RALEIGH – I like a good conspiracy theory as much as the next former X-Files devotee. Bad conspiracy theories are, however, tiresome.

Here’s an example of a good conspiracy: UFO visitation. Necessarily, aliens from outer space are either brilliant themselves or at least skilled adopters of the brilliant scientific and engineering achievements of others. That’s how they got here.

With plenty of gray matter upstairs – or downstairs, or in the pantry, not sure of the exobiology involved – extraterrestrials know better than to abduct accomplished and urbane human beings for their perverse experiments. Such victims might be believed. So E.T.s make sure to concentrate their nefarious activities in rural areas, among folks who may well be highly intelligent but whose backgrounds invoke prejudice among most of the population. The more spirited their claims of alien abduction, the more these victims are disbelieved.

That’s one smart conspiracy. The aliens responsible deserve our respect, though not yet our acquiescence. I, for one, have decided that I will not comply with their dastardly schemes.

As an example of the other kind of conspiracy theory, the dumb kind, check out the latest claim by defenders of Wake County’s soon-to-be-abandoned policy of forcing students to attend schools far away from their homes. In Monday’s Raleigh News & Observer, critics of the new conservative school board accused several of its members of trying to sabotage public schools so that Wake parents will send their kids to private schools instead. “We are all very concerned about it, because it seems that there’s an agenda there – to dismantle the public school system and make it less attractive for middle- and upper-class families,” one pro-busing activist told the N&O.

Local leftists have been peddling this particular conspiracy theory for months now. I have no reason to doubt that they actually believe it, much as devotees of Loch Ness Monster lore and Sasquatch sightings seem entirely genuine in their credulity. But it makes very little sense to the rational observer.

It’s worse than that, actually. The latest lefty paranoia about private education stands in direct contradiction to earlier lefty paranoia about private education.

Four decades ago, when many of North Carolina’s private schools got their start, liberals complained that they were little more than segregation academies designed to give racist whites a way to escape from newly integrated public school districts in Charlotte, Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and other cities. My parents well remember this line of attack, as they were publicly subjected to it.

Both my parents were career employees of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. Right after the Swann desegregation case, my father worked in student assignment under former Superintendent Jay Robinson before being assigned to an inner-city elementary school as its principal. My mother taught art in several schools across the county. When the story broke that my parents had decided to send their five children to private schools, it made the local newspaper.

But like many Mecklenburg residents seeking alternatives to CMS, my parents weren’t responding to the advent of busing. Being so close to the action, they had become appalled at other policies being implemented at the roughly the same time, such as whole-language reading instruction, open classrooms, and lax discipline. Although charged professionally with carrying out the system’s educational policies, they could at least seek alternatives, at great financial sacrifice, for their own children until the public system realized the consequences of its errors. That’s what eventually happened, and I ended up in public school for most of my junior high and high school education.

According to the defenders of forced busing, however, the thousands of North Carolinians who fled “progressive” education during the 1970s and 1980s were all really fleeing black people. The assumption was flawed, but at least it had the virtue of superficial plausibility.

Now, many of the same leftists are asserting precisely the opposite causality – that the end of forced busing will cause many middle- and upper-income families to flee the public schools. Improbably, the prospect of receiving more control over their children’s school assignment – people of means obviously have a greater ability to choose homes based on community assignment zones – is somehow supposed to repel them into the waiting arms of private educators.

This is an idiotic theory. If anything, respecting the wishes of the majority of Wake parents and dismantling forced busing will make it less likely they will exit the system for education in charter schools, private schools, or home schools. Thus, any school board members with a personal or ideological motivation for “dismantling” public schools as a first step to privatization are working against their interest by eliminating forced busing.

It would make more sense to accuse the conservative school board members of being extraterrestrials bent on sowing public discord as a prelude to invasion. Not that I should be giving the lefties any ideas. . .

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation