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Seven years ago, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools concluded a long, contentious student assignment review. District leaders agreed it was important to break up concentrations of poverty and racial isolation wherever possible.
They created a complex new formula to encourage socioeconomic diversity in magnet schools. But it was a smaller, more visible change that drew the most attention: Paired schools. In a move reminiscent of 1970s desegregation strategies, CMS merged attendance zones for two underfilled, high-poverty elementary schools with those for two schools that were crowded and more affluent. In those pairings — Billingsville/Cotswold and Dilworth/Sedgefield — K-2 students went to one building and students in grades 3-5 to another.
The move drew national attention and extensive local media coverage. Critics said it would drive families away, while supporters talked about seeing the strategy serve as a local and national model.
"It's successful to me if it's replicated in this district and beyond," Billingsville/Cotswold Principal Alicia Hash said when I interviewed her in 2019.
That hasn't happened.
As CMS inches toward another student assignment review, both sets of paired schools are being phased out, largely because neither attracted enough students to fill two buildings. Dilworth Elementary will return to a single building in August, with Sedgefield becoming a Montessori magnet. Billingsville and Cotswold will follow a similar path, though it will take a bit longer.
What happened?
The Dilworth/Sedgefield pairing, which took the Dilworth name for both campuses, immediately became a majority-white school. That's partly because CMS carved off a high-poverty, mostly Black public housing project that had been part of the Sedgefield zone and sent those students to another high-poverty school nearby. Last year, with white students making up about three-quarters of enrollment, the two-campus Dilworth Elementary was one of the whitest schools in CMS, with a poverty level below 20%.
Billingsville/Cotswold was racially and economically diverse from the start, and remained so last year.
The paired schools were designed to create room to attract more students. But the reality was they started losing students right away. Last year Dilworth had just over 600 students and Billingsville/Cotswold had just over 700. Both are at least 35% below pre-merger totals.
It's unclear whether the loss of students can be attributed to the pairings or to other factors, such as slowing birth rates, increasing competition from charter schools, pandemic disruption and gentrification of close-in neighborhoods where private schools are popular. CMS as a whole is down 4% from peak enrollment in 2017.
So far there's been no public post-mortem on the plan that once generated so much buzz. When CMS leaders — few of whom were part of the last student assignment review — laid out plans for a 2023 bond vote, they simply phased out the pairings to make better use of the buildings.
Changing landscape
Now CMS has consultants studying boundaries, demographics, magnet programs and construction plans as the school board prepares for its next comprehensive review. That review has been postponed several times amid leadership churn. The best estimate now is that data will be presented in late summer or fall.
Akeshia Craven-Howell was the CMS administrator in charge of student assignment during the last review. She recalls two things fueling concerns about concentrations of poverty in schools: In 2013, local leaders were dismayed by a Harvard University/UC Berkeley report (commonly known as the Chetty study) that labeled Charlotte the lowest of 50 cities for upward mobility. They created a task force that concluded that racial and economic segregation — in public schools and in the community at large — was a major factor in limiting opportunity.
And Amy Hawn Nelson of UNC Charlotte's Urban Institute was talking to community groups about the perils of racially isolated, high-poverty schools. Her presentation highlighted the difficulty of attracting top teachers to "hypersegregated" schools and the reduced chances of academic and lifelong success for students consigned to such schools.
"I think it was Amy's good work and also the work of the Chetty study that really pushed the board to think about socioeconomic diversity," Craven-Howell said recently. She left CMS in 2022 and now works as a national consultant on education strategy.
Craven-Howell has two children in CMS and recently joined the school board's Community Equity Committee. She noted that the 2023 bond plans will shape much of the discussion ahead. And she said Superintendent Crystal Hill's new strategic plan is currently the focus for people who care about the future of CMS.
Hill is the third superintendent to hold the office since the last student assignment review. Her plan talks about excellence and equity, but does not directly address diversity, socioeconomic status or school demographics.
Fighting for survival
Nelson is also a CMS parent who has moved on to national consulting. She co-edited a 2015 collection of essays about desegregation and resegregation in Charlotte.
But she told me recently that her focus has changed.
"I'm of the opinion that while segregation remains a topic, and one that I myself am very committed to as a parent … from a policy perspective it is silly to focus on that when our schools are so underfunded," she said.
She says North Carolina's General Assembly has shifted her attention with moves such as fighting the Leandro court order to increase spending for public education and expanding the state's private-school voucher program. She compares working for more diversity in local schools to making improvements to a house that's on fire.
"When there was a lot of movement around segregation and resegregation, the state context was really different," she said. "So when people ask me about segregation, my response is, 'It doesn't matter if we don't fund our schools adequately.' "
The disruption to in-person classes during the pandemic also intensified academic challenges at all schools, and seems to have sparked a renewed interest in alternatives to traditional public schools. And these days, anything related to diversity can become a political battleground. All of that makes it difficult for district leaders to plunge into student assignment changes that could alienate parents (and virtually any major assignment change creates angst and controversy).
What lies ahead
During the last student assignment review, Dee Rankin chaired the Education Committee of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Black Political Caucus. Now Rankin, elected to the school board in 2022, is vice chair of a board where only one of nine members was in office during the last review.
Turnover on the board and in the superintendent’s office is one reason the latest review has been slow to take shape.
“I want to make sure our community members understand our main focus is improving student outcomes,” Rankin told me last week. That can mean higher test scores, he said, but also “making sure our students have the ability to have a great social experience — learning about different cultures, learning from different individuals, diversity.”
Rankin says increasing socioeconomic and cultural diversity in schools will be “part of the formula” for the next review, but not the main focus.
“I think we’ll take a look at where there are different pockets within the city, within our county that we have an opportunity to do that,” he said.
The 2023 bond package will also determine school construction and major renovation projects for the next several years. That shapes where the board will redraw boundaries and relocate magnet programs.
Rankin says the consultant’s report will be presented to the board and the public “within the next couple of months.” It’s likely to provide the first clear look at the impact of the socioeconomic diversity formula that debuted seven years ago.
Will it also look at the lessons learned from the paired school experiment? That remains to be seen.
