The last week of the ferocious debate about the future of the Wake County Schools has been dominated by an idea called Controlled Choice, an assignment plan billed by its creator Dr. Michael Alves as a way to allow parents to choose their child's school while maintaining diversity. Or that's the idea anyway.

Alves spent three days in Raleigh, touring the Wake County schools, meeting with business leaders and community groups, and addressing the student assignment committee of the fractured school board, presenting his plan as a way to bring the community together through voluntary diversity and integration.

Wake County would be divided into seven assignment zones and students would be assigned based on parents' preferences for schools within their zone. Drawing the zones is first challenge and Alves was clear that the zones must reflect the overall diversity of the county for the plan to work.

That's the first flashpoint for the Gang of Five majority on the board that remains zealously against diversity being any part of any criteria for anything.

Then plans must be developed to determine what happens for what Alves calls an over-chosen school, one where there isn't enough space for all the children who want to go there.  Alves says proximity to the school should be a major consideration, but beyond that, the criteria are unclear.

Alves didn't say socioeconomic diversity must be one factor, but does believe that diversity is a key to the plan's success.  Board Chair and Gang of Fiver Ron Margiotta says considering socioeconomic status is a "thing of the past," a position echoed this week by fellow Gang of Fiver John Tedesco.

But both Margiotta and Tedesco have repeatedly said they don't want to create schools with a high concentration of poor students, presumably because they understand the research that shows poor students suffer in that environment.

That's a contradiction neither Gang of Fives seems able to explain. They don't want to create poor schools but they don't want a student's economic status to have anything to do with where he or she goes to school.

Tedesco's effort to have it both ways borders on farcical. He told the assignment committee this week that he doesn't want to consider the commonly used eligibility for free and reduced lunch to determine a student's economic status. 

He also restated his commitment not to create high poverty schools, but refused to say how he would measure poverty.  As Christopher Hill with the N.C. Justice Center puts it, Tedesco's plan to avoid high poverty schools appears to be not to measure to see if there are any.

But Margiotta and Tedesco must know that the poor schools they don't want to create are virtually inevitable even under the Controlled Choice plan unless there's a conscious effort to avoid them, which would run afoul of the rigid ideological stance of the Gang of Five.

Alves has a lot to offer the board. He seems generally interested in helping come up with a compromise in the contentious debate, but it's not going to work unless Margiotta and company soften their anti-diversity intransigence.

Alves spent his first day in North Carolina visiting a lot of Wake County schools and came away impressed that he didn't see a bad one. Most of the time he is called to help a school system, he finds both dilapidated schools and shiny new ones and educational disparities that match. He's also used to finding widespread parent dissatisfaction with the schools and how students are assigned.

That makes his pitch to Wake County a little different, a place where 94.5 percent of the parents are satisfied while the school board majority continues to cater to the wishes of the 5.5 percent who aren't.

Alves' solution seems to be a path toward compromise and let's hope it works, but it's hard not to think of it as a well-intentioned solution in search of a problem.