Growing up in North Raleigh, I used to envy my friends' citified education.
Although a Raleigh native, I never attended a Wake County school. With a father in education and a mother in the ministry, I attended school where Dad worked and church where Mom preached. I grew up in two worlds: weekdays in the public schools of southern Granville County and weekends at an upper-middle-class suburban church on Norwood Road.
I endured years of good-natured ribbing from my church friends for my "hick school" education. Their schools - Leesville Road, Millbrook, Broughton, Sanderson, Athens Drive - offered tons of advanced courses. Everyone, it seemed, went to college. Heck, they even had soccer teams.
Though my Wake County friends teased me, they rarely razzed one another. No one spoke of good schools and bad schools in the Raleigh where I grew up. If that seems unremarkable, ask someone from Charlotte, Richmond or Atlanta to name some good local schools and some bad ones. They'll rattle them off right quick.
Those Southern cities and scores of others have headed down a road that, until recently, Wake County refused to travel. Whatever its flaws, my hometown has refused to resegregate its schools behind code words and catchphrases. School leaders in Wake took the "public" in public education seriously and devised nationally recognized strategies to provide high-quality schooling for all.
Since leaving North Carolina, I have seen the future that the current Wake County school board is stumbling toward. I taught at an elementary school in the Mississippi Delta, where nearly all of my students were African-American and poor. Are they "neighborhood schools"? Not exactly. For one thing, most kids take long bus rides to get to them.
Farther up the road stood "the academy," a weathered aluminum schoolhouse where veteran teachers made two-thirds my starting salary. Acting on principles or peer pressure, most Delta whites opt to pay a few thousand bucks a year for the dubious benefits of lily-white education. Not exactly Ravenscroft, but many Mississippians still cling to their "seg" academies. There are a few better private schools, the kind Raleigh folk would recognize, but they're too expensive for most families and a long drive for many who could afford them.
After Mississippi, I took my Carolina pride into exile in New Haven, Conn. My Mississippi license plate seemed oddly out of place until I set foot in a local elementary school. It might as well have been Mississippi - an overwhelmingly poor, minority student body in a written-off school system. From Yale professors to city bus drivers, parents sent their children elsewhere if they had the cash.
Deep South or way up North, disinvestment and disillusionment ravage public education. Living in the nation's poorest state and then in the richest, I looked at the schools through Raleigh eyes and wondered: Who would have let such a thing happen?
I remember coming home from Mississippi and telling folks about my all-black school and the all-white academy down the road. Almost invariably, I encountered some enlightened, inside-440 lament about how "stuck in the past" those poor Mississippians were. That would never happen here.
What none of us could foresee was a school board majority that views educational balkanization as the wave of the future. Public-school antagonists who sell resegregation as entrepreneurial, anti-establishment innovation, with schools such as Enloe and Southeast Raleigh - my sister's alma mater - in the crosshairs. An ideological coup that seeks to impose a sink-or-swim mandate on low-income, minority students to bolster cynical and timeworn talking points.
If that seems harsh, it's not just Mississippi or Connecticut talking. It's Creedmoor, too.
Whatever my Creedmoor education lacked, it taught me some things the school board majority should take to heart. In Granville County, bus rides and socioeconomic diversity are not political footballs to toss back and forth. They are everyday realities of a community's children attending school - together. Up there, of course, "community" doesn't mean subdivision. There's no "school choice." There is a school system, its students and a surrounding community that knows that it can either help schools succeed or watch them fail.
When desegregation finally arrived in Creedmoor, local whites could have built their own segregation academy. A few tried. Whether for lack of funds, insufficient ideological fervor or perhaps that stubborn strain of pro-public-school spirit that most North Carolinians can't seem to shake, Creedmoor chose community over "neighborhood." Along the way, Granville County Schools rivaled their citified southern neighbor in awards and innovation.
Don't let a bad situation go south - or north - on you, courtesy of those who promote racially isolated, high-poverty schools as if this were school reform. Regardless of which end of Creedmoor Road you find yourself on, real public schools are worth saving.
Jason Morgan Ward, a 1997 graduate of South Granville High School, is a professor of U.S. history at Mississippi State University.
