Given the disconnect between how CMS is viewed elsewhere and how it is regarded by many here at home, perhaps the folks who closely follow public schools in Shelby County, Tenn., could be forgiven if they look longingly at Mecklenburg County as an education utopia, upheld unfailingly by a selfless citizenry.
In their deliberations about whether to fold Shelby County's suburban schools into the larger Memphis school system, officials sought input from education observers in a like-sized countywide district, namely the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. What those folks heard in a public forum in Memphis in December were comments like this one, from Bill Anderson, executive director of Mecklenburg Citizens for Public Education:
"When you look at our district on an interactive map and you look at one elementary school in the inner city (that) is getting about $10,000 a student and another school way in the suburbs in a more affluent area is only getting $5,000 per child, that might rub some folks the wrong way," Anderson told those gathered in Memphis. "But our community is willing to have those very difficult and open decisions, that the playing field is not level and that some schools and some students deserve more."
The notion of global community acceptance of some schools getting twice the funding per-child compared to other schools might come as a surprise to suburban critics of CMS, including those who have organized under the banner Strategic Partners for Accountability and Reform of Key Educational Performances, or SPARK Educational Performances. Among the leaders of the wordily named group is Huntersville's Bill Davis, who is among those circulating a petition asking the N.C. Legislature to allow CMS to be divided into three districts — North, Central and South.
But the backdrop of Shelby County's potential school consolidation offers valuable context to the recurring discord among Mecklenburg suburbanites who believe that too much of the school board's attention — and their tax dollars — is paid to schools in Charlotte. That's because it was a similar consolidation, completed in 1960, that unified the Charlotte City Schools and the Mecklenburg County Schools. The consolidation was approved by a 2-1 margin by the county's voters in 1959.
Had that merger not taken place, schools in Huntersville, Cornelius, Davidson, Matthews, Mint Hill and Pineville, along with unincorporated areas of the county, would have made up one system, and schools in Charlotte would have remained part of their own system.
What local leaders didn't foresee at the time was the Charlotte region's coming economic and population explosion, growth that would seed suburban sprawl and concentrate much of the county's wealth outside Charlotte. But at the same time, a collection of schools not bound by municipal lines allowed CMS, after a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Swann vs. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, to effectively use busing and magnet schools to desegregate schools once populated according to race.
When the Swann case was reopened in 1999 in response to a legal challenge by parents of white suburban students — a charge led by north Mecklenburg parents including current District 1 county commissioner Karen Bentley, former District 1 board of education representative Larry Gauvreau and former Huntersville Mayor Kim Phillips — the federal courts declared CMS "unitary," meaning the vestiges of the once-intentionally segregated system had been largely overcome. In the dozen years since, with race all but eliminated from the school board's decisions on which schools students attend, segregation returned to many schools, this time due to trends in where people lived, not on race-based decisions by political leaders. The result has been the concentration of high poverty schools (with higher per-student funding) in Charlotte and affluent student populations (getting less money per student) in the suburbs.
For example, CMS elementary schools in Huntersville, Cornelius and Davidson averaged $5,046 in funding per student for the 2010-2011 school year, while the average for all CMS elementary schools was $5,693.
And that $10,000 per-student figure thrown out by Anderson? It's not far from reality. At Lincoln Heights Elementary in Charlotte, for example, CMS spent more than $9,000 per student in a school where more than 90 percent of students live in poverty.
At the middle school level, Lake Norman-area CMS schools see $4,635 in per-student funding, compared to $5,166 for all CMS middle schools. For high schools, the averages are $5,013 in northern Mecklenburg and $5,252 for all CMS high schools.
To some leaders, those figures are proof that the system works, and that equity — the notion that some schools need more resources to give students an equal opportunity to succeed — is at work.
Others will argue — and in fact are with the launching of a renewed effort in southern Mecklenburg to break up CMS into three smaller school systems — that funding disparities are anything but equitable, and only reinforce the notion that urban and suburban populations are so different, neither can be effectively served by a single school system.
Who's right? That might just depend on where you live.
