As the achievement gap between black and white students in Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools persists, few have been more outspoken than freshman school board member Richard McElrath.

A retired educator who spent more than 35 years in the classroom, McElrath says sweeping change is needed to address the problem. He recently met with Qcitymetro.com to talk about his proposed solutions.

McElrath represents District 2 in west Charlotte, one of the city's poorest.

Below is a transcript of that interview, edited for brevity and clarity.

Q. Why did you run for the school board?
I’ve been after the school system for years now. I’ve been a thorn in their side, trying to get them to do the right thing for all the children in the school system, particularly for Afro-American children and poor people. I was always looking from the outside in and thought I could do more if I were on the inside.

Q. Now that you’re elected, how do you see your role?
I’m trying to bring a new perspective to the board, trying to get them to look at what they’re doing and realize that most of what they’re attacking is symptomatic of a bigger problem that they’re doing nothing about.

Q. And what is that bigger problem?
This board spends half its time on boundaries and assignment plans. It shouldn’t make any difference where a student is assigned to school. The only reason it does is because we have a system of low-performing schools and high-performing schools. That’s your problem. Everybody wants to get into a high-performing school, but we have clustered all the high-performing schools in certain districts and clustered the low-performing schools in other districts.

Q. You would like to see top teachers reassigned to low-performing schools, even if it goes against their wishes.
I think we have an obligation to do that. Teachers are public servants, just like police officers, just like firemen, just like the military. They’re all public servants, and they’ve got to go where we need them most. (CMS Superintendent Peter) Gorman says we’ve got strategic staffing. You can’t call it strategic staffing unless you’ve got control over where all your employees go. If you allow employees to say they’re not going to go into this school or that school, then you don’t have strategic staffing.

Q. Are you at all concerned that teachers forced into poor schools might quit?
They’ve already quit. If I live in District 2 and a teacher says, ‘I don’t want to come to District 2,’ then you have already left the system. I’m part of the system. So if you don’t work for me, then you have left the system, as far as I am concerned. I pay taxes. I am paying your salary. You can’t accept the money and then turn around and say ‘I’m not going to work for you.’ The superintendent can’t allow that. Part of my job is to make sure the people I represent aren’t discriminated against.

Q. Despite your apparent disagreement with the superintendent on this issue, you don’t see yourself as a critic. Why?
No, I don’t call it a disagreement. You’re never going to hear me say I don’t agree with the superintendent. When he talks about strategic staffing I agree. We’ve got to have strategic staffing. But it’s how it’s implemented that makes a difference. We agree that we need strategic staffing, but we disagree that we can have strategic staffing and allow certain teachers to decide where they want to work and where they don’t want to work.

Q. The district recently released a report noting that, on average, we spend $11,000 a year per child in poor schools versus $4,000 a year in more affluent schools. Why is that not enough?
It hasn’t been enough. We’ve been spending more money on the children who are behind -- the lowest-performing kids – for years. We started out with Equity Plus II Schools. Then we changed the name to Focus Schools. If you’re a Title 1 school you get extra money. They had a plan that called for closing the performance gap by 2010. Well, we are in 2010, and the gap has gotten wider. So the money is not producing good academic results.

Q. Do you see some irony there? A while back, we as African Americans complained that our schools were underfunded, that we were given second-hand books while white schools got superior funding.
We are spending more, but the more is not going for education. In my opinion, it’s going for segregation. This community has said, ‘We don’t want these people in our neighborhoods, and we certainly don’t want these children in our schools.’ And they are willing to pay $11,000 per student, whatever they have to spend, to keep (poor children) in the schools they are in and in the neighborhoods they are in.

Q. So if money isn’t the solution, what is?
The superintendent has said on three different occasions that the biggest problem we’ve got is the aggregation of poverty. In his State of the Schools statement, he said the biggest problem we have is the aggregation of poverty and that it’s caused by our housing patterns. Then in a newspaper article with the Charlotte Observer shortly after that, he said the aggregation of poverty is our biggest problem and it’s caused by our housing patters and that the city needs to build more diverse neighborhood. And there’s the answer. We don’t have diverse neighborhoods. We need to have diverse neighborhoods all over this city, and we need to have good schools in every one of them. Then student assignment won’t matter.

Q. Is there something magical about sitting beside a white student that’s going to make our African American students perform better?
No, there’s nothing magical about it at all. It just means that you’re not going to be struggling trying to get teachers to go to those low-performing schools. You’re not going to be struggling to get resources in those schools. You’re not going to be struggling to get the right kind of environment. If you look back to the ’50, ’60s and then ’70s, the trend all over this country was to build high-rise apartments and put all the poor people in high-rise apartments. We found out that nothing good can happen when you isolate poor people in high-rise apartments or anything else. We started tearing them down, and then we started building all these apartment buildings that weren’t high rises, but the mistake we made there is, we were still clustering them. And the same thing is true; when you cluster poverty, noting good is going to happen, and we know that.

Q. CMS at one time had busing to achieve integration, but it didn’t solve the achievement gap. So how do you answer critics on that point?
We bused kids in order to desegregate school. We never bused them to integrate schools.

Q. What’s the difference?
Rosa Parks was on a desegregated bus, but it wasn’t integrated.
The black people on the bus were relegated to the back of the bus; they couldn’t sit in the front of the bus or wherever they wanted to. We desegregated the schools. We put black kids and white kids in the same schools, but they weren’t in the same classes. There was no integration there. It was just desegregation, the same as the bus. Rosa Parks, when she sat in the front, integrated the bus. If it’s integrated, you’ve got black and white people in every part and portion of everything. You’ve got black people in the high-level classes, white people in the high-level classes; black people in the low-level classes, white people in the low-level classes. You’ve got black and white mixed together in everything. That’s integrated… I believe that if you put the poor kids, or the black kids, in the same class as the white kids, and you don’t discriminate against them, and you give them the same opportunities and the same material, the same instruction, I think black people will compete with white children, or anybody.

Q. You’ve not talked at all about where so many of our children are coming from – the homes and family environments. Is that unimportant?
No, that’s extremely important. We don’t discount it, but we can’t use it as an excuse. You can have parents who never read to you or have never seen a book, but if you look at all the statistics out there, if a (first grader) has three consecutive years with a qualified teacher, they can overcome the difference.

Q. In some parts of our community, education simply isn’t valued. Kids are even picked on if they try to excel, or parents simply don’t stress education. Are you saying none of that factors into the performance gap?
No. That’s why I don’t believe in busing. We’re not going to solve the problem with busing. Most of what happens in school is theoretical, but when you go home, that’s reality. You emulate the characteristics of the people you live around, all the things they do, all the associations you have... If you are in a high-poverty school and the teacher gets upset with you because you don’t do homework, the first thing the child says is, ‘Why are you picking on me? Hardly anyone here does homework.’ So not doing homework becomes ok because most of the people in there don’t do homework. That’s why I say you’re not going to get the academic achievement you want until you do something about your neighborhoods.

Q. Given that the school board has no power to change housing patterns, how is this going to happen?
That’s not an accurate statement. It is within the power of the school board. The school board is the biggest landholder you’ve got in Charlotte… Until the economy fell through, the school system was planning to build 50 new schools, all of them in the suburbs. What the school board has to do is, when they buy land for a school, they have to buy all of it. They may need 25 aces, but if there’s 35 acres or 40, they’ve got to buy the whole parcel. The way it works now, once they get the school built, they sell the remaining land to developers to build homes at whatever price point they want to. What we’re trying to get the school system to do is, instead of selling the land to developers, go ahead and lease the land or give it to the city and let the city put affordable housing on that land. If you want to educate children at the least cost, then you’ve got to get better communities.

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