Cross-District Approaches to Urban Education

A previous CGR Policy Wonk blog, ‘Transforming Urban Education: From Despair to Hope?’ discussed Raleigh, North Carolina’s countywide solution to addressing urban education issues.  The Raleigh experience offers a model for breaking down barriers of poverty and uneven resources and opportunities that help create widely-divergent outcomes across city, suburban and rural boundaries in our community.

The Raleigh model, while promising with its documented levels of success, would also be practically and politically difficult to implement locally—not least because of the multitude of school districts in most counties across New York (18 in Monroe County).  Merging two school districts in Raleigh/Wake County, while not easily accomplished, seems like a walk in the park compared with changing the current educational landscape in Monroe County.  As several responses to the original article suggested, we need the type of strong cross-sector leadership around this issue that surfaced in Raleigh.  Is that realistic locally, given our entrenched multi-school-district profile? Read more »