Wake County school board member Chris Malone focused on the AdvancED accreditation investigation during his speech at last Thursday's Northern Wake Republican Club meeting.
Malone related his "interrogation" with the AdvancED team saying that "one of the first things that happened to me was one of the fellas pointed his finger at me and said, 'I just want you to know that I don't like your policies.'"
"I thought, well okay," Malone said. "I said to him well obviously you're not a fan and we sat down and continued the interview, interrogation, whatever you want to call it."
At the end of the interview, Malone said AdvancED CEO Mark Elgart asked him what he wanted to tell the team. Malone said he asked why, after having accredited Wake for 75 years, why they hadn't investigated the district earlier.
Malone said he also pointed to AdvancED how the federal civil rights investigation is questioning whether the board's policies are having a disparate impact on minority students.
"I said, 'Certainly by their very own standards, we've had disparate impact over the last 10 years based on the previous Policy of 6200 (student assignment policy) on busing. Why weren't they here then?'" Malone said.
Malone said AdvancED's response was that nobody had complained about Wake before. While Malone didn't say it to their faces, he said he wanted to say how could they be in Atlanta "making their money" and not know about the "failure" going on in Wake under the diversity policy
While the AdvancED report gave a "blistering critique," Malone said the seven required action steps were "ordinary" and things they were already doing.
"So I went home and I slept well and I'm not really too concerned," Malone told the crowd. "I did want you to know that although there is more to come in November."
Malone then pointed to the April 10 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article on AdvancED. He said the article is showing the reasons why he had voted against cooperating with AdvancED.
Malone cited the quote from Elgart in the article in which he said "it’s not undemocratic to usurp elected school board members’ authority when they misbehave."
"Can you believe that?" Malone said of the Elgart quote. "In one fell swoop, in one sentence this guy says we have the subjective power to determine who is misbehaving and indeed what is misbehaving, what does misbehaving means and then of course because they are the accrediting service, because they have, if you have a complaint with the accrediting service, who do we go to but them.
So they've got a monopoly on the whole thing. They've got the territory. They can investigate us anytime they want based on any findings that they have and then if there's a complaint we go through them to say 'I think you're wrong' and they're going to tell you 'No, are you kidding me?' So I thought this was very instructive as to what we're dealing with and to let you know that we're going to do these seven things.
I think that they're important to do and we hope that when our number rolls around that they see that we have cooperated, that we work well together. And that we don't need them in Wake County crawling through the 3600 or over Crossroads or wherever we are at that time."
