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INDY Week
In a recent op-ed in the pages of this publication, Jenny Jones Coldren observes the issues plaguing Durham Public Schools and the angry response these issues have provoked from some of our neighbors. She calls for community solutions to community problems. She calls for unity.
Her op-ed actually points, somewhat inadvertently, to one of the challenges that underlies much of the dysfunction in Durham schools and in Durham politics more broadly: namely, that local political organizations—and perhaps chiefly the People’s Alliance, an organization that Ms. Coldren has at times represented—have a stranglehold on our political process.
Organizations like the People’s Alliance have served as a unifying force, of sorts. It is worth asking, though, if this type of political unity has delivered the results anyone in Durham actually wanted. If not, then the problem is not a lack of happy talk on social media, as Ms. Coldren highlights, but rather a lack of righteous anger. This kind of anger could find productive purpose if it spilled from the comment threads of SoDu Parents Posse and the pages of this publication into the minds of every Durham citizen when we next have an opportunity to vote.
For now, let’s review the record of recent elections. Over the past four election cycles that included the Durham County Board of Education going back to 2014, no candidate has won without the endorsement of the People’s Alliance. Not one. Those elected officials have won their offices with an average of over 75 percent of the vote. To be sure, the number of people in Durham who participate in local elections is embarrassingly small and often these candidates ran unopposed, but election results like these show a surprising level of “unity” among the voting public.
For my part, I do not want unity. I want good schools for my children. We will get to good schools via disagreement, discussion, compromise, accountability—these are the hallmarks of a functioning local polity. This is what community solutions to community problems look like. But in Durham, we rarely seem to get any of these things—or at least not around election time, when they matter most.
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Around election time, we mostly hear about the issues Ms. Coldren mentions in her opening paragraphs: the bogeyman of school choice, the specter of Project 2025. “Be afraid, good people of Durham, and trust us to protect you from the excesses of Raleigh and Washington, D.C.” But who will protect us from the current chaos in our local schools? The ugly truth is that the balance of influence upon our local schools tilts away from the federal and state levels. The real power rests with us, the voting public here in Durham County.
To my fellow Durham voters: What is your litmus test when you cast your vote for local officials? More to the point, how do we vet our elected officials for competence in the duties they will actually perform? Does it just come down to whether a candidate’s name has made it onto the sample ballot from the People’s Alliance? If so, we have to do better.
I do not know how the People’s Alliance or other prominent local organizations evaluate candidates, but their evaluation criteria do not seem to include anything, for example, related to budgetary or organizational leadership experience. Candidly, it does not matter where you stand on “banned books” if our children cannot read at grade level. Any overtures to racial equity ring hollow when the most marginalized in our community have inconsistent school transportation. The people who can take Zoom calls from the carpool line, a solution Ms. Coldren suggests, have already voted with their feet and enrolled in private school or moved to Cary.
Despite what some readers might think, my aim here is not to make a political statement. Indeed, basic issues of managerial competence are pre-political, and we do not earn the right to argue about second things until we have addressed first things. So let’s do that. Let’s hold accountable at the ballot box those candidates who have failed us and the organizations that support them. Let’s support our kids’ schools by volunteering and contributing to PTAs and booster clubs. Let’s coax friends and neighbors off the sidelines to teach, to drive buses, and to run for elected office, even if they do not have DPS students. Let’s transform the anonymous bickering in private Facebook groups into productive public disagreement that leads to a better Durham.
If we are not willing to do those things, we have no right to complain. We truly are not “in this together,” and we will have proven that the problem, in reality, is us. W
Peter Crawford is a Durham resident and parent of three children attending Durham Public Schools.
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