A front-page headline in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal declared, "GOP Pins Comeback Hopes on Recapturing Suburbs." So has the paper been talking with John Tedesco?
The voluble young Republican who is spearheading changes on the Wake County school board sees education politics as a way to re-energize the party and send it on to greater glory. Where does his brand of politics tend to get the most traction? In Wake, it's in the suburban belt where growth has led to disruption and dissatisfaction among many families who just want their children to have a stable assignment to a good school.
The community attendance zones pushed by Tedesco and his colleagues in the board's conservative majority would speak to that desire. Oops, a zone approach also would risk creating schools in Raleigh where most of the students were poor. How to make sure the schools would work well for them?
Trust us, the change agents say - having committed themselves to something that nobody yet has figured out how to do without spending gobs more money, plus crossing fingers and praying a lot.
At least the suburbanites would be spared the aggravation of having their offspring in the same classrooms with kids from ... somewhere else.
Give Tedesco credit for talking a good game about wanting to improve educational prospects for disadvantaged young people. But when he rhapsodizes about how conservative values on the school board will aid that effort, what's the message voters actually hear? More likely, it's along the lines of "He'll take care of us" - not "He'll take care of them."
Tedesco, 35 and a bundle of energy, let down his partisan hair in appealing to the Wake GOP for an endorsement in last year's campaign. He was running in a district covering his home town of Garner along with Fuquay-Varina.
The school system's policy of trying to keep schools socioeconomically diverse was a sore point among many of the district's voters. It meant, for example, that some lower-income kids, often African-American, were bused out of Raleigh to schools in Garner.
Tedesco, filling out a party questionnaire that recently came to my attention, hammered the subpar performance of students whom the diversity policy was designed to help, saying the system was failing them. OK - there ought to be accountability when the graduation rate for disadvantaged kids is only a little better than 50 percent. But while neighborhood schools might solve Garner's "problem," nobody should hold his breath waiting for such schools to become beacons of academic achievement for students who have none of the advantages of a middle-class upbringing.
Tedesco elaborated at length in the questionnaire as to why he was running. "NOW is the time for our party to capitalize on the energy of our families and their distaste for a failed system to rebuild our brand in Wake County," he said. His top issue: "The forced redistribution of children - busing, reassignment, and mandatory year-round assignments. Parental and Community Support."
Then the grand concept: "I want this election to be the first in a long line of races over the next few years to highlight that while being true to conservative values the GOP is full of life, ideas, energy, and ready to begin anew with a younger and more diverse base.
"Because of that, I want the GOP to be very active in this campaign, use it for a testing ground and in preparation for your 2010 strategies, review materials to adhere to continuity of message, mobilize volunteers and voters now for 2010 with this as a means of keeping them enthused. Use this election to build more modern tools and encourage a farm team of other young candidates."
So we have an aspiring politician using the officially nonpartisan school board to showcase himself and his tribe and to rally voters to the cause. It's a bold stroke that goes far beyond anything yet attempted in the Wake school arena, where overt partisanship has been blessedly absent while Republicans and Democrats served side by side.
Decisions about the schools being made for partisan advantage? The school board is supposed to have everyone's interests at heart, not chiefly the interests of the Republican base. But the local GOP was only too happy to back Tedesco and other board members who now are calling the shots.
We know the nonpartisan formula worked. The Wake schools have derived an extraordinary bang for the buck even if some children regrettably have lagged. Tedesco and his allies could leave those students hanging even further out to dry in poverty-plagued schools from which they can't escape and about which too many voters in the comfy suburbs simply wouldn't give a damn.
Last week I said that so far as I could recall, Mike Easley was the last primary candidate endorsed by The N&O, when he sought the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in 1990. Dr. Charles Sanders reminds me that we endorsed him in 1996 when, like Easley, he ran in the Democratic Senate primary against Harvey Gantt - the winner both times.
