Education's 'Perfect Storm?' Racial Resegregation, "High Stakes" Testing, & School Inequities: The Case of North Carolina
Introduction
Among its lessons, The Perfect Storm illustrates that converging forces can sometimes overwhelm even seasoned professionals who focus on discrete threats rather than their combined power. This paper will examine three educational developments— (1) student resegregation by race and socioeconomic class; (2) “high-stakes” accountability measures aimed at affecting educators’ decisions on student promotion and graduation; (3) continuing disparities in school resources and finance—all of which are presently gathering strength in 2002, especially in North Carolina and the American South. Each alone presents formidable challenges to educational policymakers and administrators. Yet without the most careful foresight and planning, their simultaneous convergence threatens to send public schools reeling off course, beyond the effective control of even the most well-meaning and conscientious public servants. They could well become public education’s ‘perfect storm.’
The first of these rapidly-intensifying forces comes with the imminent end of nearly fifty years of court-ordered school desegregation, a period during which hundreds of judicial and administrative decrees combined to bring racial integration to public schools across the South, transforming it from the most segregated to the most integrated region in the nation. The new era, beyond court-ordered desegregation, promises massive and still uncertain changes in the patterns of student assignment and enrollment that could reshape Southern education for the coming generation.
Although many school districts remain under federal court order in 2002,the present trend toward federal disengagement is clear, impelled by the Rehnquist Supreme Court’s insistence that returning “local control” to public school boards is now the chief constitutional imperative. Many Southern school boards, moreover, including those in North Carolina, will find themselves effectively prohibited from using this newly restored “local control” to assure the continuance of racially integrated public schools.
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