Wednesday, Sep. 30, 2009

Why Wake's schools pursue diversity

Wake County's schools did pretty well for themselves last year. SAT scores were way up, Advanced Placement exams looked good, and roughly 90 percent of schools made solid academic growth on state-mandated tests.

But the academic gains were uneven, class sizes have grown and the national economic recession has eliminated entire courses in high schools.

So, naturally, the issue dominating the upcoming school board election is student diversity.

To understand why, it helps to understand Wake's history.

The current version of the school system was built upon the belief that diverse schools are better schools.

It was called racial integration in 1976 when Raleigh's city schools merged with the county's. The same was true in 1982 when magnet schools were created to attract white students to empty downtown seats.

By the late 1990s, most educators understood that poverty mattered more than race. And poverty, of course, comes in all colors.

But something else happened during those years. The schools kept getting better -- and the rest of the nation noticed.

Business leaders recruited heavily by emphasizing the quality of all Wake schools.

Wake's schools got the benefit of more middle-class families, the backbone of any good system.

And areas such as Cary, Holly Springs and North Raleigh exploded. It was boom town. It was wonderful.

It was not diverse.

Many studies suggest poor students are more likely to succeed academically in schools with a significant middle-class population.

But it isn't magic. Simply putting a poor student in a seat next to a middle-class student doesn't automatically raise that child's test scores. It takes a concerted focus and sustained funding.

Creating schools with high concentrations of poverty, on the other hand, does produce a fairly uniform result: higher costs for test scores that are often worse.

But to achieve diversity, true neighborhood schools can't be promised.

Many people attracted here by good schools believed their school would be located in their neighborhood and shared with their neighbors. Although the vast majority of students attend a school close to home, the fact that it can't be promised is unsettling.

So when it's time to reassign students -- a certainty in a district growing this fast -- a policy that puts a poor kid from 10 miles away into a middle-class neighborhood is sure to be targeted.

But not everyone has shared in the growth yet. The percentage of poor students in some of Wake's eastern schools tops 50 percent. Growth there will be harder if entire schools start to tank.

There is still the problem of how to improve the performance of poor kids regardless of where they attend class.

It's a difficult dilemma. If providing an excellent education for everyone were easy, Wake would have licked the problem years ago.

Instead, it has been mostly a grinding, upward climb.

So next summer, after the election hyperbole has faded, Wake's students probably will post another year of solid, if uneven, gains.

And the adults will still be arguing about diversity.

Tim Simmons is Vice President of Communications for the nonprofit Wake Education Partnership. He is a former N&O reporter and editor.