Integration, civil rights came slowly to South

In last week’s column I wrote about Federal District Court Judge Waites Waring and his efforts to bring justice to African-American teachers and students in South Carolina from the 1940s to the 1960s.

            The book set me to thinking about the history I remember from that era as the South dealt with the Supreme Court’s mandate to desegregate schools. That mandate took decades to take full effect, and some would say that racial segregation still exists in public schools.

            When my classmates and I entered the N.C. public school system in 1955, we did not think there was anything unusual in the existence of some public schools being designated for white children and some being designated for black children. It was simply how the world existed. But in 1954 the Supreme Court had found school segregation to be unconstitutional, and gradual movements toward desegregation began (not with the court’s requirement for “all deliberate speed”). I was in high school, in a consolidated, countywide high school, when African-American students and teachers first appeared in my classrooms.

            Southerners determined to keep school segregation in place declared “massive resistance” to any effort to force full integration. Anson County, where I grew up, saw a mandate to make schools for black students better, at least on a par with the white schools, so county officials built a new, consolidated black high school that was to open the year after I graduated from the white high school that was only six years old. Federal officials declared the two segregated high schools illegal. Local officials countered with a plan to send all male students to one high school and all girls to the other school. The feds rejected that plan, too, and my younger sister graduated from the new, fully integrated high school.

            When my family moved to Wilson in 1980, we were impressed with the desegregation solution that was in place here. Former white schools were paired with former black schools so that all students, black and white, would spend four years in their “home school” and then be bused to the paired school outside their racially identifiable neighborhoods.

            This plan gave Wilson a great advantage compared to neighboring Nash and Wayne counties, which still had separate city and county school systems with obvious racial imbalances. Wilson County, thanks to young attorney Jim Hunt and others, had merged city and county schools in the 1970s. This single system made Wilson more attractive for industry.

            Wilson’s desegregation solution did not last very long. Changing residential patterns created school populations with large black majorities in several schools.

          A 50-member citizen task force was ordered to come up with a new, practical and federally acceptable integration plan. The task force worked hard for two years, trying to find a way to evenly balance racial populations in all schools. In a county with a few densely populated areas and some very rural areas, it was extremely difficult to bring about the preferred balance at all schools. Then the Board of Education threw out both plans the task force had recommended. Meanwhile, the federal court that had been overseeing the school system’s compliance with integration law decided the system had attained “unitary” status and ended its oversight.

            When the school board adopted a new neighborhood-based school attendance plan, some black members of the board voted for the plan, even though the plan made no effort to racially balance school populations. Most parents, black and white, have quietly accepted the neighborhood plan.

            The latest concern for public schools and their students is competition from private and charter schools, as well as home schools. Public school systems are losing students and money to the new options, as this newspaper has reported. Change is nothing new for school systems that have been reforming for more than 70 years.

This column first appeared in The Wilson Times.

Hal Tarleton was managing editor, editor and opinion editor of The Wilson Daily Times for 29 years. Contact him at haltarleton@myglnc.com.

           

           

School's out for the summer, but it's not the same

The school year is ending, or so they tell me. It's amazing how disconnected parents can become when their youngest child leaves public schools. Immediately, the school calendar, which had governed family activities for years if not decades, becomes irrelevant. For me, that moment came 20 years ago, when my youngest of three children moved on.

The culture of summer vacation today would be unrecognizable to the children of my (admittedly now aged) generation. We celebrated being free of school's routine and sang, "No more school, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks" as we leaped from the school bus. We had nearly three months free, completely. There were no summer enrichment programs, no summer camps, no museums, no arts classes, no day care and few, if any, trips to occupy the summer.

My siblings and I were free to wander through the fields and woods exploring all that nature and man's intervention had left. We fished in the little creek, chased tadpoles and caught turtles or terrapins, and we avoided snakes. We slept late. We played backyard baseball and occasionally arranged baseball games at the empty school field, if we could get there. We rode bicycles and explored the barn loft. We did chores, feeding the dog that mainly fended for himself and made sure the milk cow had food and water. We got out of bed long after our parents had left for work and entertained ourselves with games of all kinds. We wandered for miles across fields and hills and streams, climbed trees and built contraptions for our pretending. We were unsupervised for most of the day.

Our house was not air conditioned, but the school buildings were not either. We rarely entered buildings that were cooled in summer. The church had large windows that were opened on muggy Sunday mornings as everyone prayed for a breeze. The drug store a block from the church had a ceiling fan but no air conditioning. We learned to tolerate the heat and knew the value of a good shade tree.

Today's parents would never allow such a hazardous level of freedom, and social workers would be appalled at our freedom from supervision and lack of educational opportunities. They would be shocked at my clear memory of a sunny afternoon of the last day of school nearly 60 years ago. I had gotten off the school bus and strolled into the back yard and lay down on a lush expanse of unmowed grass. I lay there and felt the hot sun on my face, the cool grass against my back and the sunny warmth against my body and thought how wonderful it is to be a kid in summer.

 

North Carolina sinks to bottom in public education

No doubt, many conservatives will explain the excoriating criticism North Carolina received at the Emerging Issues Forum this week as just another liberal, Democratic rant. After all, the Emerging Issues Forum was founded by Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt.

But it's hard to dismiss the criticism of the downward slide of North Carolina's commitment to public education. Teacher salaries, once near the national average, are now ranked 46th in the country. Teacher morale may be at an all-time low, ground to bits by the pressures of constant student testing, new curricula, greater administrative scrutiny and stagnant pay. Certified teachers are fleeing the state's public schools.

 The Republicans who took over the legislature in 2009 and gerrymandered electoral districts to ensure their predominance for a decade or longer have gleefully shoved public education over the guardrails. Class sizes have increased, the Teaching Fellows program has been scrapped, master's degrees no longer improve pay, tenure has been eliminated, pay has been frozen, and charter schools and vouchers for private education are reducing the amount of money available for public schools. It's no wonder that national education experts are mourning the decline of North Carolina's once-exemplary educational achievements.

A neutral observer would have to admit that the progress under Democratic legislators and governors was not all for the improvement of the state. Many Democrats were more interested in pleasing the teacher unions and gaining their election-day support than they were in being sure Johnny could read. The N.C. Association of Educators made their interests clear in questionnaires sent to legislative candidates. The questions were all about teacher pay, teacher benefits and teacher job security and not about improving education.

But what the Republicans have done in setting a new direction for education (take that, NCAE bullies!) is jeopardize the lives of North Carolina's children and the critical infrastructure that had lifted North Carolina off the bottom of the economic ocean. An increase in starting pay for teachers, as Gov. Pat McCrory and GOP legislative leaders proposed this week, will not correct the problems they have created. For North Carolina to revive its educational reputation from the morgue, a whole new attitude will be needed in the Legislative Building, one that declares that public education is not the enemy; it is the best hope for the state's children and its economic future.

After the veto override, teachers keep jobs

Governor Perdue vetoed the Republican legislature's budget, saying the budget made too many cuts in education funding. The legislature, along mostly partisan lines (with five Democrats in the House siding with the majority), voted to override the veto.

Then a strange thing happened: School superintendents in Wilson, Raleigh and Charlotte announced that they would have enough funding from the sharply constrained state budget to retain all current teaching positions. No layoffs for teachers. Despite dire warnings that the Republican-written budget would result in massive teacher layoffs and a resultant decline in educational quality throughout the state, it looks like most school systems will survive with their teaching positions intact. Some support positions, even some "central office" positions, will be eliminated; after all, even Perdue's budget contained severe cuts in education funding. But massive layoffs of teachers statewide? It doesn't look like that will happen.

That's not to say that there aren't severe -- and questionable -- cuts in state funding. Mental health services will suffer. Prisons will be without peacekeeping chaplains. Many teacher aide positions will disappear (although there will be money to reduce class size in kindergarten and first grade -- a tradeoff whose wisdom I question). In what seems to me might be the worst for the long-term health of public schools, legislators decided to eliminate the Teaching Fellows scholarship program. For 25 years, this innovative program has provided four-year scholarships to students willing to teach in public schools for a minimum of four years. Teaching Fellows targeted academically superior students and provided enrichment opportunities in an effort to improve the quality of the state's teachers, and it is teacher quality, more than any other factor, that improves student performance. (Full disclosure: My younger daughter was a Teaching Fellow and was an exceptionally good math teacher in three different school systems, more than fulfilling her obligation to the state, before resigning to raise her children.) If the Republicans running the General Assembly are going to reduce class size, thereby increasing the number of teachers, they'll need a Teaching Fellows program to attract students into the ranks of teaching.

For legislators (and others) who want to know what's wrong with public education, I recommend this article from The Atlantic. Although many of the problems cited are confined to New York City Schools and other heavily unionized systems, the interests of the entrenched bureaucracy and the "us first" attitude of the teacher unions (the North Carolina Association of Educators is an affiliate of the National Education Association) also apply to North Carolina.

Standing at the schoolhouse door

It's a sad state of affairs when parents of public school students don't want their children to be exposed to a speech by the president of the United States. That's right, many parents (especially in Texas, apparently) are objecting to plans to have their children hear a speech President Obama plans to direct to school children. The White House says his message will be to study hard, be good students, etc.

Goaded on by conservative talk-show hosts and bloggers, some parents say they'll pull their children from school rather than allow them to hear the president encourage them to be studious and responsible. I especially liked the quote from one Texas parent who told the New York Times, "I don't want our schools turned over to some socialist movement." As his children might say, "Well, duh! This is a public school, financed by tax dollars, open to all residents and run by the state in the finest socialistic tradition."

I can't figure what there is to get riled up about, but apparently it has tripped a switch for a lot of people. The News & Observer story about this collected 117 comments as of mid-morning. Now maybe some Republicans might have a legitimate complaint if Obama were to urge children to go home and demand that their parents support the Democrats' health care reform bill, but there's no indication of that being in the works, and the speech hasn't been made yet. Taking the administration at its word (and I hope we can do that, despite all the partisanship), what is objectionable about studying hard and being responsible?

It's not just the right-wing conspiracy theorists who are objecting. The pretty mainstream state GOP chairman from North Carolina, Tom Fetzer, has raised objections. At least Fetzer is objecting to allowing politics into the classroom and not parroting the weirder complaints coming out of Texas. Heaven forbid that politics ever be allowed in the classroom! I recall two incidents from my children's public school educations. In the early 1980s, my elder daughter's teacher told her class that Ronald Reagan was an evil man bent on destroying poor Americans, and she urged them to work against him in every way they could. When my younger daughter was in a state honors chorus, my wife and I attended the chorus' performance, which was preceded by a teacher's speech urging all the parents to go back to their homes and lobby legislators for more money for the arts.

Politics in the classroom? Heaven forbid!