Integration abolished in NC County.

[SirNitram]

Link

RALEIGH, N.C. - The sprawling Wake County School District has long been a rarity. Some of its best, most diverse schools are in the poorest sections of this capital city. And its suburban schools, rather than being exclusive enclaves, include children whose parents cannot afford a house in the neighborhood.

But over the past year, a new majority-Republican school board backed by national tea party conservatives has set the district on a strikingly different course. Pledging to "say no to the social engineers!" it has abolished the policy behind one of the nation's most celebrated integration efforts.

And as the board moves toward a system in which students attend neighborhood schools, some members are embracing the provocative idea that concentrating poor children, who are usually minorities, in a few schools could have merits - logic that critics are blasting as a 21st-century case for segregation.

The situation unfolding here in some ways represents a first foray of tea party conservatives into the business of shaping a public school system, and it has made Wake County the center of a fierce debate over the principle first enshrined in the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education: that diversity and quality education go hand in hand.

The new school board has won applause from parents who blame the old policy - which sought to avoid high-poverty, racially isolated schools - for an array of problems in the district and who say that promoting diversity is no longer a proper or necessary goal for public schools.

"This is Raleigh in 2010, not Selma, Alabama, in the 1960s - my life is integrated," said John Tedesco, a new board member. "We need new paradigms."

But critics accuse the new board of pursuing an ideological agenda aimed at nothing less than sounding the official death knell of government-sponsored integration in one of the last places to promote it. Without a diversity policy in place, they say, the county will inevitably slip into the pattern that defines most districts across the country, where schools in well-off neighborhoods are decent and those in poor, usually minority neighborhoods struggle.

The NAACP has filed a civil rights complaint arguing that 700 initial student transfers the new board approved have already increased racial segregation, violating laws that prohibit the use of federal funding for discriminatory purposes. In recent weeks, federal education officials visited the county, the first step toward a possible investigation.

"So far, all the chatter we heard from tea partyers has not manifested in actually putting in place retrograde policies. But this is one place where they have literally attempted to turn back the clock," said Benjamin Todd Jealous, president of the NAACP.

School Board Chairman Ron Margiotta referred questions on the matter to the district's attorney, who declined to comment. Tedesco, who has emerged as the most vocal among the new majority on the nine-member board, said he and his colleagues are only seeking a simpler system in which children attend the schools closest to them. If the result is a handful of high-poverty schools, he said, perhaps that will better serve the most challenged students.

"If we had a school that was, like, 80 percent high-poverty, the public would see the challenges, the need to make it successful," he said. "Right now, we have diluted the problem, so we can ignore it."

So far, the board shows few signs of shifting course. Last month, it announced that Anthony J. Tata, former chief operating officer of the D.C. schools, will replace a superintendent who resigned to protest the new board's intentions. Tata, a retired general, names conservative commentator Glenn Beck and the Tea Party Patriots among his "likes" on his Facebook page.

Tata did not return calls seeking comment, but he said in a recent news conference in Raleigh that he supports the direction the new board is taking, and cited the District as an example of a place where neighborhood schools are "working."

Beyond 'your little world'

The story unfolding here is striking because of the school district's unusual history. It sprawls 800 square miles and includes public housing in Raleigh, wealthy enclaves near town, and the booming suburbs beyond, home to newcomers that include many new school board members. The county is about 72 percent white, 20 percent black and 9 percent Latino. About 10 percent live in poverty.

Usually, such large territory is divided into smaller districts with students assigned to the nearest schools. And because neighborhoods are still mostly defined by race and socioeconomic status, poor and minority kids wind up in high-poverty schools that struggle with problems such as retaining the best teachers.

Officials in Raleigh tried to head off that scenario. As white flight hit in the 1970s, civic leaders merged the city and county into a single district. And in 2000, they shifted from racial to economic integration, adopting a goal that no school should have more than 40 percent of its students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, the proxy for poverty.

The district tried to strike this balance through student assignments and choice, establishing magnet programs in poor areas to draw middle-class kids. Although most students here ride buses to school, officials said fewer than 10 percent are bused to a school to maintain diversity, and most bus rides are less than five miles.

ad_icon

"We knew that over time, high-poverty schools tend to lose high-quality teachers, leadership, key students - you see an erosion," said Bill McNeal, a former superintendent who instituted the goal as part of a broad academic plan. "But we never expected economic diversity to solve all our problems."

Over the years, both Republican and Democratic school boards supported the system. A study of 2007 graduation rates by EdWeek magazine ranked Wake County 17th among the nation's 50 largest districts, with a rate of 64 percent, just below Virginia's Prince William County. While most students posted gains in state reading and math tests last year - more than three-quarters passed - the stubborn achievement gap that separates minority students from their white peers has persisted, though it has narrowed by some measures. And many parents see benefits beyond test scores.

"I want these kids to be culturally diverse," said Clarence McClain, who is African American and the guardian of a niece and nephew who are doing well in county schools. "If they're with kids who are all the same way, to break out of that is impossible. You've got to step outside your little world."

'Constant shuffling'

But as the county has boomed in recent years - adding as many as 6,000 students a year - poverty levels at some schools have exceeded 70 percent. And many suburban parents have complained that their children are being reassigned from one school to the next. Officials blame this on the unprecedented growth, but parents blame the diversity goal.

"Basically, all the problems have roots in the diversity policy," said Kathleen Brennan, who formed a parent group to challenge the system. "There was just this constant shuffling every year." She added: "These people are patting themselves on the back and only 54 percent of [poor] kids are graduating. And I'm being painted a racist. But isn't it racist to have low expectations?"

As she and others have delved deeper, they've found that qualified minority students are underenrolled in advanced math classes, for instance, a problem that school officials said they've known about for years, but that strikes many parents as revelatory. Some have even come to see the diversity policy as a kind of profiling that assumes poor kids are more likely to struggle.

"I don't want us to go back to racially isolated schools," said Shila Nordone, who is biracial and has two children in county schools. "But right now, it's as if the best we can do is dilute these kids out so they don't cause problems. It sickens me."

In their quest to end the diversity policy, the frustrated parents have found some influential partners, among them retail magnate and Republican operative Art Pope.

Following his guidance, the GOP fielded the victorious bloc of school board candidates who railed against "forced busing." The nation's largest tea party organizers, Americans for Prosperity - on whose national board Pope sits - cast the old school board members as arrogant "leftists." Two libertarian think tanks, which Pope funds almost exclusively, have deployed experts on TV and radio.

"We are losing sight of the educational mission of schools to make them into some socially acceptable melting pot," said Terry Stoops, a researcher at the libertarian John Locke Foundation. "Those who support these policies are imposing their vision on everyone else."

'Disastrous' results

Things have not gone smoothly as the new school board has attempted to define its vision for raising student achievement. A preliminary map of new school assignments did not please some of the new majority's own constituents. And critics expressed alarm that the plan would create a handful of high-poverty, racially isolated schools, a scenario that the new majority has begun embracing.

Pope, who is a former state legislator, said he would back extra funding for such schools.

"If we end up with a concentration of students underperforming academically, it may be easier to reach out to them," he said. "Hypothetically, we should consider that as well."

The NAACP and others have criticized that as separate-but-equal logic.

"It's not as if this is a new idea, 'Let's experiment and see what happens when poor kids are put together in one school,' " said Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a think tank that advocates for economic integration. "We know. The results are almost always disastrous."

Many local leaders see another irony in the possible balkanization of the county's schools at a time when society is becoming more interconnected than ever.

"People want schools that mirror their neighborhood, but the bigger picture is my kid in the suburbs is connected to kids in Raleigh," said the Rev. Earl Johnson, pastor of Martin Street Baptist Church in downtown Raleigh. "We're trying to connect to the world but we're separating locally? There is something wrong."

Plenty of excuses and rationals, but the same end result. Segregation, apparently, is the new black.

[Kyler]

As similar proposal was brought forth in the city I live in. It was quickly shot down because of public outrage. Though the local conservatives tried hiding their agenda by passing laws to make the cities school bus system more cost effective. It did not fool anyone. I hope the public listens to real educators instead of a bunch of tea party morons who don't the first thing about teaching.

[Zaune]

I can actually see points on both sides here. Bussing a load of kids across town so they can provide 'diversity' (and, let's face it, meet a hostile reception from the majority socio-economic group in that school) strikes me as a thoroughly imperfect solution, and Nordone kind of has a point: If the percentage of kids receiving free school meals has a direct causal relationship to the percentage of kids who drop out or fail to graduate, several people are doing their jobs very badly indeed.

And yet...

Look, this sounds vaguely offensive even to me, but we may as well face up to the fact that academic success has a strong ancestral component. Without forcibly taking the offspring of many thousands of chavs into care at a variety of ages and fostering them with middle-class families we'll never know if it's a completely learned behaviour or has a genetic aspect*, but it's a sad fact of life that attitudes towards authority and learning are pretty well ingrained in kids by the time they hit puberty, and it is bloody hard work steering the vehement anti-intellectuals onto a different path. Not impossible by any means, but if there's more than a handful of that sort per class and you're going to have precious little time to administer the necessary attitude-adjustment to them whilst still trying to teach everyone else.
As I touched upon in the previous paragraph, I hate the idea of "poor kid quotas" or whatever; it's an ugly solution that feels like an admission of failure and probably comes over as more than a little patronising. But if it keeps the number of chavs per class down to a level where the teachers can get something done, maybe it's one we'll just have to live with.

* I really, really want to believe it doesn't, by the way.

[Kyler]

Zaune,

Busing in social diversity today would undoubtedly cause problems, but the city I live in has had the current busing system for 30 years. The current busing system already has most Whites & Blacks attending the different schools. If the proposal had moved forward the ratio of minorities in predominately white schools would have dropped to less than 5% and predominately Black schools having less than 5% white students. The current system has a mix of about 70/30 & vice versa. While not a great racial diversity ratio it is definitely better than the one proposed.

Your are correct that it is proven based on standardized tests that black students often score consistently lower than whites. Though the reasons are very complicated not greatly understood since some of the underlying issues are to believed to psychological not genetic. Though in my opinion in some ways standardized tests are poor judges of a students overall ability. In much of the educational research I am familiar with, schools with greater diversity normally have better tests scores than ones that do not. In certain systems of teaching mixing students of different knowledge levels allows the more intelligent students to help less intelligent ones learn the material more effectively. Isolating less intelligent student is not the answer. Often a students ability to learn material depends in how the material is being taught and what kind of learning ability a student has. If you teach a class full of students that learn more effectively using visual skills with books and non visual methods they are not going to score as well as call that best learns from that same method.

[Ryushikaze]

The hell you say.

This is not a good idea and I hope to high heaven that this is declared illegal ASAP.

Isolating the underprivileged won't help them, even if you toss more money at the underprivileged schools. Hell, Raleigh, toss more money at the public schools in your area in general.

[Zaune]

Zaune,

Busing in social diversity today would undoubtedly cause problems, but the city I live in has had the current busing system for 30 years. The current busing system already has most Whites & Blacks attending the different schools. If the proposal had moved forward the ratio of minorities in predominately white schools would have dropped to less than 5% and predominately Black schools having less than 5% white students. The current system has a mix of about 70/30 & vice versa. While not a great racial diversity ratio it is definitely better than the one proposed.

Your are correct that it is proven based on standardized tests that black students often score consistently lower than whites. Though the reasons are very complicated not greatly understood since some of the underlying issues are to believed to psychological not genetic. Though in my opinion in some ways standardized tests are poor judges of a students overall ability. In much of the educational research I am familiar with, schools with greater diversity normally have better tests scores than ones that do not. In certain systems of teaching mixing students of different knowledge levels allows the more intelligent students to help less intelligent ones learn the material more effectively. Isolating less intelligent student is not the answer. Often a students ability to learn material depends in how the material is being taught and what kind of learning ability a student has. If you teach a class full of students that learn more effectively using visual skills with books and non visual methods they are not going to score as well as call that best learns from that same method.

Can't argue with that, though it doesn't mean I am or ever will be entirely comfortable with the idea. I just wish I had a better one, though forcing parents to send their kids to the nearest public school, however bad its rep, might be a start.

[Master_Baerne]

It provokes some interesting questions, actually - I am not an educator, but it certainly sounds reasonable that including a couple poor students (e.g. an inner-city black kid raised to think that education is for pussies) with a majority of average or good students (basic midle-class white kid) would be detrimental to both, a claim a coworker of mine brought up in defense of this. According to him, this sort of mixing lowers the class level, doing a disservice to those at the top of the scale, while at the same time forcing those at the bottom end of it to work above their level/speed and to be constantly outperformed by their academic superiors.

While it's something of a diversion from the topic, anybody more knowledgeable than I care to comment?

[Simon_Jester]

One big thing this ignores is that children aren't born with their attitudes toward education fully formed. Busing and mixed race/class schools are something you do at all levels, including the children's formative years. Part of the point is to get to these kids early and exert some kind of social pressure on them to learn things about learning. The poor kids need to learn that they can learn and that this is good for them, something they're more likely to pick up from middle and upper class students than from their peers.

And (good luck getting anyone to admit this in the US) the rich kids need to learn that poor kids are not some kind of inferior Martian- that the customs of their little enclaves aren't the sum total of the human condition, with everything else being an undifferentiated sea of gangbangers and welfare queens. That's another argument for mixed schooling, and you can make similar arguments on racial lines as well as class lines.

[Zaune]

One big thing this ignores is that children aren't born with their attitudes toward education fully formed. Busing and mixed race/class schools are something you do at all levels, including the children's formative years. Part of the point is to get to these kids early and exert some kind of social pressure on them to learn things about learning. The poor kids need to learn that they can learn and that this is good for them, something they're more likely to pick up from middle and upper class students than from their peers.

How would you define 'formative years' in this context? Going by my admittedly somewhat hazy recollections of my schooldays, you could predict with depressing accuracy which kids were going to end up on welfare or in jail by around the age of nine, though it should be noted that this was back in the days when Tony Blair and New Labour looked like a shining beacon of hope for the future of Great Britain.

[Simon_Jester]

Elementary school begins before the age of nine, no?

There's a limit on how much you can accomplish with integrating schools, I accept that. But the alternative is laughably unrealistic: the idea that schools full of poor kids will continue to receive extra funding when their test scores are low (because their students are poor) and no one in the government's social circles is attending them (because their students are poor).

It never happened before during the time of formal racial segregation in schools. I see no reason to assume it will happen now.

If nothing else, herding the poor kids into poor-district schools guarantees that the ones who do have the right upbringing and habits to succeed will have a much harder fight of it, because there won't be a large peer group of like-minded students for them to join.

[Coriolis]

I actually went to high school in Wake County. My HS was one of the ones where they bussed in kids from other parts of the county to "meet quotas". Let me tell you, the program actually works.

2008-2009 Statistics

The link is for my HS from the 2008-2009 school year. Note the performance of black students on the End-of-Course tests. They're a full 15% higher than the district and 20% higher than the state. To be fair though, our HS is situated in a fairly wealthy area so we can afford a lot more than other Wake County schools (the report card doesn't differentiate between normal and bussed students). Take it as you will.

[Zaune]

Elementary school begins before the age of nine, no?

There's a limit on how much you can accomplish with integrating schools, I accept that. But the alternative is laughably unrealistic: the idea that schools full of poor kids will continue to receive extra funding when their test scores are low (because their students are poor) and no one in the government's social circles is attending them (because their students are poor).

Not disputing your logic, just wondering how soon you think the process ought to start. I also can't help feeling that five to seven is a bit young to be traveling to school by bus, but maybe US school districts have something slightly better than the British system.

[Chardok]

actually, I was bussed to school from age 5. (Maybe Because it was a different era *shrug*)

[Aaron]

They do it here in Canada from the start of Kindergarten, which is 5 IIRC.

[Zaune]

I've never heard of it happening younger than eleven in this country, partly because even villages in the arse-end of nowhere have their own primary school (covering up to the US equivalent of 6th grade) but secondary schools tend to be bigger and more centralised. And I don't know what level of supervision is provided on school buses in other countries, but fifty to eighty kids aged between eleven and sixteen with no adult present save for the bus driver was anarchic enough that I still get nervous riding a bus when the school's let out for the day.

[Aaron]

I've no idea what it's like on buses here, because I always walked but I'm pretty sure that in my county that transportation has to be available for children over a certain distance from the school. Some kids come from over 20kms away.

Even if we did live that far though, I'd still drive mine. The bus drivers in the county are some of the worst I've seen in the fucking country.

[Keevan_Colton]

I think the difference here is due to the population density in the UK. Primary schools tend to serve an area of just a couple of miles radius which includes a large number of children. There are for example within about two miles of where I'm living right now (which is pretty much out in the sticks) more than four primary schools.

[Andras]

I think the difference here is due to the population density in the UK. Primary schools tend to serve an area of just a couple of miles radius which includes a large number of children. There are for example within about two miles of where I'm living right now (which is pretty much out in the sticks) more than four primary schools.

When I was in 4th grade, I had to walk a mile just to catch a bus to go 5 miles to the school.

Once I was in 5th grade, they paved the road and the bus came to pick me up at the end of the driveway.

When I was in 6th grade, the school was 15 miles from our house, and it took 45 minutes on the bus since most of the road was a 2 lane.