over diversity and urban school investments continue to take priority in the county's educational plans. Some say the large, urban-dominated Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, or CMS, is unresponsive to their needs, and they complain of overcrowding in district schools.

"CMS is highly bureaucratic and slow to change and that frustrates people," says John Aneralla, mayor of Huntersville, whose town board voted unanimously to join the legislation earlier this month. Aneralla says the district used "flawed and subjective" data to determine which schools were overcrowded in a recent study, and to what extent.

"CMS has to be pushed to build schools where they're needed – they'd much rather build where they want people to be," he says. "People really more than anything in north Mecklenburg just want stability, they don't want to be a pawn in CMS' view of where kids go to school."

The effort is the latest in a decadeslong conflict between city and county schools in the area, says Roslyn Mickelson, a sociology professor at University of North Carolina, Charlotte. The battle reached the Supreme Court in 1971 and resulted in the area becoming a leader in school diversity efforts through busing and other measures in the succeeding decades.

"This county, up until its undoing in the late 1990s and early 2000s, was one that really created a template for success," Mickelson says. City leaders embraced desegregation efforts and even pushed back on criticism from then-President Ronald Reagan. The district's efforts helped attract businesses that brought thousands of new residents and students into the county's schools, which stretched the capacity of the school system.

"During that catch-up period there was a fair amount of dissatisfaction that people confused with desegregation itself rather than the explosive growth," she says.

In recent years, the Charlotte area, like the country as a whole, has regressed in its integration efforts.

A federal court in 2001 ordered the district to stop using race in student assignments, and it began using neighborhood school-based assignment the following year. As a result Charlotte schools have become increasingly segregated. A report this year found the district had 30 more racially or economically isolated schools last year than it did in a decade ago, and would need to reassign 55 percent of its students to achieve racial parity. Nationwide, a recent analysis found that the number of segregated schools has approximately doubled over that same time period.

One force behind that trend is school district secessions, which have occurred by the dozens since 2000. In most cases, the parents and leaders in wealthier, whiter suburbs have broken off from larger, more racially integrated school districts. The results can be devastating for the old school district. In Memphis, Tennessee, the leftover city school district was forced to slash its budget by 20 percent the year after wealthier suburbs formed their own special school district. Eventually, seven Memphis-area schools closed and hundreds of teachers were laid off. Even in less extreme instances, the secessions inevitably create more segregated districts.

Charlotte is already the state's most segregated school system in the state, according to a recent analysis. Critics say Brawley's legislation could exacerbate that problem.

"The bill will make it virtually impossible to create diverse public schools in Mecklenburg County," Mickelsen says. "It is designed to insulate the residents of the largely white prosperous suburbs of Mecklenburg County from the rest of the public school system, where there are significant numbers of low-income students, especially students of color."

The bill has steadily progressed through the North Carolina General Assembly after legal issues threatened to derail it initially. Republican lawmakers, who have a veto-proof majority in the state's legislature, tucked a provision into the state budget that lets any municipality in the state fund their own charter or public school. That budget passed both houses Friday with the charter school provision intact, and the state Senate on Thursday approved the Charlotte-centered bill, which will be taken up by a committee to reconcile the House and Senate versions Monday.

While the provision will make the Mecklenburg proposal work, many are worried it could mean other communities in the state will follow suit.

"Saying any municipality can raise funding for their own schools – that's really going to exacerbate inequalities by letting these places fund schools with property taxes," says Ellinwood, with the N.C. Justice Center.

"The reason why North Carolina has this history of more than 60 percent of the [education] funding coming from the state level is we have pockets of historically underfunded communities."