Citizen

Are you ready? Wake schools superintendent Tony Tata will present his student assignment plan to the school board on Tuesday, with the board slated to vote on it at its October 18 meeting. That's a week after the October 11 elections. In between, the board has scheduled a public hearing — one — on the plan for 5 p.m. Thursday, October 13 at Broughton High School.

Tata holds a meeting with reporters most Friday mornings. Our friend Greg Flynn attended today's confab and he's posted the video. Greg also sent along a handout that Tata read from with "key points" he wants people to understand: StudentAssignHighlights2pdf.pdf

Tata Press Conference on Wake Assignment Plan from Greg Flynn on Vimeo.

The finale of last night's District 8 school board debate was stunning. Out of his New Jersey past, the incumbent School Board Chair Ron Margiotta suddenly declared that funding for the Wake school system is "woefully inadequate." His opponent, Susan Evans, had the last word, and she used her closing statement to say that if elected, she'll "put politics aside" and "champion a highly efficient, balanced school system."

When Evans finished, the room literally exploded with applause — the first of the night. The moderator, a no-nonsense type, had warned the audience not to react, not even to breathe, until the end. So it was hard to tell whether the spontaneous reaction was for Evans alone or for Evans and Margiotta. My take, watching from the front of the room, was that it was for Evans, whose concluding syllable was still on her lips when the crowd erupted.

Interesting. This was in Apex, which is assumed to be a Republican stronghold — a Margiotta stronghold. There were 150 people in the room, and of course they were not a random sample of the school board electorate. Still, it looked to me like at least 100 were Evans' supporters, whether from the outset or after they'd heard both candidates.

From the surprised reaction on Margiotta's face, I believe it looked that way to him too.

(By the way, if you want to watch the debate, it's now online courtesy of the N.C. Center for Voter Education, partners with WakeUP Wake County and the League of Women Voters of Wake County.)

But let's go back. Margiotta thinks school funding is woefully inadequate? Well, talk is cheap, and throughout the debate Margiotta took full advantage of its low price.

Programs for gifted students are inadequate, he said. We need more vocational education. We need more magnet-like programs at non-magnet schools. We need more STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) programs — every school should have one. Every middle school has foreign language courses; soon, every elementary school will have them too, if Ron Margiotta has anything to say about it.

Magnet schools in Raleigh get the whipped cream, Margiotta said. (But he supports them :-)

Suburban schools get the broccoli — but it's time they got some whipped cream too.

That's what he said.

And then he said he's from New Jersey, where per-pupil spending in the schools is often 2X what it is here.

He said it, not me.

It was an amazing display for a Republican who never objected as his party cut state aid to schools in the General Assembly ... a Republican who, when asked to support a request to the county commissioners that they not cut school aid per pupil, voted no ... and remember, the county commissioners are his fellow Republicans.

School funding means taxes. Republicans oppose taxes. Margiotta is a Republican. And he is no exception, nor are his four running mates on the Republican slate for school board seats, nor are the four other Republicans elected to the school board in 2009. Ask them how they'll pay for something, and out comes the magic "wasted spending" pot they plan to draw on.

Margiotta bragged that the Republican-majority school board cut no teaching jobs this year despite — he said — cutbacks in state and federal aid. What he neglected to explain is that a one-time, $27 million federal Education Jobs grant — a form of stimulus funding that his fellow Republicans in Congress opposed — saved Wake from needing to cut teaching jobs. But it didn't save the teachers assistants who were fired, or the assistant principals who were fired, or the central staff, including secretaries, who were fired.

Superintendent Tony Tata has described next year's budget as looking like a $27 million cliff that Wake will fall off unless the county or the state — or Congress — comes to its senses about school funding. Good luck with that.

But say this for Margiotta: He resisted every invitation to pledge, or even hint, that he would support higher taxes. And he ducked when asked about a bond issue to build the new schools Wake desperately needs. If you vote for Margiotta, you're voting for someone who clearly sees the needs, but is just as clear that tax money won't be paying for them.

Tata's looking for foundation grants, Margiotta said.

He added: "We had better find some outside funding."

Because there won't be any inside funding on his watch.

"We are in desperate need of more resources," Susan Evans said, and while I don't think she said in so many words that she'll be for higher taxes — no candidate ever says that — she did say that, unlike Margiotta, she would've asked the county commissioners this year to keep per-pupil funding level and not cut it. Doing so would've required a small tax hike.

Evans added, "I would really like to work to change the culture of that," by which I believe she meant the culture that says great schools can be had on the cheap and new taxes are never needed if you use the magic word "waste."

Answering questions about Wake's student assignment policies, Evans repeatedly made the point that maintaining diversity in some form — she called it balance — saves the taxpayers money.

Western Wake has been plagued by student reassignments over the past decade, which Margiotta & his GOP mates never tire of blaming on diversity — or busin' (try to say it like George Wallace used to, hitting the "bu" hard).

Evans' response? We opened 51 new schools in a 10-year period and added close to 50,000 students, a whole lot of them in Apex, Holly Springs, Fuquay-Varina and the western part of Cary — in western Wake, that is. So of course students were reassigned. If they weren't, the new schools wouldn't have been full, the old schools wouldn't needed more portable classrooms — and it would've cost more money.

Yes, some students were assigned to schools to maintain diverse student populations — a mix of kids from richer and poorer families — in every school. Again, doing so kept all the schools full and in demand, unlike Charlotte, where they dropped diversity and soon needed to close inner-city schools because families had abandoned them.

Evans said the number-one priority for a new assignment plan should be stability — not reassigning kids once they've started in an elementary, a middle or a high school. Parents should have a choice, and proximity should be a factor, but so should "balance" — with the new "balance" factor being student achievement levels rather than socioeconomic status.

It doesn't cost more to do it with balance, she argued. it costs less than if you create more "high-needs" schools where kids are disadvantaged and their achievement levels are low.

The best example of this, Evans said, is the new Walnut Creek Elementary School in Southeast Raleigh, which opened this year with — thanks to the new no-diversity Republican school board — a nearly all-black student population. About 80 percent of the kids qualify for free or reduced lunches because of low family incomes.

Because Walnut Creek is considered a "high-needs" school, and because the Republican school board had said up and down they'd put extra money into high-needs schools and show the world that diversity isn't necessary, Walnut Creek was ticketed for an extra $1 million this year. It was supposed to have 800 students, with class sizes of 20 or less.

But that promise had evaporated in a month's time after Walnut Creek opened with 900 students — pushing class sizes up.

Tata is pledging to bring forward a student assignment plan for board consideration on October 4. It will include stability, proximity, and achievement (balance/diversity) in a parental-choice model, Tata says.

Evans said there should be balance. She added that stability, proximity and balance should be readily achieved, at least initially, in a parental-choice plan since more than 90 percent of parents who responded to Tata's "test drive" indicated they'll keep their kids in the school they're in now.

That is, schools with students assigned with an eye toward balance.

On balance, Margiotta was a firm no. The plan he will support, he said twice, will have proximity as its most important factor, along with stability and choice. Period. "I am a believer in neighborhood schools," he said.

Evans quoted Tata as saying that the Margiotta approach — a "pure" neighborhood-schools plan with proximity the main factor and no effort made to maintain balanced student bodies — will produce between 17 and 25 additional high-needs schools like Walnut Creek.

Such schools would need extra money — money taken from the suburban schools, presumably, and all those nifty programs Margiotta's promising to deliver — or else, if they don't get it, kids will be hurt, parents will abandon the "have-not" schools, and it'll be Charlotte all over again, Evans said.

Meaning, it'll be expensive.

Unlike talk, which is cheap.

• (l to r) Kevin Hill, Heather Losurdo, Jennifer Mansfield, Eric Squires

To say it's been a rough week for Heather Losurdo, the Republican Party's candidate in the pivotal District 3 (North Raleigh) school board election, is like saying a drowning woman is a little wet.

First, Losurdo's penchant for crackpot commentary — don't call it humor, because it isn't funny — was exposed by a new political organization of the progressive stripe, Progress NC. "Heather Losurdo: The Queen of Extreme" is itself a bit over the top in blaming her for the extreme right-wing views of a website on which she's been advertising. I'll note that she's also been advertising on the Indy website.

That said, the Facebook exchange in which her husband, Craig Losurdo, cracked that the Eagle's been replaced as the symbol of America by the Skunk, "which is half-black, half-white and everything it does stinks" ... and Heather comes back with "LMAO" ... she was "laughing my ass off" at her husband's racist remark ... is a dirty little window into the mind of the Republican right-wing.

Unfortunately, there's more where that came from on the "Queen of Extreme" website put up by Progress NC Action. But read it yourself. Don't let me pre-judge it for you.

The second source of Losurdo's troubles is the revelation that she and Craig moved to Raleigh three years ago after Craig pleaded guilty to a crime arising from his eight-month stint as assistant manager at a company in upstate New York.

The facts of his guilty plea were known to journalists here — including me — for weeks, thanks to anonymous emails we received from someone purporting to be a "true conservative" who wanted Losurdo exposed. But perhaps that was a masquerade? The emails contained a link to a Department of Justice summary of the case and a second link to a 2007 magazine article about it.

I decided, after consulting with my editor, that Craig Losurdo's role in the case — his "crime" — was minor and was unrelated to Heather's qualifications for the school board. The latter conclusion, I will add, was based on my belief that she has no qualifications for the school board that such a revelation would sully.

I had no illusions, of course, that this crime story would remain secret for long. I simply didn't want to be the one spreading it.

In frustration, Mr. Anonymous posted the email's contents as a comment on the N&O's education blog. Even then, it sat unremarked until — wait for it — the head of the Wake County GOP Men's Club bitched in a newsletter that lefties were attacking Ms. Losurdo.

Steven Nelson, the GOP Men's chair, said (I'm copying this from the N&O blog post about it):

"One of the areas where one of our candidates has been targeted is Heather Losurdo and her husband. Of course, the left will not give the whole story, but it came out this week that her husband has been charged with a felony and is awaiting sentencing. Of course, they would love to leave it at that, as the truth will destroy their ability to use this smear. The truth, so you can tell others, is simple. Her husband worked for a company in the northeast that had been hiring illegals. When Craig learned of this practice and the company's decision not to change this practice, he resigned from the company. After he left the company, the feds came after him and arrested him. However, he turned states evidence and due to his assistance, they were able to prosecute the true perpetrators of this crime. He plead guilty to a misdemeanor. He is awaiting sentencing per the plea arrangement. If he keeps his nose clean for another year, his record will be expunged."

The left? With friends like these —

As it happens, before I decided not to be the one "breaking" the news about Craig Losurdo's scrape with the immigration authorities, I talked to Heather and Craig Losurdo about it following the District 3 candidates debate last week. Nelson's account is the same as what they told me. Craig took a job in a company plant, found that the company routinely hired undocumented immigrants, and got out as soon as he could — considering he was sole breadwinner for a family of four and did not want to quit before finding another job.

More than a year after he left, ICE looked him up and gave a choice. Cooperate with us, and we'll let you plead to a Class B misdemeanor. Or don't cooperate, and take your chances on a felony trial and the $300,000 it'll cost you in legal fees even if you get off. He took the plea and has been a cooperating witness against company officials since.

A long time ago, I worked for a daily newspaper in New Jersey. I absolutely would've written the Craig Losurdo story then, and my paper would've published it. "The public has a right to know," we said of such things.

Today, I still think the public has a right to know and decide for themselves, within the bounds of an ever-expanding universe of available information and the need for journalists to choose what matters and what doesn't on a day-to-day basis.

I don't say that Craig Losurdo's story doesn't matter. That's for readers to decide. I simply say, and my editor said, it wasn't a story the Indy needed to spend our time on.

To me, the most salient fact in the story as far as Losurdo's candidacy is concerned is that she's lived in Raleigh just three years. During that time, her only claim to a place on the school board — if you can call it that — is her rise to leadership in the Northern Wake Republican Club. If you think more Republican politicos are needed on the school board, regardless that they know little or nothing about the school system or its needs, she's your candidate.

It was clear enough to me what Losurdo stands for when she plugged her candidacy at a Tea Party rally on April 15, the hated "Tax Day" to people who think taxes are evil except when used to pay them something.

Tea Party Republicans think the country's in decline (so do I) and they blame it on liberal policies (I blame it on global capitalism and the politicians it buys). Anything that tries to lift up the poor or be fair to immigrants, Muslims, African-Americans or other disadvantaged people is considered money right out of the pockets of more "deserving" folks. (I think if the poor did better, we'd all do better.)

Anyway, this Tea Party view that when times are hard, the better-off should grab all they can and let the poor fend for themselves strikes me as exactly what we don't need on the board of the Wake public school system. (Or a Wake Christian school either, for that matter.)

Why confuse what's important to know about Heather Losurdo with a gratuitous story about her husband's bad luck at a job? By the way, Craig Losurdo is now in the tile business in Raleigh—custom tile installations. He said it's going well.

Here's something I learned last night at the District 6 school board election debate. Superintendent Tony Tata's been talking up the idea of single-sex academies in Raleigh, specifically an all-male academy at the Longview School next door to Enloe HS and an all-female academy in the former Raleigh Charter HS in Pilot Mill. (Raleigh Charter moved to a new location this year. The tiny Longview School, an alternative school program, could move out and be merged with Mary Phillips HS, Tata suggests.)

The two academies, Tata says, would be grades 6-12 and could open as soon as 2012-13. His goal is that, within a few years, the two would serve a combined 800-1,000 students.

Good models for this, he told the school board Tuesday, are the pair of Early College High Schools (grades 9-12) in Guilford County, one all-male, one all-female. Each has a graduation rate of 95 percent or better.

So far, so good.

What Tata somehow failed to mention about the Guilford schools, and what went unreported in the press from the school board meeting, is that the two schools are a good deal smaller than what he has in mind and both are overwhelming black. One, apparently, has zero white students.

The all-male school in Guilford, located at historically black N.C. A&T University, had 96 students in 2009-10, according to this "state report card" on the Guilford Public Schools website. None were white. A handful were multi-racial.

The female school, at historically black Bennett College, had 103 students. Its 2009-10 state report card indicates that a handful of its students were either white or multi-racial, but the overwhelming majority were black.

I came home and looked up the data after hearing an exchange during the debate between District 6 candidates Donna Williams and Christine Kushner about Tata's single-sex academies idea. Williams said she likes the idea, and she's heard that single-sex schools can be particularly effective with at-risk kids. Kushner, too, said such academies can be a good idea. But — Kushner said — one of the academies in Guilford is all-black, and that gives her more than a little pause.

I don't want any "racially identifiable" schools in Wake, Kushner said.

Racially identifiable as in all-black or, for that matter, all-white or all-anything.

Now, I'm not suggesting Tata's goal is a pair of all-black schools. But, his description of what he does want is very likely, it seems to me, to result in one or both student bodies being predominantly African-American unless the superintendent and the school board are committed to avoiding that outcome.

Tata describes the academies he wants as having "highly structured" programs focused on building "leadership and character." I get an image of his days in the Army and the U.S. military's very successful programs for minority enlistees. The campuses he has in mind are either in Southeast Raleigh (in the case of the Longview school) or on the edge of it (Raleigh Charter). Southeast Raleigh is Raleigh's historically African-American community.

When Tata spoke to the school board — I wasn't there, but there's a summary of his presentation on the N&O's website — he talked about partnering with nearby colleges, perhaps including historically black St. Augustine's College, which is close to both Longview and Raleigh Charter, and Peace College, historically Presbyterian and white, which is next next door to Raleigh Charter.

Enloe, a magnet HS with a base population that is predominantly African-American, just got a JROTC program started. It would be moved to the Longview academy, Tata said.

Close your eyes, and you can imagine an all-male academy at Longview with a military bent ("highly structured"), an emphasis on discipline ("character") and a student body that is coming almost exclusively from Southeast Raleigh. Sure, white kids from other neighborhoods might be drawn to it. But will they still be drawn when the school turns out to be predominantly non-white?

On the other hand, the all-female academy could be anything. Leadership and character? "Bring It On."

Still, the context of Tata's proposal indicates that it's designed to serve students from Southeast Raleigh who live near a magnet school but —because half the magnet populations come from outside Southeast Raleigh — have only a 50-50 chance of going there. Historically, about half the students in Southeast Raleigh have been bused to schools that are outside their neighborhoods.

Tata's Student Assignment Plan promises to preserve the magnet schools (Enloe is one), but the big, unsettled question about his plan is, where will the other Southeast Raleigh students be assigned? In a choice plan, they'll assign themselves, and Tata's "test drive" indicates that most will choose based on proximity to home unless school officials actively encourage other choices.

Tata's talked about encouraging kids from low-income neighborhoods to choose from of a designated set of "high-performing" schools elsewhere in Raleigh or in the suburbs. He even suggested at one point that, especially in cases where the kids' parents are disengaged and don't make a choice — or they make a poor choice given their childrens' needs — school officials might intervene and make the choice for them.

School Board Chair Ron Margiotta, on the other hand, thinks kids from the 'hood should be in "neighborhood schools" the same as the kids in the 'burbs.

That's where the idea of the new academies comes in.

Having two new schools in or on the edge of Southeast Raleigh, with room for 1,000 students, offers a possible answer to the question of where Southeast Raleigh kids will go — especially if the school board doesn't care whether those schools are racially integrated or segregated.

Whether it's a good answer is yet another question. Around the country, there are a few successful all-black schools, but not many — and fewer still where the students are low-income. Conversely, Tata said the research shows that single-sex academies lift student achievement in all subject areas.

Take a look at the Guilford schools. The girls school is doing great. The boys? Average for the district — but that means above-average for other black males in the district.

But these are choice schools — very small — and the students who attend them are presumably not a random sample of African-American students. Rather, they're students with engaged parents who've decided not to put their kids into Guilford's other, much-much-larger high schools.

For 35 years, Wake County has avoided having all-black schools. Under the new school board, Walnut Creek Elementary School opened recently with a predominantly black student body, but it's located on the outer rim of Southeast Raleigh in an area of middle-class black subdivisions.

How would a school drawing a predominantly black, predominantly low-income student population do?

Here's another thing I learned last night. Tata's Student Assignment Plan — the Blue "Choice" Option — which Tata says is "very close to where we need it to be ... and getting a vote" is not going to get a school board vote prior to the October 11 elections.

How do I know that?

Because Donna Williams, a Republican with — shall we say — close ties to the Republican majority on the school board, said so.

Heading into Tuesday's school board meeting, it was thought — but obvioiusly it shouldn't have been — that the board would give Tata's plan some kind of thumbs-up or thumbs-down that day. (That's literally the way the Republicans do it — Board Chair Ron Margiotta asks how the members are feeling and sticks out his thumb.)

On Tuesday, though, the board listened as Tata once again described in a very general way how his plan is gonna be great. Then they kicked the can down the road to the Oct. 4 meeting — a week before Election Day.

Will there be a vote on Oct. 4?

Conceptually, Tata's "Blue" plan rolls right down the middle between the school board majority's desire for "neighborhood schools" and the goal many others have for neighborhood schools with diverse student populations — that is, they would NOT be pure neighborhood schools.

But that middle ground is, thus far, in concept only.

Whether Blue will result in reasonably diverse schools or not depends entirely on how it's executed. The devil, in other words, is in the details. And the details are far from set — or clear.

Margiotta has made clear his preference for a pure neighborhood-schools plan, with diversity cast aside as a goal. But he's running for re-election Oct. 11, making for an awkward situation if Tata insists on diversity as a real outcome of his Blue plan and Margiotta feels constrained to vote no. You know Margiotta doesn't wan to break with Tata — the Republicans' choice to be superintendent — on the eve of the election.

By the same token, if Tata is forced to vague up the diversity element in Blue to the point that it won't produce reasonably diverse schools, Margiotta & Co. probably don't want that outcome to be apparent prior to the elections either.

Anyway, Williams said she's "been told" that the Student Assignment Plan won't be put to a vote until after the elections, and if she's elected, she'll insist that her views on it be taken into account. Williams, if elected, wouldn't take office until December. Figure at least a month for her to get up to speed on the assignment issue, and we'd be into January before this hash is settled under her scenario.

***

The debate itself was energetic, if predictable. District 6 looks like a race between Kushner, who's endorsed by the NCAE and the Wake Democrats, and Williams, who's endorsed by the Wake Republicans. There are two other Democratic candidates, Mary Ann Weathers and George Morgan, but neither seems to have much support or an organized campaign.

Is the Wake school board majority — the Republican majority — on the right track or the wrong one? Williams says right track, Kushner says wrong. Kushner says the board majority is political and divisive. Williams says there's too much anger on both sides, majority and minority. (Actually, if you'll allow me an editorial note, there's lots of anger at the majority from people who come to the school board meetings. But the board minority has been almost saintly, month after month, in their willingness to disagree but remain polite.)

One other thing I learned — or confirmed — last night. Williams husband, Tom Williams, is a partner in Acadia NorthStar, an accounting business with a specialty in charter schools management with some 67 charter school clients in North Carolina already.

I encountered Acadia NorthStar a few weeks ago when I attended the N.C. Charter Schools Alliance conference in downtown Raleigh — the company was a headline sponsor of the conference. With the cap of 100 charter schools taken off this year by the Republican-led General Assembly, being in the charter school management business in North Carolina is about to be a growth sector.

Kushner, at one point in the debate, said her one of her opponents (unnamed, but obviously Williams) was getting support in the race from proponents of charter schools and private schools — the likes of Art Pope and Bob Luddy, in short. That she is. And yes, she told me, her husband is the Acadia NorthStar Tom Williams.

"I heard the shot," Donna Williams said of Kushner's comment when I talked to her after. "I'll say this, I am in favor of school choice, and I am in favor of competition."

During the debate, Williams acknowledged that she's in the school board race as a consequence of her very active role in GOP politics over the past three years. But she said if elected she'll be independent-minded and not bring a political agenda to the table.