Sixty years ago this week, Charlotte, North Carolina vaulted into the worldwide spotlight when 15-year-old Dorothy Counts was met by a jeering white mob as she arrived for her first day at previously all-white Harding High School.

Seeing a newspaper photograph of the confrontation from his home in Paris, author James Baldwin decided to return to the U.S. “Some one of us should have been there with her,” he wrote. In India, missionaries Darius and Vera Swann saw the same picture and made a similar decision. They moved to Charlotte to join the struggle for equality, and became the lead plaintiffs in Charlotte’s landmark Swann school busing case, in which legendary civil rights attorney Julius Chambers convinced federal judge James McMillan to order Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools to fully desegregate every school in the district.

The changes Swann required transformed Charlotte. School desegregation helped break down racial barriers, dramatically reduced educational inequalities and raised student performance across the board. Initially a focus of resentment, busing became a point of pride. Residents still talk of the day in 1984 when President Ronald Reagan came to town to preach his rising gospel of colorblind, competitive individualism, and was greeted with a chilly silence when he called busing a “failed experiment.”

This fall, however, many Charlotte-Mecklenburg students walk through the doors of schools that are once more separate and unequal, and that have been linked to some of the nation’s lowest rates of social mobility. Less than two decades after a Reagan-appointed judge put an end to busing, nearly half the schools in this booming city have poverty rates of 70 percent or higher. Many are more than 90 percent nonwhite. Performance levels, course offerings and extracurricular activities are dramatically lower at the district’s high-poverty schools than at its high-wealth schools. Rather than fostering connections, schools now exacerbate divisions.

A year ago, when the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott sparked an uprising that once again thrust dramatic images of Charlotte conflicts into the worldwide spotlight, separate and unequal schools became a key focus of the protest. As a man with a bullhorn announced on one tense evening: “They got us in failing schools without adequate resources and then you don’t have the education to get jobs.”

Urban districts across the nation need a new direction. In an era rife with inequality and growing racial unrest, we need to turn back to the hard-won wisdom of the 1960s and 1970s, to work together to recapture the many benefits of desegregated schools, and to extend those benefits to other areas of urban life. Although current federal policy has doubled down on individualism and the false promises of “choice,” the new wave of young families drawn to urban centers offers new opportunities to build connections and community – if families and school districts will do the work required to turn ideal into reality.

The Swann case addressed the problems of segregation in multiple ways. Darius and Vera Swann stressed the value of interracial interaction. “We believe that an integrated school will best prepare young people for responsibility in an integrated society,” they wrote about their son, James. “Having lived practically all of his life in India, James has never known the meaning of racial segregation. We have been happy to watch him grow and develop with an unaffected openness to people of all races and backgrounds, and we feel it our duty as parents to insure that this healthy development continue.”

Julius Chambers pointed to the realities of politics and power. In his assessment, Charlotte’s predominantly white leadership would only make all schools genuinely equal if all schools educated white as well as black children. “I don’t think that those who are now in power would provide the facilities and services that would be necessary in order to accomplish equal educational programs,” he told the U.S. Senate in 1971. “As I view it, the only way that we can obtain quality education for all children, black and white, is to accomplish racial mixing of students in the various schools.”

Reaching those lofty goals proved far from easy. Charlotte’s first year of busing, 1970-71, saw boycotts, demonstrations, bomb threats, school closings, fights, and student walkouts. That spring, students at West Charlotte High School, the historically black school that would eventually become the flagship of the desegregated system, outlined the profoundly personal commitment required to overcome racial differences and build new kinds of schools. “To change things for the better, everyone must do something,” they wrote. “COME TOGETHER. At first glance, that may seem simple enough, but it is really a tremendous task. It means giving of oneself, sharing with others, investigating the problems of our society . . . and finding workable solutions.”

Charlotte residents rose to the occasion. A grassroots community group crafted a communitywide plan in which children from some of Charlotte’s wealthiest white neighborhoods were assigned to historically black West Charlotte. Rather than fleeing to private schools, parents put their children on the bus. In 1974, West Charlotte students proudly invited students from busing-torn Boston to come see desegregation in action. The irony of a group of northerners coming South to learn lessons in race relations was lost on no one. In the years that followed, school communities across the county engaged in the demanding work required to build genuinely integrated institutions.

In the process, Charlotte became a better, fairer, more prosperous community. “Almost immediately after we integrated our schools,” leading banker Hugh McColl would famously write, “the southern economy took off like a wildfire in the wind. Integration – and the diversity it began to nourish – became a source of economic, cultural and community strength.”

But the schools in which Charlotte residents took such pride stood on shaky ground. The painstaking efforts devoted to the busing plan were not matched by similar endeavors in jobs or housing. Instead, those sectors were shaped by a now-familiar combination of market forces, public policies, and investment priorities that favored the already powerful. The neighborhoods in Charlotte’s center city faced the same challenges that eroded urban black communities across the country: urban renewal, highway construction, deindustrialization, limited investment, an expanding drug trade, mass incarceration. The outer edges of the county, in contrast, filled with prosperous new subdivisions.

Commitment to desegregation also began to wane, eroded in large part by the Reagan-era emphasis on “colorblind” individualism. In 1999, Reagan-appointed federal judge Robert Potter, ruled that Charlotte-Mecklenburg had overcome the ills of segregation “to the extent practicable,” and ended the busing plan.

The return to neighborhood schools opened huge gaps between the expansive offerings at the district’s high-wealth, predominantly white suburban schools, and the far narrower opportunities at low-wealth, predominantly minority center city schools, whose students struggled with the challenges – poverty, instability, violence, trauma – that plagued their counterparts across the country. The change at West Charlotte was especially dramatic. In 2005, a judge surveyed the school that had once been a national model of excellence, and accused it of “academic genocide.”

Charlotte and the nation have now seen two decades of bipartisan, largely ineffective efforts to make segregation work, primarily through the deployment of reform strategies focused on “business efficiency,” “accountability,” and “choice.” These failings – most notably the stark inequalities that mark the large, unified district of Charlotte-Mecklenburg – underscore the lasting truth of the arguments made by Julius Chambers half a century ago. The essential task of educational equality cannot be left to policy or to the workings of a supposedly free market. Everyone must pitch in.

Around the country, families and districts are working on pieces of this challenge, employing a range of strategies. This spring, for example, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board resurrected a busing-era strategy of “pairing” high and low poverty elementary schools. The district has turned to partial magnet programs to diversify and revitalize neighborhood schools without displacing current students. Families in a number of neighborhoods have launched efforts to reintegrate struggling schools. While these efforts are not without their perils – especially if better-off families focus their energy and resources on efforts targeted to their own children – they offer the best hope for building stable, thriving schools.

While some of these hands-on efforts are longstanding, many are in their infancy, and need to be supported through vigorous public policies and private actions that once again actively encourage racial and economic integration, in neighborhoods as well as schools. Only then will communities be able to genuinely engage the talents and resources of a wide variety of residents, allow children to “grow and develop with an unaffected openness to people of all races and backgrounds,” and offer the equal opportunities promised in our Constitution.

Photograph of Dorothy Counts, September 4, 1957. By Don Sturkey, courtesy of The Charlotte Observer.

Back in May, trustees of the business group BEST NC paid a visit to Shamrock Gardens, my son’s elementary school. They came for a presentation on a new staffing structure called “opportunity culture,” which has been quite successful at Shamrock. The report written by BEST NC’s president, however, overlooked a key reason for Shamrock’s success. This was my response.

It was a pleasure to welcome the trustees of BEST NC to Shamrock Gardens Elementary, and to show off our school’s many accomplishments. We’re delighted they were impressed with our school and its wonderful staff.

In her recent account of Shamrock’s “blueprint” for innovation, however, BEST NC president Brenda Berg left out a critical piece of the foundation. She focused on the school’s “core business principles,” which she described as “supporting developing employees, creating clear career paths for leaders, and adapting their delivery of services based on data to meet ever-changing needs.” Indeed, Shamrock has done these things and done them well.

But Shamrock’s long-term accomplishments, and the difference the school makes in its students’ lives, are inextricably linked to the success of a 12-year-old effort to reintegrate the school racially and economically. This endeavor has fostered increased parent involvement, student activities that reach beyond the narrow range of material measured by standardized tests, and the kind of supportive, joyful atmosphere that makes students want to learn and teachers want to stay.

This is a crucial concept for those who wish to improve struggling schools. A school is not a business – it is a community that reaches well beyond its walls. Building schools that reflect the society we want our children to live in is a more daunting task than simply reorganizing internal operations and monitoring test scores. But it’s a necessary one.

So here’s the story of how we built that community at Shamrock.

In 1997, when North Carolina began rating schools based on standardized test scores, Shamrock Gardens was one of the highest-poverty elementary schools in CMS. When that first set of ratings was released, it placed Shamrock was among of the fifteen lowest-performing schools in the entire state. A flurry of interventions followed – removing the principal, sending a state assistance team, offering bonuses for test score improvement, adding an extra week to the school’s schedule. They had limited effects.

Plaza-Midwood, the middle-class, largely white neighborhood where my husband and I lived, was assigned to Shamrock. But almost no one sent their children there. When the toddlers who filled our neighborhood streets reached school age, parents sought out magnet and private opportunities, or put their houses on the market and moved to neighborhoods assigned to higher-performing schools. In 2005, the year before our son Parker started kindergarten, more than 90 percent of Shamrock’s students qualified for free or reduced lunch. About 6 percent were white. Most of those were poor as well.

We didn’t want to join the exodus. But we also knew the school needed to change. It was a pleasant place to visit, with a friendly staff and kids who lit up when they saw visitors. Still, as at so many high-poverty schools, teachers constantly came and went. There were few extracurricular activities, and little intellectual spark. No one could remember the last time the fourth grade had made the standard pilgrimage to Raleigh to learn about state government. It was the embodiment of separate and unequal.

So we rolled up our sleeves. Working with our school board representative, with neighbors, and with CMS staff, we chose a strategy that deliberately diverged from prevailing efforts at school “reform,” which focused almost exclusively on raising standardized test scores. Rather, we followed the example of nearby Idlewild Elementary, which had successfully used a ramped-up “gifted” program to diversify its student body and invigorate instruction.

Parker’s second-grade class, taught by the marvelous Sarah Shields Kensicki. Parker is in front.

Convincing our neighbors to join us in this endeavor proved a tough sell. When Parker entered kindergarten in the fall of 2006, we were the only family in our circle of neighbors who made that choice. But the program got off to a fine start anyway. Our principal, Duane Wilson, had hired one of the best gifted coordinators in the system. There had always been plenty of smart kids at Shamrock – the teachers had just been too overwhelmed to give them many opportunities to shine. In six marvelous years, the number of white children in Parker’s advanced class ranged from zero to two, and there were years when he was the only child who paid for lunch.

Mr. Wilson, who had more than three decades of experience working in public schools, also knew that a key part of his job was looking after his teachers. If Shamrock didn’t become a place where teachers felt supported and appreciated in monetary and non-monetary ways, if the pressure to produce test score miracles was so great that the revolving door kept spinning, no improvement would last. Progress made one year would vanish the next, as teachers burned out or looked for jobs elsewhere.

Mr. Wilson knew what he was doing. When Parker entered kindergarten, Shamrock’s staff was dominated by newly hired first and second-year teachers. By the time he graduated, many were still at the school, and had matured into six and seven-year teachers at the top of their game. Careful attention to data and the craft of teaching, especially on the part of assistant principals Tangela Williams and Paula Rao, helped test score performance grow across the board, eventually freeing us from the federal sanctions that had dogged us for years.

Principal Duane Wilson with graduating fifth graders.

As the school improved, more families from Plaza-Midwood and neighboring Country Club Heights began to join us. They pitched right in, supporting teachers and creating the kinds of extracurricular activities that families at better-off schools take for granted. One parent organized an extensive vegetable garden program. Another worked with our butterfly gardens to develop butterfly-raising activities for every grade. We formed a Science Olympiad team. We bought art supplies. We started clubs. We raised money to send the fourth grade to Raleigh for the first time in decades.

All of these activities were designed not just for the “advanced” students, but for the entire school. As events and programs created more volunteer opportunities, parents and grandparents from less-well-off families upped their volunteer time as well.

Shamrock fourth graders headed to Raleigh.

Like all schools, Shamrock still faces plenty of challenges. Tight budgets and growing numbers of struggling families make it a tough time to be in education. At a school like Shamrock, where families come from distinctly different economic strata, it’s a constant – though highly rewarding – endeavor to balance different perspectives and different levels of social and economic clout.

Our staff also has to contend with state-mandated, test-focused policies that include the misleading A-F grading system, the destructively stressful Read to Achieve legislation, and a persisting threat to use test scores to measure teacher quality, despite abundant evidence that such policies are neither accurate or effective. Such tactics continue to drive families and fine teachers out of public schools – particularly the ones that serve our state’s most vulnerable children.

But so far, Shamrock’s dedicated staff and parents have weathered these storms, and our students continue to thrive and grow.

Shamrock parents helping to build the school’s butterfly gardens.

Almost half a century ago, when Julius Chambers argued the Swann desegregation case before the Supreme Court, he contended that schools would only be equal if they all enrolled children from politically and economically powerful families, who would thus have a personal stake in making sure all schools succeeded. My years at Shamrock have made it clear to me that he was right.

Not every struggling, high-poverty school is fortunate enough to sit near a well-off neighborhood. But along with promoting investment in teaching and learning, organizations such as BEST NC need to look beyond their business-oriented strategies and seize every opportunity to champion racial and economic integration – leading by personal example when possible. Separate wasn’t equal during the era of Jim Crow. It isn’t equal today either, and no effort focused solely on the classroom will make it so.

Parker attended Shamrock from 2006 to 2012. I chronicled some of those years in my “Seen from the ‘Rock” blog: seenfromtherock.blogspot.ca. More about Shamrock’s extensive school garden programs can be found at shamrockgardens.org.

When assessing a high-poverty school, where do you look? Which of the many numbers that present-day schools generate do you give the greatest weight? What goals do you envision?

Differences over this dilemma were laid bare in Charlotte this past week, when former school board chair Arthur Griffin took aim at Project LIFT, a multi-year philanthropic effort focused on West Charlotte High and its feeder schools.

Griffin directed his critique at West Charlotte’s stubbornly low rates of state test proficiency – in 2016 less than a third of the school’s students scored at grade level. He also pointed out that less a third of the graduating class of 2016 qualified for a diploma “endorsement” that met the state’s definition of education’s new mantra: “college or career readiness.”

The criteria for such achievements was not especially rigorous: endorsements went to students who had completed four years of math and compiled a grade point average of C+ or better. Such figures speak directly to those (myself included) who argue that grades matter more than test scores.

Griffin accused Project LIFT of “dumbing down academic expectations.”

“As a community, we can’t institutionally continue to be dishonest and short-change unwitting students and their families into believing you should be satisfied, or ‘encouraged,’ with the current level of student achievement,” he wrote.

Countering Griffin’s assertions was longtime community leader Ophelia Garmon-Brown, co-chair of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Opportunity Task Force. She focused on West Charlotte’s much-improved graduation rate, which rose from 51 percent in 2012 to 86 percent in 2016.

“Has Project LIFT been successful in making substantial progress toward improving the education – and lives – of students?” she wrote. “The answer to this question is, unequivocally, yes!”

I appreciate the work of LIFT participants, and the daily difference that dedicated staff and volunteers are making in students’ lives. I don’t agree with Griffin’s argument that the program was designed as window dressing. But he is telling a hard truth.

LIFT’s programs – like so many of the “reform” efforts of recent decades – seek to help struggling students do better with the basic building blocks of education, especially those measured by standardized tests. As Griffin pointed out, that has proved a thorny challenge.

Part of the problem, in my opinion, is that such limited goals don’t reach toward genuine equality, don’t aspire to create schools that match the educational riches available at the district’s highest flying institutions.

The argument for such a focus has generally been basics first, other things later. But in multiple decades of this kind of effort “later” has rarely come. Schools celebrate gains, only to stagnate or slide back in subsequent years. Efforts begin anew. The formula does not work.

The problem lies less with individual schools than with a society that has created and tolerated enormous gaps between well-off and struggling families.

In theory, education is supposed to help bridge those divides, creating equal opportunities for younger generations. But when schools reflect deeply unequal neighborhoods, as they do in Charlotte, they magnify the gap instead – not simply in test scores, which measure a narrow range of often-limited skills, but in course offerings, extracurriculars, opportunities to go beyond test preparation and take up more challenging and inspiring tasks. Across the country, few charter or voucher schools have done better – and many have done worse.

While endeavors such as LIFT aid individual students, they also make it possible to imagine that these divides are being addressed, that providing a relatively modest level of assistance, backed up by a corps of volunteers,  will do the trick – or at least enough of it. As Arthur Griffin pointed out, that has simply not proved true.

It’s time to stop focusing on test scores and on “choice.” It’s time to start talking about what equality really means and what it will take to really get there.

For the exchange, see: www.charlotteobserver.com/opinion/article155345349.html

Charlotte Observer, May 2, 2017

In the spring of 1971, at the end of Charlotte’s first, turbulent year of full-scale school desegregation, editors of West Charlotte High School’s yearbook offered a sober but hopeful vision of the work required to emerge from Jim Crow segregation and build a new, more equitable city.

“Realizing that to change things for the better, everyone must do something, we, the staff of the W.C. Lion, would like to make a suggestion,” they wrote. “COME TOGETHER. . . . . At first glance, that may seem simple enough, but it is really a tremendous task. It means giving of oneself, sharing with others, investigating the problems of our society . . . and finding workable solutions.”

Today, we again face the challenge of building a new city, a better, fairer place than the one where we currently live.

The demise of Jim Crow and the achievements of school desegregation proved just a start. Even as court rulings and individual action ended legal segregation, economic shifts widened income gaps. These growing divides were embodied in the urban landscape, isolating many lower-income families in high-poverty communities with limited opportunities.

Knitting a stronger community fabric that brings more residents together and spreads opportunity more evenly will require shifts in economic, housing and school assignment policies. It will also take personal commitment from economically and racially diverse groups of people who are willing to work steadily together on projects that directly benefit everyone involved, such as a neighborhood where they all live or a school that all their children attend.

As the school board’s reassignment proposal demonstrates, those of us living near the center city have the greatest opportunity to do that rewarding work.

Building a racially and economically integrated school can be a remarkable endeavor. A diverse group that works effectively together pushes everyone, helps everyone, and creates a tremendous sense of achievement.

In the years I’ve spent researching the history of West Charlotte High School, I’ve listened to countless compelling stories about the lessons West Charlotte students learned from each other during desegregation. I could relate to many of them – the six years my family spent at high-poverty Shamrock Gardens Elementary involved both hard work and profound satisfaction. We wouldn’t trade anything for our time there.

As the West Charlotte yearbook editors made clear, however, this is no easy task, intellectually or emotionally. It requires steadfast commitment from a broad range of people who are willing to listen to and learn from each other, to investigate our city’s shortcomings from multiple perspectives, and to devise solutions that work for more than just a fortunate few.

In the case of schools, success depends not only on parents, but on teachers, administrators and district officials who are ready to do the work and provide the support required to bring together families from multiple backgrounds, and to fashion dynamic programs that build on diverse strengths. It cannot be business-as-usual with a different mix of students.

I urge those families who now have the chance to play a larger role in this essential project to examine their new school assignments carefully, consider the many opportunities along with the very real challenges, and determine what it will take to ensure that CMS supports and funds the changes that will be needed to help reconfigured schools succeed. It can be done, and the rewards are worth the effort.