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Ongoing NC GOP debacle thread

Countywide districts are really too big in the populated areas of the state. There's no real cost savings going on spread across 150,000 students. Sponsors Rep. Brawley and Rep. Bradford are from northern Mecklenburg County which just got royally fucked on the latest countywide bond referendum. Huge school districts are a dinosaur that have proven they have no idea how to educate large swaths of their student population.

Will smaller districts do a better job ? I doubt it, but it could serve to make even more obvious the education problems that already exist in pockets of low socioeconomic status.
 
Wake County should have at least 3 school districts. At least then I wouldn't have to find child-care for my kids because there is 1 road with ice on it in fucking Rolesville.
 
There are some significant and important policy issues inherent in very large, county-wide school districts. The posts above have identified some of them. Unfortunately, at this point I don't think I can give Phil Berger the benefit of the doubt that they are really concerned about these policy issues. The NCGA has been relentlessly anti-city since Berger & Co took over, and I have no doubt that what this is really about is taking power and money away from urban voters and schools and giving it to rural/suburban voters and schools. Naturally, this will have significant and disparate impacts on white vs. black students, and it's hard to imagine that the current NCGA wants to tilt the table toward the black students. Go ahead and surprise me, NC GOP, but 10 years of anti-city, anti-minority actions at this point speak for themselves.
 
That's fine and all, but if the school systems were working these reps constituents wouldn't be calling them up nonstop complaining about the school system.
 
That's fine and all, but if the school systems were working these reps constituents wouldn't be calling them up nonstop complaining about the school system.

I'm guessing this is primarily about voting power and thus the power to direct $$$. Rural constituents are getting outvoted on the big metro school boards, and think those dang inner city kids are getting too much money, so they're complaining to the NCGA to "fix" it - which just means make sure less money and power goes to the city and more goes to the rural areas. They can't get their way in local elections so they'll go to the daddy Republicans in Raleigh to get their way. The GOP has always been for "more control by local government" until the county boys started getting outvoted by the city folk. Pretty simple.
 
I'm guessing this is primarily about voting power and thus the power to direct $$$. Rural constituents are getting outvoted on the big metro school boards, and think those dang inner city kids are getting too much money, so they're complaining to the NCGA to "fix" it - which just means make sure less money and power goes to the city and more goes to the rural areas. They can't get their way in local elections so they'll go to the daddy Republicans in Raleigh to get their way. The GOP has always been for "more control by local government" until the county boys started getting outvoted by the city folk. Pretty simple.

First, there are no rural parts of Mecklenburg County. It's suburbs v. inner city. The northern Mecklenburg County towns of Davidson, Cornelius, and Huntersville have a population of over 100,000 people, with Huntersville at over 59,000. Matthews and Mint Hill have 60,000 combined. Mooresville (37K), Chapel Hill (59K), and Concord (94K) are examples of municipalities that operate their own school districts, so it's not like there isn't precedence for a North Meck or SE Meck school district with independent or combined towns.

But when I say "suburbs v. inner city," you and I both know I mean white v. black. Is it hard to understand that residents in the suburbs tire of seeing the State of NC and CMS fail decade after decade to find a way to educate disadvantaged students with their hard earned tax dollars ? At the same time, per student spending at disadvantaged schools is roughly twice what it is at a suburban school. Then, the school board and county commission fail to build schools in the fastest part of the county as part of a BILLION dollar bond referendum. At the same time, they ignored their own list of priorities to move another school up the list ahead of working to relieve crowding in the northern part of the county.

Matthews and Mint Hill have threatened to lobby to leave the school system or set up a charter campus unless their students are afforded seats in schools in Matthews and Mint Hill, rather than being inexplicably bused.

Growth for 2017 at CMS was only 200 students. CMS is losing out to charters and private schools. I pulled my kid out after 3rd grade, partly because they wanted to send him to what has historically been the worst middle school in the system for decades. Meanwhile people in the city decry CMS as a classroom to prison pipeline. We operate five of the ten largest high schools in NC (Wake County operates the other five), at 3,000+ students each. The new superintendent has hired the husband of one of his cronies he brought with him from his former district to the "newly created job of culinary development manager in the department of community engagement at $85,000 a year." http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/education/article160162294.html Can you blame people for being fed up with this horseshit ?

Ultimately will people have to pay more to find ways to prepare lower socioeconomic students for preschool, kindergarten, third grade reading level, high school diplomas, and beyond. Yes, I know that to be true and the NCGA has worked diligently to destroy school systems statewide. But you can't blame residents for not trusting a bloated bureaucracy that doesn't listen to them and wastes their money with bad overall results. Parents only get one shot at educating their kids.
 
I appreciate the detailed post... but I don't see anything in it that actually disagrees with what I posted. It just provides more detail as to why the Meck suburbs want to override the existing system. Busing is not "inexplicable", it is a clumsy and flawed attempt to try and achieve some level of integration - which white parents have fought explicitly or implicitly for generations. Mecklenburg County is already highly segregated, and segregation is strongly correlated to bad outcomes for black kids. Matthews et al wants more segregation, it seems. Not calling anyone a racist; everyone wants the best education for their kid but that often runs head-on into making sure that everyone else's kid has the best education too.
 
I appreciate the detailed post... but I don't see anything in it that actually disagrees with what I posted. It just provides more detail as to why the Meck suburbs want to override the existing system. Busing is not "inexplicable", it is a clumsy and flawed attempt to try and achieve some level of integration - which white parents have fought explicitly or implicitly for generations. Mecklenburg County is already highly segregated, and segregation is strongly correlated to bad outcomes for black kids. Matthews et al wants more segregation, it seems. Not calling anyone a racist; everyone wants the best education for their kid but that often runs head-on into making sure that everyone else's kid has the best education too.

Well, it's inexplicable when there are court orders affecting Mecklenburg County indicating its unitary status, not to mention it's "clumsy and flawed" and a waste of resources. CMS sold the citizens of Mint Hill on a bond referendum that was going to build a new high school in Mint Hill. The bond passed, the school was built. Then CMS filled the school, in Mint Hill, with students from Charlotte while their kids stayed at Independence. This is the level of incompetence and mistrust that people are dealing with.

You act like what they're doing is wrong or partisan. I would just say there are perfectly reasonable and pragmatic reasons for it not related to the urban rural divide. They want the opportunity to pay for and run a local school system, not one that encompasses 546 square miles with the highest population density in the state that falls on its dick at every possible instance. As someone who lives in the middle of Charlotte, their leaving would only drive up my taxes since part of their county tax money would likely leave with them, so this wouldn't "help" me at all. But I definitely understand where they're coming from.

The NCGA and local school systems find a way to educate at risk students because there are too many alternatives out there and big public school systems are in the news weekly for something they're doing wrong.
 
Well, it's inexplicable when there are court orders affecting Mecklenburg County indicating its unitary status, not to mention it's "clumsy and flawed" and a waste of resources. CMS sold the citizens of Mint Hill on a bond referendum that was going to build a new high school in Mint Hill. The bond passed, the school was built. Then CMS filled the school, in Mint Hill, with students from Charlotte while their kids stayed at Independence. This is the level of incompetence and mistrust that people are dealing with.

You act like what they're doing is wrong or partisan. I would just say there are perfectly reasonable and pragmatic reasons for it not related to the urban rural divide. They want the opportunity to pay for and run a local school system, not one that encompasses 546 square miles with the highest population density in the state that falls on its dick at every possible instance. As someone who lives in the middle of Charlotte, their leaving would only drive up my taxes since part of their county tax money would likely leave with them, so this wouldn't "help" me at all. But I definitely understand where they're coming from.

The NCGA and local school systems find a way to educate at risk students because there are too many alternatives out there and big public school systems are in the news weekly for something they're doing wrong.

I'm not saying they don't have legitimate beefs. Any polity is going to have people that are pissed off at the decisions of leadership, often rightfully so. I'm just saying that the wealthy 'burbs seceding from the Meck school system is 100% guaranteed to not lead to better outcomes for at risk students and especially poor black kids. I think you know that.
 
I'm not saying they don't have legitimate beefs. Any polity is going to have people that are pissed off at the decisions of leadership, often rightfully so. I'm just saying that the wealthy 'burbs seceding from the Meck school system is 100% guaranteed to not lead to better outcomes for at risk students and especially poor black kids. I think you know that.

Once they raise taxes in the new smaller Charlotte school district to replace any lost money, I doubt the results would be any worse. We already have schools that are 95% low SES and the're not particularly affected by Matthews-Mint Hill or Davidson-Cornelius-Huntersville.
 
Republican primary candidate in Jeff Jackson's senate district.

Headshot.jpg


https://www.noratrotman.com/about-nora/
 
Looks like she just declared because that website is sparse. Good to see young people running for office. Jeff Jackson is my dude though.
 
I’ve seen quite a few tide pod jokes about folks protesting gun laws. The fact that Americans are willing to eat tide pods tells me we actually need more gun control, not less.
 
I’ve seen quite a few tide pod jokes about folks protesting gun laws. The fact that Americans are willing to eat tide pods tells me we actually need more gun control, not less.

these are the same people saying that the girls Roy Moore hit on were old enough to know what they were doing
 
I’ve seen quite a few tide pod jokes about folks protesting gun laws. The fact that Americans are willing to eat tide pods tells me we actually need more gun control, not less.

I missed the whole tide pod thing. Was this big on the YouTubes or something? It seems like something olds heard about from a chain email.
 
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