To Clark, it was the beginning of a classic spiral he'd seen time and time again in other big urban systems. It had happened in Boston, Cleveland and Detroit. Contrary to popular perceptions of "white flight," Clark knew that white parents didn't have to leave a school system to deal it a crushing blow. Over time, simply not showing up in the first place would do the trick. And that, Clark wrote, was exactly what white parents were doing here.
But Clark's warnings — buried in a report to the court during the 1998 legal battle that ended student school assignment by race — were ultimately lost in an avalanche of legal briefs and scholarly analysis. At the time, white enrollment in CMS was over 50 percent, and the system still had white kids to burn. Urban schools were in shambles, and desperately needed repair. Dealing with concentrations of poverty understandably took precedence over courting suburban parents. That could always be done later.
Problem is, it wasn't. In the process, without ever formally choosing to, the school system contributed to a demographic chain of events that today is radically altering the political and social landscape of Mecklenburg and surrounding counties.
In 2000, just two years after Clark's warning, white student enrollment in CMS dipped slightly below 50 percent for the first time. It was a momentous event that would have sent a chill down the spine of any sociologist or demographer with a school desegregation background. But since we don't have a lot of those around here, the significance was largely lost on local politicians. With almost no fanfare, Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools had hit the tipping point.
Bill McCoy, former director of the UNCC Urban Institute, believes this is the most critical issue the community currently faces, yet no one is leading a charge to deal with it.
"The thing that is missing in this discussion right now is where is the business community on this?" said McCoy. "This is a business town and this school system controversy cannot be a positive factor in terms of business people locating here and people growing businesses here. The business community has to come forward and engage in this discussion and in looking for solutions, because if we continue to go the way we're going, it is going to have a very negative impact on the business community."
"Education sits on top of the economic food chain, and people move to what they perceive to be good education," says Dr. Doug Bachtel, a demographer with the Department of Housing and Consumer Economics at the University of Georgia. "To put your situation in economic development terms, this ain't good."
Bachtel says that middle and upper-middle class parents who move to surrounding counties are often the same types of people who are prone to join PTAs and the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce.
"You begin to lose these folks who can make a difference," explained Bachtel. "That hurts economic development in terms of the labor force and because those are the kinds of people who usually get involved in trying to attract new industry and making their community better. Once that process starts, it is like a snowball and it picks up speed."
The Tipping Point
Since the 1970s, sociologists have been giving people across the country the same test. They hold up flash cards picturing several dozen homes and ask what they'd do if someone of another race bought a home in their neighborhood. Then they add another, and another. For the last few decades, the results have remained largely the same. When African-Americans own 25 percent of the homes nearby, whites begin to get antsy. At 50 percent, a majority of whites say they'd leave or that they wouldn't move into the neighborhood in the first place. For African-Americans, a 50-50 racial mix has been the preferred ideal in this test. But bump their neighborhood up to 75 percent white and they, too, begin to get cold feet.
The same thing applies to schools, say experts.
"Whites will go to schools that are 60 percent white and 40 percent minority," said Clark. "When it gets down below 50-50, they will not go. Whites will just pull out and if new people are moving to the district, they will look at the school structure in the city and say, 'Well, I can live in a neighboring county.'"
With schools, the move toward the tipping point usually doesn't start with racial discomfort, but rather with a general perception that a school system is somehow inferior. Because middle and upper-middle class whites are typically the first to bypass the system in favor of private schools or public schools in surrounding counties, the system becomes increasingly populated by minority students, and increasingly low-income. At around 50 percent white, race increasingly begins to drive the abandonment of a public school system.
It becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, said Charles Gallagher, an assistant professor of sociology at Georgia State University who studies race and ethnic relations.
"The presence of a sizable minority population then becomes a proxy for the quality of the schools," said Gallagher.
While sociologists agree that there is no precise mathematical tipping point, at somewhere near a 50-50 racial mix, the "tipping" accelerates and the ratio of one race to the other begins changing more rapidly.
That's exactly what appears to be happening in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, says Christine Rossell, a Boston University professor and school desegregation expert. A decade ago, 54 percent of CMS students were white. In 2000, when CMS hit the tipping point, whites made up roughly half of the public school population.
Today, a mere five years later, they make up just 39 percent.
This phenomenon would perhaps have raised more red flags along the way with local leaders if total white enrollment in our school system was declining significantly, but it's not. CMS has just 307 fewer white students today than it did a decade ago, hardly a large-scale retreat in terms of raw numbers. In fact, the number of white students has hovered around 47,000 for most of the last decade.
What is very new, but has received scant official attention in terms of its effect on CMS, is the growth in the number of white students in surrounding counties. During the last five years, while white growth at CMS stagnated, the surrounding counties — in particular Union and Cabarrus as well as York County, SC — added 10,000 additional white students to their school rolls.
And that's not the only demographic change that has been largely ignored: the county public school system has also seen a very large in-migration of minority students. While white enrollment stayed flat, an additional 15,000 African-American children and 11,000 Hispanic children enrolled in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools over the past decade. At 43 percent, African-American children are now the largest student group in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.
According to David Armor, a research professor at the Institute of Public Policy at George Mason University, it appears that white parents who are moving to this region with school age children are increasingly choosing to live outside Mecklenburg County, while African-Americans and Hispanics are settling down inside the county. With half the residential growth in the six-county region now occurring outside Mecklenburg, the trend is likely to accelerate over the next decade.
On top of all that, white parents who live in Mecklenburg County are increasingly choosing charter, private or home schooling, which has also taken its toll on diversity in public schools. In 1990, 83 percent of white school age children who lived in the county attended Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. By 2000, only 70 percent did. In contrast, 98 percent of African-American and Hispanic school age children here attend public schools.
For Boston University's Rossell, many of these trends are familiar ones that have been the prelude to white abandonment in urban systems across the nation for decades. Unless the school system does something radical and does it now, she says, it will soon start losing the white kids it still has.
Once that happens, says University of Georgia's Dr. Doug Bachtel, black middle class families will likely begin to abandon the system as well, leaving behind higher and higher concentrations of low-income kids.
Given all these combustible trends, it's no wonder the school system is facing mutiny from both black and white parents' groups who've made news lately with threats of lawsuits and/or secession from the school system. Experts we spoke with agree that these are some of the classic signs that the system is "tipping."
"Charlotte is repeating what has happened in every large metropolitan area in the Northeast," said Gallagher. From here on out, he said, perceptions about local schools will increasingly be a key factor, if not the key factor, in the real estate decisions made by parents of school-age children.
"New homebuyers," said Gallagher, "even those that wanted the cultural amenities being close to the city would provide, are doing this calculus about how if they move into the city, they're going to have to pay for private schools, but if they move to one of the surrounding counties, you typically get better, more affordable housing."
Bill McCoy says schools and racial issues play a part, but shouldn't take all the blame for parents choosing to bypass Mecklenburg for the surrounding counties.
"I think taxes have a part in that choice," he said. "Cheaper housing plays a part in that choice. I think it is hard to figure out what is the primary factor, but there is no doubt there is a role in terms of education."
Jim Carpenter, President of the Union County Chamber of Commerce, hears about school choices on a daily basis.
"For parents with school age children, the quality of education and schools ranks as their number one criteria," said Carpenter. "People looking to move here come to the Chamber and want to see our scores."
Carpenter says the Chamber actually has a fact sheet listing the county's school test scores that it distributes to parents. The sheet doesn't list Mecklenburg's scores or make any other comparisons, but usually by the time savvy parents wind up at the Union County Chamber, they've already checked out Mecklenburg's school scores, he said.
It's an area in which Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools are increasingly getting clobbered by surrounding counties, all of which have higher test scores. At the high school level, Union County's average ABC score is 82, compared to 59 for CMS. Four of Union's five high schools posted average ABC scores of 80 percent or better in 2004, while only one of Charlotte-Mecklenburg's 17 high schools broke the 80 percent barrier.
Integrated Suburban Magnet Schools?
There's no generally accepted word to describe what's going on demographically in Mecklenburg County. Rossell calls it "non-entrance." Armor calls it a "classic metro re-segregation pattern."
But everyone Creative Loafing interviewed agreed that it can't be called white flight, because Charlotte-Mecklenburg isn't actually losing white people. Like the school system, it's just not attracting them in the numbers it once was.
Between 1980 and 1990, whites flocked to Mecklenburg County. Twice the number of whites moved here during that decade than the number of blacks and Hispanics combined.
Over the next decade, however, the trend was radically reversed. While the number of whites moving here declined, Mecklenburg attracted more than twice the number of new African-Americans it had the decade before. Hispanic in-migration grew by 1400 percent. In the end, only 40 percent of those who moved to the county between 1990 and 2000 were white.
This is a phenomenon that is altering the fabric of a county that doesn't deal well with change. This time, though, the community can't just brush the problem under the rug. We must begin facing facts if we want to continue to prosper in the future said McCoy, a longtime observer of demographic trends in the region.
"The first thing to do is admit it," said McCoy. "We all have to come to terms with the change in the demography of Mecklenburg County and the impact it's having in the schools. This is a demographic issue that the local folks have to come to grips with. The critical thing is not to run and hide from it, but address it."
Here's one more thing not to hide from: Charles Clotfelter, a public policy professor at Duke University who has studied segregation patterns in schools, says that our school system is now among the most segregated in the state.
"Charlotte was an example of integration for a long time," said Clotfelter. "In the last five years, there has been as dramatic a change in racial isolation and segregation in Charlotte as anywhere else that we have looked at."
Statewide between 1995 and 2003, the percentage of black students who go to schools that are over 90 percent nonwhite rose from 7 to 12.4 percent, Clotfelter said. "In Charlotte," he continued, "it went from 2.3 percent, which is extremely balanced, to 21.3 percent over the same period."
He blames the choice-oriented student assignment plan the system adopted in the late 1990s, which allows parents to chose schools close to home. At the same time, though, Clotfelter also acknowledges that the county appears to have already hit the racial tipping point.
"What you see is a more rapid disinclination to go to public schools," said Clotfelter.
And that's the problem. By law, the system can no longer use race to decide where kids go to school, but it can use income. To break up high concentrations of poverty and race at some schools, the system will have to spread disadvantaged kids more evenly throughout the system. But by doing so, it risks driving away suburban parents, which could over time result in an even more racially and economically segregated system than the one we currently have.
School board member Molly Griffin says the situation is the biggest issue facing the school system right now, and that she brings it up at board meetings every chance she gets.
"You want to say it in a way that states the facts without using buzzwords that will make somebody angry," said Griffin. "But the fact is that the school system doesn't look like the county and that is a problem for me."
But Griffin says there won't be any easy answers for Mecklenburg County like there were for the Wake County school system, which caps poverty levels at individual schools at 40 percent. Just over 30 percent of Wake students are on the free and reduced lunch program.
"The point I try to make is that we are pushing 50 percent poverty as a system," said Griffin. "So how do you think we are going to cap poverty at 40 percent like Wake? The mathematical model doesn't work."
The social model doesn't work either, says Armor.
"The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School Board should be very concerned about its policies, because if it is perceived as adopting policies that are anti-white and pro-minority, the system will become predominantly minority," he said. "Then it will be very hard to have any level of integration in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Although there is no white flight yet, it is only a matter of time until white enrollment will begin to decline if the current trends continue."
But if the system continues on its current path, it also risks being sued for doing too little to reduce high concentrations of race and poverty that are as much a result of its current student assignment plan as of the system's and the county's changing demographics.
Both Rossell and Clark say that the only way to target both problems is with integrated magnet schools located in the suburbs.
"You make them attractive to whites and minorities and you try to keep the numbers sort of slightly majority white, 55-45, and they tend to work," said Clark. "That means you've really got to be creative to get integration going."
But, Rossell warns, you've got to be careful there, too. After the Rockford, IL, school district went on a building spree in the fast-growing, largely white suburbs and moth-balled several partly full schools with high-minority concentrations in the early 1990s, it was successfully sued for discrimination and spent years under a court-ordered desegregation plan that drove whites out and taxes up.
School Board Member Louise Woods says she isn't overly worried about the situation. The decrease in the percentage of white kids in the system doesn't mean that it's getting less diverse, she says, because black and Hispanic children students increasingly come from many different countries.
Woods takes the opposite view of the tipping point-obsessed academics we spoke to. She says she believes that middle-income parents, both white and black, are uncomfortable with schools that are racially homogeneous and want more, not less diversity in schools. In fact, the school system should positively market its diversity as a way to attract parents who at present might be educating their children outside the public school system.
"I think we need to pay attention to the quality of every school and pay attention, where at all possible, to having more diverse populations in as many schools as possible because I think middle-income families are more comfortable and often will flee schools that are less diverse," she said.
Woods also points to the fact that this year, about the same number of white kids entered kindergarten in our school system as did black children. It's unclear whether this is the beginning of a new trend, because the number of whites appears to shrink at just about every grade level after that, but Woods remains hopeful.
Meanwhile, as urban and suburban parents become increasingly shrill in their conflicting, and ultimately competing, demands for change, one thing is becoming abundantly clear. There are some very tough decisions ahead, and someone will have to begin making them soon.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com.
