What Great and Good Looks Like in Charlottesville

by James C. SherlockIn the relationship between Charlottesville and the University of Virginia, very bad things have happened to Charlottesville and continue to do so.I have developed a working thesis on that relationship.The city is at the mercy of the University by virtue of the latter's wealth, influence, and power in Charlottesville elections.Unfailingly progressive Charlottesville city council, school board and Commonwealth’s Attorney candidates are elected by the dominant votes of the University, its employees and its students. With those officials in place, the University gets its way.Charlottesville Public Schools (CPS) are creatures of the University.Many CPS teachers have their bachelors and/or advanced degrees from UVa's School of Education and Human Development. Every progressive educational policy and virtually every experiment the University’s ed school can dream up are visited on those students.For the city's Black children in those schools, that influence, well-meaning though it was, turns out to have been a disaster unparalleled in the Commonwealth.Voting. Charlottesville’s elected city council and school board align philosophically and directly with the University. Joseph Platania, the elected Commonwealth’s Attorney, is a restorative justice icon.  That makes sense, really, because a very large slice of the voters who elect them are academic and medical staff, faculty and students at UVa.  The University has almost 10,000 employees at the Charlottesville campus. It has over 17,000 students there. All are of voting age.  The total population of Charlottesville was estimated at 45,373 in 2022. A total of 38,250 of those, swelled by university students claiming residency, were of voting age. More UVa students than you can imagine vote in Charlottesville. The census bureau asks only where they live the majority of the year.  The University uses everything but cattle prods to get them to the local polls.  Influence. Charlottesville, were it to resist UVa’s interests, would be in a cage match with a much more powerful and wealthier competitor. The cage is the ten square miles of the city.As the University has expanded and continues to do so, the city cannot. Irresistible force meets inelastic object.With the University community’s demand for residential housing within walking/bicycle distance of the Lawn continually increasing faster than supply, and no undeveloped land in Charlottesville, the zoning decisions are tough.Zoning changes generally bow to the University’s interests. As a recent editorial in The Cavalier Daily explained, the University is not a good neighbor.Public Schools. But what drew me to this story is the fact that Black students in Charlottesville Public Schools (CPS) have suffered to a degree unequaled elsewhere in the commonwealth.  It is a school system designed unusually with six schools for Pre-K-4, one for grades 5 and 6, another for 7 and 8, and a single high school with a couple of alternative programs.The map above shows that the Pre-K-4 school boundaries roughly follow the neighborhoods in the earlier map.Now look at the elementary school performance and attendance annotations.The biggest anomaly is that the gap between White and Black academic performance in CPS is an ocean. Worse than Richmond both in absolute performance by the Black students and relative to White students.I can find nowhere in the commonwealth, including other college towns (and I looked), in which White and Black public-school students exist in academic disparity to the extent they do in Charlottesville.  The Charlottesville High School riots reflect that gulf.CPS has managed to fail those Black children in a relatively balanced student demographic of 42% White, 29% Black, 14% Hispanic, 5% Asian and 10% multiple races.The teachers have far more advanced degrees, most from UVa’s ed school, than the average school division.It just doesn’t work.One reason: They do not enforce truancy laws. Possibly because they think inequitable outcomes would result. Instead they have well-meant but demonstrably failed multi-part strategies to encourage attendance.There is no effective order and discipline in the schools. Same mind set.So, a lot of Black kids have no chance to learn. And it is harder for teachers to teach.Those are the inequitable outcomes of unworkable attendance and discipline strategies.But that is not nearly all they are doing that does not work.Next, we will look next at town and gown in more detail.Someone once wrote that things that can’t go on forever will stop. Charlottesville as a city is untenable. I will recommend that Charlottesville strongly consider reversion to town status within Albemarle County. Such a move is all upside for the city.Albemarle County, with a population last year estimated at 114,534, half again the median household income of Charlottesville, and huge swaths of undeveloped land, is in an excellent position to make it work far better than the revisions Virginia has seen up to this point.We will also look a lot closer at Charlottesville Public Schools and the relationship between those schools and the University’s School of Education and Human Development (UVaEd).It has produced unmatched failure for the very Black children whom both claim, and intend, to champion.This column has been republished with permission from Bacon's Rebellion.