Fitzsimon File

The Wake County School Board is scheduled to vote this week on its request for next year's budget, prompting more sharp and misleading criticism from opponents of the system's student assignment policy.

Almost every action of the Wake County Schools prompts outrage from those critics, a coalition of upset parents and right-wing think tanks intent on dismantling public education, who are furious that Wake County uses diversity as one of the criteria to decide which schools students attend.

The diversity opponents are demanding that some of the $63 million currently spent on transportation be used instead for academic programs and to offset budgets cuts planned to respond to the economic downturn.

It's a pretty good soundbite, but like most of the claims of the system's critics, it doesn't have much grounding in reality, though you'd never know it from most of the news accounts.

Most of the money that Wake County spends on school buses has little to do with the reassignment policy and would be spent anyway. School officials say it is virtually impossible to know exactly what transportation costs would be if the schools were not kept economically diverse.  

The critics are now fond of pointing to a questionable study by Queens College showing that poor students in Charlotte are doing as well as poor kids in Raleigh even though they attend schools close to where they live, regardless of the effect on a school's racial or economic makeup.

But a comparison of the two systems earlier this year by the News & Observer included the fact that the Charlotte system spends 17 percent more in busing cost per student than Wake County schools. It doesn't seem like segregated schools save any money on school buses.  

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg system abandoned its diversity policy in student assignment after a court ruled in 2001 that race cannot be a factor in determining where a child goes to school. Charlotte officials chose not to follow Wake County's lead and use economic diversity instead of race.

Wake County is doing better that Charlotte Mecklenburg in virtually every measurement of performance, lower teacher turnover, higher SAT scores and a higher graduation rate. Wake County is achieving its better results with less money. It educates almost 4,000 more students than Charlotte with $35 million less every year.

Among the other things the critics don't like to talk about is that only three percent of Wake County students a year will be reassigned  in the next three years because of the diversity policy. The rest of the reassignments are being made because 10 new schools are opening in the next ten years as a result of the area's population growth.

Almost one out of four students in Wake County currenlty don't attend their base school.  Many attend magnets, or year-round schools, and some attend different schools because their parents are teachers.

Four out of five students who do attend their base school live within five miles of their school. That generally doesn't make the stories featuring parents upset with the reassignment policy.

Neither does the fact that 97 percent of the students in Wake County will attend the same school next year as they do this year. While it's understandably troubling for that small number of families, the reassignment policy has served Wake County well and won the school system national recognition.

That's what really drives the ideologues crazy, that balanced, integrated, diverse schools work well for students and the community.

Cutting transportation funding doesn't make sense. Neither does ending a policy that works.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 30th, 2009 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.